I remember when I was first introduced to Pandora. It was fascinating to think that you could just pull up a website that would play what you wanted without having to choose one song after another, playing constant DJ for yourself. Streaming has become widespread, with many different services, both paid and free. A person no longer has to have “taste” in music. They can choose a song or artist that they heard on the radio and liked, then let the internet do the selecting for them. Streaming is very controversial with artists because streaming services are playing their music, but not necessarily providing compensation. With streaming available, people no longer have to buy music. It is easily provided for them with the click of an app and the play button. Streaming services employ a lot of people to help develop these behind-the-scenes “taste” for its mindless consumers. Pandora has many music analysts that are creating a “music genome.” They employ many people to analyze music to assist the algorithm that chooses music for their listeners. The work does not stop at the coding though. These analysts have to measure how people then interact with the application. Do they give the song a thumbs up? A thumbs down? Do they skip it? This constant data is taken in to help alter the music output for a particular person. While streaming is a service I appreciate, evaluating it in this context reminds me of Fahrenheit 451 where people are constantly served up content on their televisions until they have no true opinion of their own.

In many respects, American music was greatly influenced by Latin Americans. As Cubans and Puerto Ricans moved to New York, they brought island sounds with them. There are several iconic Latin songs such as “La Bamba.” Latin rhythms can be heard in popular themes such as that of Mission Impossible. As Latin inspired music grew, we saw other cultural shifts such as the mambo craze. This is another great example of how displacement of people leads to innovation in music.

I thought that this section was interesting because we are seeing a surge in Latin music being played on popular radio stations today. Artists like Shakira, Enrique Iglesias, and Cardi B have helped to bridge a gap between American and Latin pop music. Other songs like “Despacito” with Justin Bieber, Luis Fonsi, and Daddy Yankee have also popularized Latin music.

Week 10 was about copyright and sampling. Copyright is one of the many powers that corporations hold. They are able to own material that might naturally be free to share, such as art. Corporations are an interesting phenomenon because they are entities that possess the rights of people. When a person starts a corporation, that company stands separately from themselves. They are not a part of it in legal terms. Because corporations are their own being, they have the ability to own intellectual property as well. Corporations have played a big role in copyright law over the years, especially Disney. I think it is very unscrupulous how Disney has seemingly been able to manipulate the law. The graph that we looked at about the extension of copyright over the years with the creation of mickey mouse is very telling about how their revenue is able to influence to legal system. I do not believe that copyright should be extended for a very long time because it inhibits innovation. Companies try to patent things now, not for the sake of intellectual property, but to protect their wallets. Consider the way that they can prevent generic drugs from being made when a drug is initially found to be successful. A generic drug would give many more people access to potentially life saving remedies, but instead not everyone can afford it just like with the Epipen situation.

For the Digital Scavenger Hunt assignment, we are to search for the earliest references to a musical term such as salsa, jazz, mambo, hip hop, etc. I  chose to search for the genre of “Disco.” On the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it shows that disco started to increase around 1975. This corresponds to a search in Google books where the earliest search result for disco is in 1978. It is sheet music from Edgar Schlepper. It is said in an article about early disco that a lot of American disco was influenced by German music. Kurt Reighley states that “Germany exerted considerable influence on American disco, via the contributions of Giorgio Morodor, Kraftwerk, et al.” Disco was not received well by many. Anti-disco campaigns were started against the genre. An article from 1979 stated complaints about its “rhythmic repetition” and “nonmelodic monotony.” Disco was associated with African Americans, so many white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Council passed out pamphlets saying that disco was wrong and should not be listened to. People in the black community also held grudges against disco because they felt that it was monopolizing the radio, preventing other black artists from getting recognized. Lastly, many people of “new wave” music thought that disco was a “perversion of black music,” so disco was not well received by many groups of people.

This week was very interesting. We discussed how Claude Shannon worked to separate information from meaning, which led to the creation of the binary code computers use today to communicate. Binary would allow computers to operate and send information more efficiently. Binary code is very interesting because it reminds me of how the brain works. All of our reality is based on tiny electrical signals that our brain is able to integrate, as the recipient computer of signals would. This recreates the information as text on the other side, while simplifying the signals in transit. The person reading the information on the other side is able to gather the meaning from the text.

