1,866 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2017
    1. Josie and the Pussycats, both the film and the soundtrack, continue to influence people who do not identify with the aggressively male music world. Even before this reissue, female-identifying musicians have discussed how revolutionary it was for them to see women in a mainstream platform.
    1. Although most of us arc used to hearing sound all around us every day, we don't often pay attention to how il signals information, including feelings, responses, or needed actions.

      One of the activities in our class textbook, Guide to First-Year Writing (6th Edition), asks us to “consider a song as an argument” (70). This activity (activity 2.12, found in chapter two) requires the participant to locate a song that appears to make an argument and answer the activity’s given questions. For this exercise, I chose the song “Love Is Dead” by Estonian musician Kerli.

      The title alone presents Kerli’s argument: love is dead. Answering the activity’s given questions, however, caused me to contemplate Kerli’s song as a complex communicative device; I soon realized that Kerli’s message is not as simplistic as the title implies. In my response, I hypothesize that Kerli is a mistress who has made the difficult decision to leave a secret relationship. By referencing lyrics that support my interpretation of the song’s argument, I was able to appreciate the narrative present in the song, and analyze its method of storytelling.

      Previously, I felt most drawn to the aural mode of “Love Is Dead,” however, this activity prompted my explicit admiration of the song’s linguistic mode as well. Through the following questions, I discuss how and why the linguistic mode of the song’s argument is supported by its aural mode:

      How would you describe the musical style of the song? In what ways does the style of singing and instrumentation help convey the rhetorical argument?

      Here is a snippet of my response:

      *The composition of the piece seems to describe the navigation of a dangerous path. It’s as if one has to look over one’s shoulder while listening to this song. By employing a sense of danger, the ballad mimics the traitorous and deceptive nature of Kerli’s secret relationship.

      In the song, Kerli’s vocals are slightly distorted. She sounds as if she is singing from behind a glass wall, showing that she is both unsure of the words she is singing to herself, and afraid of being honest about her doubt of the worthiness of her relationship. The instrumentation is forceful and almost overpowers Kerli’s voice at times. One is never unaware of the thematic orchestra scoring Kerli’s ascent through perilous territory. As the song advances, however, Kerli’s angelic voice increases in power. She continuously repeats and chants variations of “love is dead, love is gone, love don’t live here anymore,” alternating between singing these words, chanting them, and crying them to the audience.*

      As this article’s authors point out, the aural mode of media “signals information” even when we are not consciously aware of those signals.

      At first, I only appreciated the superficiality of the composition of “Love Is Dead,” and simply recognized that it sounded good to me. I now realize, however, that the aural mode of the song also performs the deeper, more complex function of storytelling. The sound of Kerli’s song influences the emotions that I feel upon listening, and the imagery I conjure in accordance with the music.

      Read the full response on my website, Postscript Reverie: My Analysis of "Love Is Dead"

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBDiHFS1TjY

  2. Sep 2017
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  5. May 2017
  6. Apr 2017
    1. ambience

      Related to my other note on violence/parasitic imagery, it's so interesting that ambient music is his metaphor. I think language/rhetoric/rhetorical situations have for the most part been associated with ruptures, conflicts, lava. Now we have ambient music which doesn't really have major musical shifts or discordant sounds and seems completely different.

    2. Ambient1:MusicforAirportsandMusicforFilms

      Is it just me, or do these albums seem like very different projects, and yet that's not really addressed? I mean, I suppose I can imagine a need for ambient music in background scenes for films, but soundtracks are so often used for overt emotional manipulation that I imagine relying on ambient music of this sort would actually lead to a sort of "uncanny"/discomforting experience for the audience. Barring a weird indy film where that is the goal, I can't imagine what market there would be for a film soundtrack from "the guy who brought you Ambient I: Music for Airports."

  7. Mar 2017
    1. Li Delun, one of the Chinese musicians trained in the West whose career survived the Cultural Revolution, helped lead the revival with a new ideological line, declaring, “People need this product of the West to liberate their cultural thinking from 2,000 years of feudalism.” By the early 1990s, the Chinese government was deliberately encouraging the study of music through its education policy. Students and their parents were keenly aware that musical training could be an advantage in China’s brutal competition for slots at top universities. Knowledge of Beethoven was something to show off, and President Jiang Zemin (in office 1993–2003) enjoyed doing just that, taking the baton to conduct orchestras at state banquets and playing the piano for Western leaders.
    1. “Whenever I play in Korea, I feel like I’m at a rock concert,” says Bell. If there’s any irony to the most quintessentially Western music tradition being kept alive by the East, by now it’s a moot point. Classical music is as Asian as tempura and Spam. Even if it eventually dies in the West, it will have an Asian afterlife, much in the way washed-up American rock bands can still pack stadiums in Manila.
    2. And in contrast to celebrity musicians like Yo-Yo Ma and Lang Lang, Asians haven’t made much headway into conducting or composing. Asian music education is not famous for its music theory. The Suzuki method, Asia’s most successful classical music export, is a highly mechanical training regimen based on drills and rote memorization, with no emphasis on “feeling” the music
  8. Feb 2017
    1. One can imagine a man who is totally deaf and has never had a sensation of sound: and music.

