On November 28th, our class topic was radio. We learned the obvious how radio works like a recording, but got more into detail about how it is a voltage amplified by A LOT and then broadcasted. Radio was an important tool for Veterans of Navy Signal Corps in WWI (1920). Although, we would not consider a radio a ‘tool’ today its interesting how it was noted as one roughly 100 years ago. An interesting fact we learned this class was that Henry Ford famously wanted cars only to be black because they were “tools” and it becomes a personal indulgent and no longer a tool when you add color. All I can say is that Henry Ford and I would have had a huge problem because white cars are my all time favorite. But getting back to the topic of radios, by 1929 3/4 of Americans had radio in their homes. To think in 1920 it was a tool for Veterans of Navy Signal Corps and 9 years later almost every American has one makes you realize the radio took off just like the internet did. There were problems involving the radio overlapping frequencies, so a solution was established in 1934 through FCC to regulate radio. The FCC focused to make it rational since the radio was considered a scarce public good. They set it up so if you wanted to be a broadcaster you needed a license from the FCC because not everyone can be a broadcaster. Everything as a broadcaster was regulated including what you would say. This is  very American approach instead of censoring everything but to try and work hand in hand to regulate for the common good of the people. FDR famously and heavily used the radio to talk to the American people, which I think was so wonderful because it makes it so much more personal, so kudos to him as president. Eventually a Fairness Doctrine was created which made sure you do not monopolize and if you had an opinion you would broadcast the other side of the opinion as well. Although this is no good for today and does not matter I think this Doctrine was wonderful and essential because today there is way too much bias in the media. Something crazy to think about is that in most large cities there were only about 16 TV channels through the 1970’s. National stations included ABC, NBC, CBS. Today most people have like 800 channels to choose from, so I really can’t imagine having only 16 (and thats if you lived in a major city) like what if everything on those 16 channels sucked? (No TV is not my life, but when I do decide to watch it I hope what I like is on) We concluded this class by discussing how Cable TV had such fewer bandwidth restrictions and Digital Cable TV had no bandwidth restrictions, so it came to conclusion  there is no rationale for regulating it. On November 30th, we began class discussing Thomas Jefferson aka Third President of the USA. Prof. O’Malley began by saying he was quite the hypocrite because he had slaves and thought they didn’t have souls yet was against slavery. I was sitting in my seat like what? Jefferson was committed to believing that wage earners were the problem with this country (Jefferson is totally discriminating against me lol) and that owning your own business was much better. Prof. O’Malley stated how the Star Spangled Banner showed how wage earners and slaves are equivalent on a ‘social’ basis and now I sang it to myself in my head and still doesn’t see that. Following our discussion on Jefferson we talked about his enemy Hamilton, which is so ironic because over Thanksgiving Break I saw Spamilton in NYC (it was pretty funny you’d like it). Hamilton was Caribbean born, a bastard (like me because my parents weren’t married when they had me but they are now haha), and very ambitious. He believed the United States must become a diverse nation and stop with this “farming crap”. People are truly liberated when they can show their true self and take the path to prosperity. It’s fair to say the two men hated each other an they each had powerful differences. Jefferson was opposed to big government because it’s a danger to an independent farmer, while Hamilton wanted big government to support and fund infrastructure for commerce. Essentially, Hamilton “wins” because we’re living in his ideal world because most people work based on wage. We briefly touched base on the Homestead Act which was an Act of Congress that let anyone move out to the west on 640 acres and improve an preserve the land and after a few years you got to own it. All I know is if I lived in this era and my father moved our family to the dry areas of Kansas from industrialized living I would not be very happy with him. We concluded class with my favorite part of the lecture with segmentation solutions that would tell you common segments based on your zip code. My zip code is 20155 which is Gainesville, VA. I was not that surprised to see the categories were wealthy middle age mostly with kids, wealthy middle age mix, upscale younger family mix, etc. I was not surprised to see this because in Gainesville you either live in a gated community or a big house with acres of land. I clicked on a few of the segments and one said most likely to eat Chipotle, which was funny and ironic because that was where everyone went after school let out in high school. It also said ironic things such as flies United, which my family does, despite me hating that airline. I had no idea this zip code solutions existed and I love that I am now aware of it and can kill some free time by looking up zip codes that inform me with probable lifestyle traits and neighborhood demographics.