The internet also gave a reader more control over their information intake with the creation of hypertexts. Sites like Wikipedia contain many embedded links, so that the user has choice in their information pathway. Therefore, the invention of the internet gave people freedom to explore information, rather than have it dictated to them as a book would. Not everyone agrees that this is a good thing. With so much information ready at our fingertips and a number of tangents to follow on any given website, our attention span is challenged. Carr said that it is important to practice sustained reading, following the author’s point, to counteract this. I think that the internet can be a big distraction. Growing up with constant, multiple sources of stimulation programs people to always seek that level of distraction. It is almost as if we need it to function and can look very similar to ADHD. I will often watch TV while I am on my phone.

In week 7 we talked about more in depth about migration. Throughout the United States, as it became more developed and the politics changed, migration was very prevalent. With this movement of people, new styles of music began to emerge. In DC, African Americans developed Go Go music, while white people who came to the area played distinctive guitar styles. One thing that united these migrants was the subject of their music. They were enthusiastic about modern life, yet they felt nostalgic for their past lives.

This week we talked about the blending of different styles and how music can be very meaningful to displaced people. Music, especially in the beat or rhythm, can provide a sense of comfort. For example, we talked about how Camila Cabello’s song “Havana” may not be very meaningful to most people, but it might be significant to displaced Cubans here in the United States who are hearing familiar music on the radio. Many emotions are tied to music because most people grow up hearing a certain style. This was also true for many African Americans who began moving to the cities. “Hoochie coochie Man” was a song that became very popular in the African American community of Chicago. It was a familiar Southern style to many of those who had moved to the city from the South.

The blending of European and African styles of music also created new types of rhythm. There was a lot of music produced that put an emphasis on the “and” of the second downbeat, which was different from the current style. This can be heard in some tango music. Blending different styles of music can create new sounds to connect different cultures of people.

This was perhaps the most disturbing lecture of the semester. In the late 1800s, white people would do minstrel shows in blackface. It was most shocking to me that the banjo was presented in these shows as an African instrument. However, today it is a hallmark of white country music, such as in the Appalachian region. The minstrel shows also had a comical, but unintelligent Jim Crow character. These shows perpetuated a lot of racial stereotypes of African and African American people. It was very odd and disturbing to hear of white people dressing up as black people to entertain others. Also, that most of these events are never spoken about. Your average person does not know anything about minstrel shows or the origins of the banjo.

During these times, there was a lot of blending of cultures. We talked about how Hawaiian music became very popular for a time. People pretended to be Hawaiian to make their music more popular. This was another situation where I was surprised about an instrument’s origins. I always thought that the ukelele originated in Hawaii or the polynesian islands. However, it originated in Portugal and was adopted by the islands.

Cultural appropriation is a large issue throughout history. It can be a hard pill to swallow that things such as instruments and sounds are “borrowed” from a culture and become popular while the origins of it are looked down upon. Music carries a deep history of cultural blending, as well as societal issues of the times.

In week 4 we discussed signal and noise and the rise of the ARPANET. Signals are always complicated by noise, because noise is ever-present. That noise can hinder the ability to receive a signal. I think that this probably presents a large issue as industrialization continues because there is more and more information and sound in the world as the population grows. For example, we have “big data” now, which is more information than can be traditionally processed. A lot of this information can be just noise compared to the signal trying to be relayed.

We learned that the ARPANET was one of the foundations of the internet. It was based on packet switching, which allowed information to be split up into smaller pieces. I think that this was an important change for building the precursor to the internet. It allowed technological advances that were distinct from older technologies like telephones. Packet switching set up a framework for larger amounts of data to be sent because they could be broken down. Developing packet switching also required the development of destinations or addresses, which came about with the invention of the URL (Uniform Resource Locator). My favorite part of week 4 was discussing how the internet is so pervasive now. Text messaging, instant messaging, websites, are all part of the internet. They connect people all over the world.

Week  3 of the course covered a wide array of topics. Among them were the Second World War, the Cold War and the military industrial complex. HIST 390 comes in through the history of computing. The weapons and weapons systems created by the superpowers during these conflicts required a vast amount of funding and research allocated towards the development of advanced computing.

Things like ballistic trajectories for shells, rockets, and missiles needed complex engineering advanced by analog, and later digital computers. The resulting progress in computing was essential for the technology we have today. It’s incredible to think how much of the technology we regularly use today originated during this time period. Following the Second World War the leap in technology was mind boggling.