      Locke identifies a similar problem in his own writing, but unlike Nietzsche, refuses to address it further: "Words having naturally no signification, the idea which each stands for must be learned and retained, by those who would exchange thoughts, and hold intelligible discourse with others...Those [words] which are not intelligible at all, such as names standing for any simple ideas which another has not organs of faculties to attain; as the names of colours to a blind man, or sounds to a deaf man need not here be mentioned...for if we examine them, we shall find that the names of mixed modes are most liable to doubtfulness and imperfection."

      Although Locke doesn't delve much deeper into this, I do like how he notes that some words are used to describe "mixed modes" like music and color. Nietzsche addresses this concept below, saying that although a man might be deaf, he can still "feel" music (via vibrations) and therefore might understand sound in a way that is divergent from the conventional manner. I'm also reminded of Rickert's piece, in which he noted that Homer could never identify the color "blue" as we understand it today, instead calling the color of the sea "purple" or "wine red."

  9. Dec 2016
  10. Nov 2016
    1. We found that, next to musical training, the personality trait of openness was the strongest predictor of musical sophistication. People who score highly for openness are imaginative, have a wide range of interests, and are open to new ways of thinking and changes in their environment.
  11. Oct 2016
  12. Jun 2016
    1. Two performances did seem to transcend the present, with artists sharing music that felt like open-source software to paths unknown. The first, Sam Aaron, played an early techno set to a small crowd, performing by coding live. His computer display, splayed naked on a giant screen, showcasedSonic Pi, the free software he invented. Before he let loose by revising lines of brackets, colons and commas, he typed:#This is Sonic Pi…..#I use it to teach people how to code#everything i do tonight, i can teach a 10 year old child…..His set – which sounded like Electric Café-era Kraftwerk, a little bit of Aphex Twin skitter and some Eighties electro – was constructed through typing and deleting lines of code. The shadowy DJ sets, knob-tweaking noise and fogbank ambient of many Moogfest performers was completely demystified and turned into simple numbers and letters that you could see in action. Dubbed "the live coding synth for everyone," it truly seemed less like a performance and more like an invitation to code your own adventure.
    1. “The time we were opened to that world is when we talk to other bands. People who are great people, amazing musicians. Then they release a new song, and I’m like, ‘That’s not them. I’ve been on tour with them for months, that’s something they would not do. That’s where we’ve seen it the most, honestly.” When it is suggested those artists drank the Kool-Aid, Joseph adjusts the metaphor, replacing “drank” with “served.” “They weren’t given a choice. They were painted into a situation where they were going to get shelved or a plug was going to get pulled, by people in control who think they know [what works].”
    1. For the sixteen-track album, the band invented fifteen fictional personas, each with its own sound, aesthetic, and backstory that draw from different decades of club culture. Genres range from Studio 1 reggae to indie rock, under pseudonyms like Burning Phlegm, White Virgins, and Noah's Dark.
  13. May 2016
  14. annotatingausten.sfsuenglishdh.net annotatingausten.sfsuenglishdh.net
    1. What Amber explained was exactly what I’d feared: through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted.

  15. Feb 2016
  16. Jan 2016
    1. Now fintech platform OpenLedger and Danish bitcoin exchange CCEDK are joining forces with MUSE, a music-tailored blockchain, to make monetizing music as easy as new peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms made distributing it 15 years ago.

      PeerTracks, a music streaming and retail platform company, is the first outfit to use the brand new MUSE network, in partnership with CCEDK and OpenLedger.

      http://www.peertracks.com/faq.php<br> https://www.openledger.info/<br> https://www.ccedk.com/about

    1. This is from 18 August, 2015, so it's possible things have changed. But it's interesting anyway, and many links are given.

      Most music streaming services have been paying artists on a per-click basis. So most subscribers' money doesn't go to the artists they are listening to, but rather whichever artists get the most clicks. And this system is extremely vulnerable to click fraud.

