That is the date I started working on my project with the Mixcraft 8 Digital Audio Workstation software.   After I downloaded the free trial software and opened up the program, I kind of had to take a second for myself haha.  I had virtually no experience with any sort of digital editing equipment, I took […]

This class I found very interesting.  It posed the question in this post title.  What do we actually know about historical narratives?  How do we know what was actually true and what wasn’t?  And this more or less links back to the earlier class analogy of Dale Earnhardt’s car and museum presentations of history. To […]

How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt was a very excellent read.  It explored the transformation of the music industry during the advent of the MP3 format of data compression.  The format of the book — one chapter on Brandenburg, Morris, or the adaptation of the MP3 — then one chapter on “Dell” and the […]

Class was cancelled for this day, so this post is kind of short, but I thought this topic was very relevant to anyone with an online identity. The article was about the dangers to your identity, information, and privacy represented by simple one-step password systems for your email.  The article said that it is especially […]

This week relates directly to the final project I feel.  The topic was “where things are borrowed from,” in my own words–namely “grabbing” a piece of music from one source, and re purposing it to fit your own narrative. What sampling used to be was more analog : burning a CD, transcribing a record, cutting […]

This post largely ties into the one from 3-19 on the problems inherent in presentation of a historical narrative and the availability of information.  Crowd sourcing, such as Wikipedia, is seen by many as an invalid source of information, and also by many as a valuable location for discourse.  Its when anyone is allowed to […]

One of the big points brought up in this class was a museum exhibit of Dale Earnhardt’s car, and how historical narratives may be carefully and meticulously groomed for a historical effect.  In this example, we were presented with the question “how do you know that was actually Dale’s car?  How do you know that […]

This time we discussed what music senses of identity in regards to what kinds of music you listen to, and the contrast between musical choice and market supply.  The main factors of individual choice in the music store, availability/location of those songs in the market, and cultural segregation all impact people’s musical identities, as was […]

This class primarily focused on “the Great Migration,” race records, and identity of artists.  In the late 1800s and the early 1900s, great numbers of sharecroppers, former slaves or their descendants, and overall large numbers of rural folk “migrated” into urban centers in search of better jobs.  The majority of these migrators were African-Americans escaping […]

For the class music scavenger hunt, I happened across a genre of music which saw massive popularity in the late 1930s up into the 1950’s: the Boogie Woogies.  This genre, I learned, is theorized to have begun in the late 1800s among communities of newly-emancipated slaves in the South, primarily in Texas.  I found that […]