On November 21st, which was our last class because Thanksgiving Break (yay for eating turkey, mashed potatoes, and corn) we began class by listening to ‘On The Floor’ by Jennifer Lopez ft. Pitbull. Hearing that song honestly brought me back to my 15 year old self freshman year of high school because my friends and I loved that song! What I learned is that ‘On The Floor’ is actually the same beat and melody as Lambada by Kaoma, which was a dance hit from the 80’s. And to complicate measures even more Lambada actually originated from Llorando se Fue which is a folk song. A lot of sampling has been done here you could say. This class we also got into a really random topic of Asians, but it turned out to be pretty riveting. It was discussed how the Vietnamese have been pretty pissed off at the Chinese for 1000’s of year and everyone in Asia hates the Japanese. I say they hate the Japanese because of the amount of tourist they draw in because lots of people want to visit Tokyo. We furthered our discussion by saying when these groups come into America they’re automatically labeled Asian instead of the country they descend from and how ironic it is because the countries that make up Asia don’t really like each other. This led us to talk about 1790 Naturalization which was only available to “free white people” but the statue never defined or said what white is. Prof. O’Malley then asked our class if we would rather the government be efficient or fair. I pick efficient because I’d rather the government get stuff done and to be quite frank life will never be fair. An efficient government would benefit all the people of the land and we have a broken justice system that isn’t even “fair” so what makes people ever believe the government will be? Be concluded class with a fun fact that I shared at the Thanksgiving table which is that in the early republic the only important holidays were the Fourth of July and Election Day and they were violent holidays. The Fourth of July shocks me because I can’t imagine a time when Fourth of July didn’t consist of being patriotic, having a BBQ, drinking cold beer, and watching fire works. I can completely understand how Election Day was violent because we live in a time where everyone feels the need to voice their opinion to everyone and if a candidate of their liking doesn’t win they go bananas, so I can only begin to imagine how it was handled in the early days with little police force. So because of this violence Thanksgiving helped neutralize the violence, but today everyones just thankful a holiday exists where you can be a complete fat ass and it be completely ok. As for MP3, I thought the book sucked. It wasn’t even till page 170-180 where the significance of MP3 came in. What drew me away the most was the cat experiment, I actually couldn’t believe it at first and thought it was an acronym for something. Although I myself am not a fan of cats I thought it was completely inhumane that the cat was killed and they tested its brain to see if it wold work. I was so disturbed and when the chapters continued and an elephant head became involved to test hearing I was just like wow I’m too big of an animal lover to be able to tolerate this. The only beneficial part that I learned from the book was that the history of MP3 is the history of compression meaning work out put ratio. Besides this I found it cool that several people developed MP3 over a period of time and it was tested by AT&T and although thats not my cellphone carrier (team Verizon) it was interesting to be informed about. But to sum it all up I would never read this book again.