      The author argues that Subscriber Share is a better system. With that method, your subscription fee is divided among the artists you listen to according to the percentage of time you spend listening to them.

      FAQ includes additional links and replies to counter-arguments.

  17. Dec 2015
    1. Maria Anna (called Marianne and nicknamed Nannerl) was – like her younger brother – a child prodigy. The children toured most of Europe (including an 18-month stay in London in 1764-5) performing together as “wunderkinder”. There are contemporaneous reviews praising Nannerl, and she was even billed first. Until she turned 18. A little girl could perform and tour, but a woman doing so risked her reputation.
    1. Huge follower counts on YouTube and social media DO NOT easily translate to income. And those followers expect you to be "real" -- so they are hostile to advertising and sponsored content.

      Do you own a business? It might pay to offer a salary to the producers of a YouTube channel that reaches your target audience -- in exchange for low-profile "brought to you by" links and mentions that won't offend that audience.

      https://twitter.com/JBUshow<br> https://twitter.com/gabydunn

    1. The supermarket giant, which has been selling CDs for decades, will stock a small selection of classic albums as well as a few new titles by the likes of Coldplay and George Ezra. LPs by The Beatles, Radiohead, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley and Elvis Presley be available, priced between £12 and £20.
  18. Nov 2015
  19. Oct 2015
  20. Aug 2015
    1. The Stanley Clarke Band is an album by jazz bassist Stanley Clarke. It was released by Heads Up Record in June 2010 and was produced by Clarke and Lenny White. Band members include Ruslan Sirota on keyboard, Ronald Bruner, Jr. on drums and Hiromi on piano.

      Hiromi composed and played piano on Labyrinth.

  21. May 2015
  22. Nov 2014
    1. This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1306 genres by The Echo Nest. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.
  23. Aug 2014
    1. One thing that was happening at that time was the media was portraying punk as this extremely self-destructive, nihilistic kind of sadomasochist kind of nonsense. Which then really created a lot of unpleasantness in terms of straight society towards punks. But even worse, people who were really into nihilistic and sadomasochistic and self-destructive tendencies said, “Oh I must be a punk!” and started coming to shows.

      Dischord Records founder Ian MacKaye on media coverage of the D.C. punk scene

  24. Feb 2014
    1. If the Riemann hypothesis is true, Im tn = 0 for all n, and the function f(u), constructed from the primes, has a discrete spectrum; that is, the support of its Fourier transform is discrete. If the Riemann hypothesis is false, this is not the case. The frequencies tn are reminiscent of the decomposition of a musical sound into its constituent harmonics. Therefore there is a sense in which we can give a one-line nontechnical statement of the Riemann hypothesis: "The primes have music in them."

      The frequencies are reminiscent of the decomposition of a musical sound into its constituent harmonics; the primes have music in them.

  25. Nov 2013
    1. In use these should be united, so that the same oration can expound purely, speak ornately, and express thought wisely. However, the precepts of pure diction, ornate delivery, and intelligent treatment must be kept separate and should not be confused.

      surely, like learning to play the guitar: fingering on the keyboard, strum and pick, and annotation are studied as distinct practices, and combined together to produce the music.

  26. Oct 2013
    1. Such is undoubtedly the case unless we suppose, perchance, that a regular structure and smooth combination of words is requisite only in poems and songs, and is superfluous in making a speech; or that composition and modulation are not to be varied in speaking, as in music, according to the nature of the subject.

      Interesting use of vocal music as an exercise or means of training an orator. When I consider any number of vocalists, a commonality among them is the ability to speak well (and pleasantly). I'm having a hard time recalling any vocalist with a flat, monotone voice (among other unpleasant speaking qualities).

    2. In oratory, accordingly, the raising, lowering, or other inflection of the voice tends to move the feelings of the bearers. We try to excite the indignation of the judges in one modulation of phrase and voice (that I may again use the same term), and their pity in another, for we see that minds are affected in different ways even by musical instruments, though no words cannot be uttered by them.

      Ok, this is all fascinating stuff. Even when we speak it tends to be in some sort of music scale, or at the very least we don't speak in dissonant tones.

    3. But let us consider what peculiar advantage he who is to be an orator may expect from music. Music has two kinds of measures, the one in the sounds of the voice, the other in the motions of the body, for in both a certain due regulation is required.

      Here's the point, finally.

    4. Nature herself, indeed, seems to have given music to us as a benefit, to enable us to endure labors with greater facility, for musical sounds cheer even the rower

      What does he mean by Nature, is it some higher being like god he is evoking?