On September 28th, our class topic was history of recording. We began the class talking about time and how in 1830 every city, town, village, and farm in the United State had its own time which is so surreal with how the world is today in 2016. I had absolutely no idea that it was until 1880 that regional time zones were created or that in 1883 the U.S. organized four different “time zones”. One never really puts too much thought in thinking about how different the time zones were back then and how the world did not run on GMT yet, but it is extremely fascinating that folks put measures into their own hands to decide what time of day it was. As the 1900s approached the time of day had been organized and settled and motion pictures became common. The beginning of motion pictures approaches shortly before a new era sparks. This era is referred as “Acoustic Recording Era” which lasted roughly 20 years from 1905-1925. Something interesting I learned this class were drums and pianos typically were not used because it was too loud and would blow up the recording thus ruining it. Today’s time the piano and drums are some of the most common musical instrument that people pride themselves with playing, so it’s strange to think they were not used during this era nearly 100 years ago. After the Acoustic Recording Era came the Electrical Recording Era. It wasn’t until circa 1952 when tape recordings began, which have become CD’s in todays time. Fast forward 18 years and multi-track tapes advance and are used in the 1970’s. Much progress occurred in the history of recording within a 70 year period and still continues to this day. It truly amazes me to see where we began and where we are today. On October 3rd, the class was introduced to the history of swing beat. The class was short and spent mostly watching videos to thoroughly understand the concept. Essentially, in the 1950’s everything in North America was built around swing beat. What really stuck to me from this class was that Argentina has a lot of Africans naturally. I had literally never heard this before and it was extremely shocking to me. I had never noticed swing beat before, but after this class I will be carefully listening for it. Finally, October 5th our topic was history of genre. We began class with watching a youtube video Axis of Awesome – 4 Four Chord Song and it was astonishing. I absolutely loved what the mash up the three men created and the craziest part is all those wonderful, popular songs share the same chords. It really put into perspective that an abundant amount of songs are all built on the same chords. After viewing the youtube videos, we discussed the period of Radical Racism (1890-1910) and how many deaths occurred from lynching (never heard of lynching before this class). What saddened me was that dark town was slang for where blacks lived and how inhumane whites treated them while they are worth as much as any other human life. What I believe was a step forward in the history of genre was when Race Records was marketed to both white and black people helping lessen the divide between the two races.