On November 14th, class began with the topic of Classic Chicago Blues. I was pretty excited when the lecture began because I’ve been dying to go to Chicago and am hoping to go this coming Summer, so you could say I’m a bit eager to learn about the history of The Windy City. Prof. O’Malley then played a song called ‘I hate to see you go’ by Little Walter. What is unique about this is that The Rolling Stones recently released a cover of this song. I was enthralled to learn that The Rolling Stones have always loved, admired, and been inspired by the Chicago Blues. I find it a bit random that a British band loves traditional Chicago Blues, but things like this just make the world so much smaller and its absolutely fantastic. An interesting fact we learned is that The Rolling Stones have has a black guitarist named Daryl Jones from Chicago on their payroll for roughly 20 years, but he is kind of “invisible” because he never appears in videos, which you can say is odd since they love and play Chicago Blues but don’t include the black Chicagoan. After moving on from the Chicago Blues we talked about basic science that involves music which is if there is no air there is no sound, mostly everyone knows this because we all learned in grade school that there is no sound in space. This air and sound notion ties in with adding overtones. For example, in an organ it can produce a violin or cello sound by pressing a key and deciding which pipe to come out of (this is the overtone). Something cool that I have never realized or thought about is that the shape of my room could be a harmonic ratio. We were shown in class Palladian and the idea is the home can be played like keys on a piano because the first floor window and second floor window is a harmonic ratio. Which is bizarre because who actually looks at their house and thinks “hm, yes this a harmonic ratio”. All of this information makes me realize how music is physics because it may be emotional, religious, or moving, but it begins with physics. We concluded class by learning how CD Audio is sampled 44.1 hz (more than twice the resolution our ears can hear) which is equivalent to 50,000 pennies. We also we’re shown a picture of 50,000 pennies and class and boy does 50,000 pennies make a big block of copper. Whats important to remember is that this sampling is not referring to the same sampling as taking pieces of another artists music, which was explained in a previous post. On November 16th, we were suppose to have read MP3 for this class, but instead Prof. O’Malley moved it back to the coming Monday (the 21st) so this class we learned that there are two kinds of files. On file is an audio file which is recorded sound. The second file is MIDI files which stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. Besides learning this we spent the remainder of the class focusing on garage band to better prepare us for our end of the year project. I have never used garage band before, so I was a bit worried for what was to come, but it actually seemed pretty fun to get to mess around and mix up different beats. Each genre had a name of a person such as Nikki, Dez, etc. which all had their own category of music, drums, and beat to mash up with others. After seeing and better understanding how Garage Band works I’m excited to play around with it for the project.

On November 7th the beginning of our class was dedicated to funk. A characteristic of funk is that not a lot of chords are used. A hero of the funk genre is James Brown, which is ironic because when he first began his music career with the song Please, Please, Please it is more rhythm and blues, and to find out he transitions into funk is interesting. James Brown’s style was different in the 60’s, but funk is all about the rhythm and grove, which he presented in his later styles of music making him such a funk hero. To compare funk to something like pop music is not difficult because the average number of chords being used in pop music is going down and down and is more harmonically static-which brings us back to the 4 chords song we were presented at the beginning of the school year. A reason behind the harmonically static could be deprived from Latin music and Bogaloo movement, which has also been cited as an origin of funk. Because of harmonically static you can “sample” music aka take pieces from song and make it your own. Mellotron was the first sampler which was each tape went down to keyboard and when you pressed down on a certain key it would trigger the sound. Over time mellotron is replaced by electric samplers which are developed using records, which would repurpose something to make it new (turntables). By the late 80’s it was more affordable to buy “digital samplers” for about $2,000, but I still find that expensive for that time period. I personally do not think I would have spent $2,000 on a digital sampler for my own personal use, which makes me realize how much music means to people to pour so much money into it. What is interesting is that Claude Shannon anticipated inventions like this would