This week we talked about mapping music. The tools that we were showed is helping with the final assignment. You can see what artists are similar to other artists and same with songs. What I found the most interesting was the link to the Songs of America. You can see what songs and the genres that are from the different parts of the country. I love how you can see what genres originated from what regions. Some of these were not surprising, like the kind of music found around Virginia.

On Monday, the DAW was introduced. The DAW is the Digital Audio Workstation. Tomorrow we will be doing a workshop so I thought I would do some background research beforehand. This program is used when working with music. You can record, edit, and make music with this program. It has been around longer than I thought. People began using it as early as the seventies. Over the years, it is becoming more accessible to people as technology continues to expand and the program is becoming cheaper. The DAW is used everywhere today; from tv to radio to music.

This week in class we learned about copyright. And some of the crazy rules and regulations that things are indeed copyrighted by. I found the rule that when something is copyrighted, it is done so for 120 years, so insane. So someone can just take it after you are dead and claim its their own and make money off of it? No thank you. That’s not how it should work! We also were shown some examples of some songs that were supposedly rendered the same song. Such as Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke and a Marvin Gaye song. This I believe is too similar to claim as Robin’s own. However, with the case of Sam Smith and Tom Petty, I believe that no monies should have been awarded to Tom. There isn’t enough similarities to give half of Sam’s royalties away.

In class today, what caught my attention the most what how Jennifer Lopez’s “On the Floor” sampled from a song in Brazil, which sampled from a song from Bolivia. It weird to think that melody has been around for so many years! Anyways, I decided to blog this week about some other genealogy’s of another song. Ariana Grande is a huge pop star today, one of her first well known songs was back in 2013 with “The Way”. Come to find out that song sampled the melody from another back in 1998. This was a song called “Still Not a Player” by Big Pun. The fact that a pop song from the 2000’s had the same beat as a popular hip hop song back in the 90’s is so funny to me. Well come to find out that the line doesn’t stop there. The original melody was found in a song from 1979 called “A Little Bit of Love” by Brenda Russell. This was more R&B. It is so funny to see it travel through all of these genres! One last interesting fact, Britney Spears’ “Toxic”, as iconic as it is, came from a hindi song in 1981………

I found this topic to be very interesting and spent a lot of time googling and reading about the argument that is “black confederates”. Many people believe that there is no such thing as black confederates, while others stand strongly that they did, infact, exist. There are many theories as to why they may have fought for the confederacy. And people hold strongly on their beliefs. So much so that it has reached an impasse. I find this so fascinating as I think there should be records to prove everything. Everything that has happened in my lifetime is easily documented and can be found on the internet. So its alien to me not to have records on all things. Based on what I have read and come across today, I believe that black confederates did e

This was the most interesting thing I had read or learned about in this class thus far. I had no idea that the “Jazz swing” was the foundation for the hip hop groove. Rob Brown taking it step by step made it extremely clear how this music has evolved over the years. It’s clear that he has had the experience and knows exactly what to do. I do not know much about jazz or hip hop, I listen mainly to what is on Top 40 radio these days. For me, it was great to learn the connection before exploring the music myself. You can even here it in popular hip hop today, which was interesting. It made me think about how you used Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” as an example of the swing beat in class the other day. It was one of the biggest songs in the world just a few years ago and it used a concept that was coming up on 100 years old.

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