April 9, 2018
Bumper music: Tito Puente’s Ran Kan Kan. Beats revisited. The more I listen to James Brown, the more I like him. Tastes change with age. I used to hate The Who, but they’re starting to wear on me since playing the halftime show during a Superbowl some years back.
Still unsure if I understand beats, yet. Maybe I do get it, but some doubt is present. If I could see it on a time-domain instrument like an oscilloscope, maybe it would make sense. This is an example of an “unknown unknown,” that is, I don’t know what I don’t know. I’m OK with that.
One doesn’t have to be good at music to enjoy it. Lots of things in life are like that (insert joke here). I have a good handle on sampling theory and interpolation. When using frequency-domain instruments one can get some squirrelly readings by under-sampling a signal. Thank you, Mr. Nyquist (and Claude Shannon, again).
What was especially cool was learning that certain overtones (harmonics) determine the “fingerprint” of voices and instruments. Guitarists choosing the point on a string to create desired harmonics should have been obvious to me, but I’ve never noodled with musical instruments. Up the frequency range into the electromagnetic neighborhood, waves can act in a similar fashion when interacting with environment. Waves are waves, it would seem.
April 11, 2018
Stephen Witt’s “How Music Got Free.” Great book; could be made into a movie. It’s a bonus when you can learn history while enjoying a well-crafted story. It’s worth noting that the debate about intellectual property in previous lectures tended to get my brain twisted around a bit. Strangely enough, when the issue is dealt with in Witt’s book, I felt completely neutral towards it, and I can’t explain why. Maybe because the story doesn’t require me to make a decision on right and wrong; like watching a movie where you know the end is predetermined.
I can’t help but admire the Fraunhofer team that championed the mp3 format tenaciously. “The race is not always to the swift, but to those who keep running,” as they used to say. Sharing the code early on made all the difference in the world. I can’t bring myself to hate Doug Morris for becoming the richest record exec in the universe. He was delivering on his obligation to his employer, and wasn’t stealing the money from me. I have mixed feelings about the crimes committed by Dell and Tony in North Carolina. No doubt they were stealing, but I marvel at their methods. Selling bootleg music and movies face-to-face as well as posting to file sharing online, it’s amazing Dell made it so long without getting caught. In addition he had a marketing network with barber shops. That’s an example of the American Dream: Bootstrap bootlegging.