happen. The coolest part of this class was the Powerpuff Girls theme song is sampled from the drum beat of a funky drummer, like who in the world would ever think that while watching Powerpuff Girls. We concluded class watching a video about The Art of Sampling which described the process. What I learned from this video that fascinated me the most was that if you sampled a song you can not be nominated for song of the year because it is an Emmy rule. On November 9th, we started class with the genealogy of a guitar part. The class was shown a video of Chuck Berry’s trademark sound he played with his guitar as well as T-Bone Waker, who was a blues guitarist, that played “west coast swing”. T-Bone Waker reminded me a lot of Elvis mixed with some soul music. What surprised me the most about this class was to learn Elvis never wrote any of his own music and mainly just did covers. We were shown the 2 versions of That’s Alright (Mama) by Arthur Crudup who wrote the song vs. Elvis who covered it and it made it a sensation. What Elvis consisted of was more of a country beat with no drums bass player. Elvis coded to people to be “dangerously black” because of where he bought his clothes, where he grew up, and how he did covers of black songs that he made famous but was marketed to white teens because it sounded black, but was white because the singer (Elvis) was white. This is just completely absurd to me because of where in town you buy your clothes does not make a white man black nor should it even matter. Many people in this time period saw mystery train as the difference between being white and black in America, since it originally was sung by a black man but re-sung by Elvis. In the 50’s white music was louder and faster, which is ironic because it has totally shifted and I believe it is the opposite today. Not to label music by a race, but if someone asked me what black music is Rap or Hip-Hop would come first to mind because of its origin, which I believe is louder and faster. We learned how copyrighted certain music is and how sampling it may cost you in the end. For example, Sting made nearly $1,000,000 a year for 5 years because they owned the song ‘Every Breath You Take’ by The Police, which was sampled by Puff Daddy in the song ‘I’ll Be Missing You’. Andy Sommers felt robbed by this because he created the guitar part yet Sting was the one being paid, but a nice gesture was made by Sting awarding Sommers 15% to compensate. This class really showed how you can lose millions by sampling improperly and how well sampling worked in the cards for Elvis.

On November 2nd, which has been my favorite class thus far, we learned so much about copyright including cool facts. We started class by learning the background such as the origins of property which you turn it alienable and turns into a good. Compared to the justification of property which are property rights in our tradition that are associated with labor. The notion of property has changed overtime. For example, back in the day if you had an acre of land and you didn’t do anything with it, your neighbor could begin growing corn on it without problems, but today it does not work like that and people take their property much more seriously. Another thing that is taken very seriously is the idea of corporation, which is a fictitious person created in law, so it has person status. This limits liability to actual people. Other things that can be considered property is even an idea. An idea is intellectual property, which is protected by patents, trademarks, and copy right. If not copyrighted it’s in the “public domain” and anyone can use it. The first copy right goes back to 1790 and a fun fact is that copy right has an expiration. What interested me so much was how Ritchie Vallens did a cover of La Bamba and made it famous and he did not know how to speak Spanish. His grandmother wrote down the lyrics for him and he created his own version since it was not copyrighted and made it a sensation that you can hear in movies. I was so fascinated by this lecture I went home to tell my dad about Ritchie Vallens not knowing Spanish but making La Bamba a huge hit and he told me I knew exactly who Ritchie Vallens was because he was one of the men killed alongside Buddy Holly (who I grew up listening to because of my father). We got to talking more about how Michael Jackson owned all The Beatles songs, which is just plain weird like why did he feel the need? And how important copy right really is. In class it was discussed in a few years Mickey Mouse will no longer be under copy right and it will have been expired, so it leaves me to wonder is it then up for grabs in the public domain, or will Disney find some sort of loop hole to claim it again. The most mind blowing part of class that made me realize how important copy right is was how Disney made nearly $8,000,000 off Frozen, which was a story written in the 1700’s. I now don’t blame people for thinking Disney is the money hungry enemy. This class was just too good and I loved being able to discuss it with my dad.

