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.