April 30, 2018

Tommy Dorsey and Thomas A. Dorsey. Weird wrinkle in segregation that it prevented confusion back in the day.

Autotune “de-skills” the singer. I can see that. Kind of like electronic rider aids “de-skill” professional motorcycle racers. I’m a lousy singer and far from being a pro-level rider, so I’ll gladly accept all the assistance I can get in both endeavors. However, the parallel with industrialization de-skilling and de-valuing skilled craftsman is something I’ve seen in my lifetime. Factory kitchen cabinetry is no match for a skilled finish carpenter, but the market is saturated with affordable, perfectly serviceable factory pieces. We usually shop by price, and therefore the number of specialized craftspeople are ever decreasing.

Never thought I’d agree with Marx, but his concept of “commodity fetishism” sounds like he was ahead of his time, in one respect.

Review/Course Overview. From Edison cylinders to digital recording, preserving voice and music is an example of displacement of time and space. I also suggest the written word was a similar form of displacement when it was still a new concept.

May 2, 2018

Additional review. Pop music’s legacy is as a diary/journal of US history. A history of racism, politics, and people displaced. Does DAW software impoverish or enrich the music experience? More the former than the latter, I would argue. Accessibility may be its own form of enrichment, I guess, but it’s not worth the trade off in value.

Culture contrasted with politics. Culture promotes blending, politics promote segregation, sorting and balkanizing groups to facilitate control. Ask yourself, which feels like human nature?

One final thanks to Claude Shannon. Reducing everything to binary data is more a blessing than a curse. Alexander Hamilton would have approved of Shannon.