On October 31st (Happy Halloween!!) we began class by learning about the WIN Tribe – whom I have never heard of before. WIN is an acronym for White, Indian, and Negro who were a mixed group of people living in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Following the WIN Tribe, Prof. O’Malley showed the classroom his great grandparents wedding certificate that stated their race as colored, although they really were “white”. It’s mind blowing to me that Prof. O’Malley could have been considered black in the state of Virginia because of his Irish heritage. You can thank this colored nonsense to Walker Plecker who would write to people if they had any percentage of black in them they could not attend white schools or socialize with white people because “it’s an awful thing”. I think it is more of an awful thing to have the audacity to tell people where they can and cannot attend school or whom they may gather around. The original Patrick O’Malley wedding certificate was white, so Plecker clearly refiled it. Class then shifted it’s focus to the Encyclopedia and how Dennis Detero made the first modern type of encyclopedia, which complied all knowledge we had in the world into a book that was 28 volumes (they were scholarly). Not only was knowledge gathered, but classified as well, people like Ben Franklin were featured in it. By the 20th century the encyclopedia became necessary and families signaled it as ambitious and cared about the knowledge and owned their own encyclopedia. Encyclopedia Britannica had scholarly knowledge and it was believed “you had authority” because of the encyclopedia. The main downside of the encyclopedia was that you had to buy a new one every 10 years because the articles would be updated as well as the information. It is fair to say that “information gets better when it’s more freely shared.” What I found most interesting was that there are 28 volumes, but only 26 letters in the alphabet so why did certain letters like ‘E’ which had 2 volumes have more information than others. Besides the importance of the encyclopedia we learned in this class how we should really thank Stallman and his 4 freedoms because he helped create LINUX which is the backbone of the internet and Andriod users should be thanking him as well (Team iPhone over here though). Also, special thanks to Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger who are the founder and cofounders of wiki, which is one of my favorite sites to use when I’m looking up something. To conclude, we wrapped up class discussing the importance crowd sourcing has to computing. The more people you have looking then less problems will occur.

For class on October 24th, we had to come prepared to class with a music genre that we were interested in researching that was “born” before I was born. After taking some time to think about what I wanted to learn more about I decided why not research soft rock. It is underrated in my opinion and soft rock singers like Eric Clapton, Elton John, and Bryan Adams were involved in my childhood car rides thanks to my dad. I began using Google Ngram Viewer to see if any patterns occurred surrounding the soft rock era, which originated in the early 1970’s. When using Google Ngram Viewer I saw that in the 1980’s soft rock and teen pregnancy crossed on the graph. This just left me to assume reckless teens were going to concerts or staying out too late and wound up in some trouble. What I also discovered using Google Ngram Viewer was that soft rock and drug usage crossed on the graph in the late 60’s and early 70’s, which is not that shocking since half of American’s were “experimenting” with drugs and were complete flower childs. After playing around on Google Ngram Viewer I logged into ProQuest to search some articles regarding Soft Rock. One article, Soft Rock: The Hard Truth written by Diane White for the Boston Globe described Soft Rock as an oxymoron. She went on to explain its either rock or not so what is soft? Diane White concluded that rock by definition isn’t soft, but “soft rock has become a fast replacing loathsome in its own special way”. To broaden my knowledge further I decided to also listen to the soft rock station on Pandora and to my surprise it was not just the classics, but songs from the early 2000’s such as Wherever You Will Go by The Calling and You’re Beautiful by James Blunt, which I have always considered more alternative were categorized under soft rock. To conclude, I think soft rock never left us I believe it has been reshaped just as 90’s rap is nothing like todays rap, its a constant evolution but the slow tempo and melody remain true to the soft rock roots. Besides the digital scavenger hunt we had a class discussion that began with showing the class 634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A) song where you can hear the lazy back beat in the song. Al Green Love and Happiness was a famous back beat song, where it was concluded that if you have a good drummer you may say “give me more of a back beat feel”. We finished our class discussion this day by learning how white people push the beat, so they have a front beat vs a back beat.

On October 17th, we had a riveting class discussion that shocked me. We learned that African Americans fought with The Confederacy. All I can think is what in the world? I had never heard that or learned that before and was partially flabbergasted. What you can conclude from African Americans fighting with The Confederacy is that slavery wasn’t as bad as we were told and Confederacy had state rights that the blacks agreed with. To contradict this, Abraham Lincoln did not want blacks fighting onside with the North because it would be harder to reach an agreement with the confederates. Mid lecture we were showed historical pictures such as a recruitment picture from Philadelphia for the Union. I think it’s incredible after all this team these extraordinary pictures have not been lost or damaged. We also talked about the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, whom I have never heard of or been taught in any history class before, which blows my mind because it is so important to know that there were free persons of color that were apart of a Militia unit. The 1st Louisiana Native Guard in 1861 protected North from New Orleans. Another fun fact about free persons of color in New Orleans was that they sent their kids to France to be educated or they even owned slaves, so blacks were owning blacks. We concluded this class by discussing how Frederick Douglass wrote about all the black lives that were lost fighting for The Confederates in Manassas, which I found so cool because of how local that war was. I’m from Haymarket, which is about 10 miles from Manassas, and my high school actually is named Battlefield, because of the war that was fought in Manassas, so I felt a deep connection when we learned about what Douglas wrote. Then on October 19th we learned about the history of the internet. The class began by showing us Ngram Viewer and how to use it, which I wasn’t even aware existed. Then I learned how Google Books has digitalized 30 million books, while the Library of Commerce has 37 million books. That means Google Books has nearly digitalized every book in the world. Prof. O’Malley taught our class how to navigate google books by showing us the key on the side which was labeled advanced search and how you can pick your search and limit it by dates and various other things. Copyright unfortunately can limit you on finding what you are searching for which is a huge problem for Historians, but besides that Google Books is an awesome tool to be aware about. An interesting point discussed regarding copyright is that Happy Birthday recently was copyrighted, so technically every time it is sang you are suppose to pay for it. Which is ridiculous because who is actually going to pay for it because when it is sang in your private home no one would ever know. We concluded this lesson with talking about the thousands of dollars (my tuition money) that is spent a year maintaining the GMU Proquest Database, which makes me realize I really should take advantage of it while I am still a student here. Learning about all the free online databases and Google Books that I should be taking advantage of has shaped my new perspective to researching!

On October 12th, our assignment was to have come to class having read Segregating Sound by Karl Miller and our class lecture related to the book. Segregating Sound discussed how successful the blues were to the music industry and how the blues introduced “folklore”. A white folklorist named Walter Webb was mentioned a handful of times in the book crediting him for introducing the blues as a new popular genre. The blues was an important genre as it connected the age of the Jim Crow Era as it was popular amongst blacks. On page 190, Karl Miller discussed and examined the politics of segregation and the emergence of folklore, which was often associated with blacks, into commercialized music industry. Miller discussed how whites and blacks shared this music genre and the shifting struggles over this shared genre and the classifications of constant black or white. This era we begin to see an emergence of whites and blacks sharing similar interests and the color divide lessens, but not entirely. My favorite part of Segregating Sound was that Race Records was mentioned and it excited me since we had previously touched base on it in a previous class. The interesting part with Race Records was it had genres that marketed to blacks such as blues, but that genre always marketed to white, since it was basically originated folklore. For this class, besides having read Segregating Sound and learning that John Lomax was one of the most important folklorists in American history, we also had a lecture on Forms of Nationalism. We discussed how the people that came to the United States shared similar aspirations, which could come from the iconic quote of how people came here to live out there “American Dream.” Specifically, 75% of Italian-Americans that immigrated returned and stayed in the United States. Although, whites were essentiality superior, theoretically speaking all citizens were equal because all agreed to be ruled by the same laws and follow them. We also touched base on The Enlightenment, which took place in the 1700s, which emphasized on rationality and individualism. We talked about The Enlightenment and how the Romanticism Era was a reaction to it. This was an interesting topic because we discussed how people in this era begin to be moved by greater things and argue for meaning and beauty found in emotion. The Era people truly connected to their inner self, which can be linked back to the emphasis on individualism that the Enlightenment Era gave the people.  What fascinated me the most was that our lecture concluded by connecting back to Segregating Sound by discussing the issues with “Romantic Nationalism” in the United States is nature of folk is non-white.