The Book MP3: The Meaning of a Format by Jonathan Sterne offers an interesting and in-depth look at the various factors which had to come together over the course of a century for the file format which holds most of our music files today, the mp3, to come into existence, and subsequently prominence.  As dense as the book is–if there is indeed a less scientifically dense book on the subject, as Prof. O’Malley alluded to in class, why didn’t we read that instead?–learning about all these factors that at first glance would seem only tangentially related to the topic, such as telephony, turned out to have monumental impact on how most of our music sounds to most of us to this day.  Ultimately, I’m not sure what to do with all this information that I now have on the subject though: am I really supposed to consider the fate of the poor lobotomized cats which made my iPod possible when I’m using it to listen to the Beatles?  Sterne freely admits that people who are worried about the fidelity of the music on their mp3 players would be better served buying better headphones and/or speakers, as that will make a greater positive impact on how their music sounds to them than converting their files to a less-compressed format, and for far less effort. “Pre-echo” on percussive passages of music isn’t a thing I ever heard before this book told me to listen for it, and even now I have to be trying to find it in order to hear it.

However, where MP3 hits closer for me is in its description of the testing used to determine the compression algorithm for the format.  It seems that the groups who were administering the testing didn’t have enough of a range of music in mind.  While it’s certainly true that a limit of listening tests is that you cannot annoy the listener, it seems to me that you could have found some people who had the requisite knowledge to understand what they were listening for and wouldn’t be bothered by modern music, or music which focuses more on rhythm than melody, or polyrhythmic music, or whichever of the types of music that seem to be missing from the selected recordings that you want to go after.  At the very least, it would have been possible to have the expert listeners’ study be paralleled by another by a random sample of the population, which would tend to remove some of that middle-brow, “listenablility” bias, and then use some combination of the results of those two studies to determine which algorithm best reproduced the most music.

So, all in all, I really have no idea how to feel about copyright.  I like that, in theory, it protects individual content creators from having their work stolen from them, and ensures that they’ll receive compensation for their work. However, in practice, most of the time it’s being used by corporations to enclose old popular works and keep them from lapsing into the public domain so that the corporations can continue to profit on them.  On the other hand, I have little sympathy for artists like Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, who didn’t really create anything new or different at all. Complicating matters further, though, I do feel sympathetic towards artists like NWA or Public Enemy, who sampled pieces of music they didn’t own.  Even though that is definitely outright theft of copyrighted material that they don’t own, they changed it, made it new and different, made it their own, transforming the sample into something much less like the original than the knock-offs created by Thicke and Williams, by Sam Smith, and even by George Harrison, whom I personally love.  I enjoy listening to My Sweet Lord, even knowing full well that it’s a rip-off of He’s So Fine, but I do agree that Harrison’s estate should be sharing the royalties with the Chiffons. I think in my ideal world, people would be able to sample music, but there’d be some sort of revenue-sharing system in place where the original content creator and the sampler could both claim some credit.  But, I’m not sure how I’d want to extend that courtesy to people who write songs that are clearly “inspired by” other songs to a greater or lesser extent.  Just changing the key and the tempo isn’t enough. Ideally, I’d want there to be some sort of rule that you have to have created something different in some meaningful way, but I have no idea how to measure that, and even if I did, ruling on that in a court of law would be nigh-impossible.

This class always asks more questions than it answers, and that can be frustrating.  However, my beliefs clearly aren’t really logically consistent in any meaningful way, and I need to figure out why that is.

I’m a huge fan of Wikipedia, I’ve spent (wasted? well, at least I was learning…) many an evening down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, clicking link after link, becoming engrossed in some topic of interesting to me and trying to learn everything there possibly is to learn about it, getting sidetrack by some unexpected interesting tangent that pops up in an article about something familiar and following it for a time before returning to my thread of original interest.  None of this would have really been possible in the same way before Wikipedia; there was an Encyclopedia in my house growing up, but turning page after page and even going between multiple volumes in my quest for knowledge would have taken all of the fun out of trying to learn in this free-form way. That’s the thing about Wikipedia: because it’s so easy to use, it’s actually really fun for any curious person with academic interests. I’d definitely agree that Wikipedia is a perfectly acceptable academic tool, largely because of its user-friendliness: it’s very easy to get a broad base of knowledge for use in organizing a paper in almost any subject. The fault would be treating it as one’s only source, as many Wikipedia articles don’t go into the necessary depth to support an academic thesis. However, another thing Wikipedia is usually very good about, especially when it comes to it articles in more academic areas, is citing its sources. The sources a wikipedia article cites are often perfectly good academic sources worth citing in any paper. Besides which, using ANY one source as the sole one in any paper would be a mistake in the first place, even it was from a well-respected textbook or scholarly journal.

Ok, so that’s all well and good, but the other thing from this weeks’ classes that’s sticking in my craw is the discussion we had about whether it’s good to wear suits when out in public, such as in class.  Prof. O’Malley put forth that showing the discipline to wear a suit reflects the discipline to focus on learning, but I’d argue that it merely reflects the discipline to wear a suit and nothing more. I only own one suit, and I didn’t even bring it to school with me from Los Angeles, does that mean that I’m not willing to really focus on learning? Shouldn’t the definition of what it means to have a public persona evolve with the times? Why should being a public person mean the same thing to me as it did to my grandparents and their grandparents?

I’m not sure I have really good answers to any of these questions I’m raising, and I’m not even sure whether I’m raising these questions solely to subconsciously give myself an academic-minded justification for my personal distaste for suits and shaving and cutting my hair and all that jazz. Nonetheless, I’d have appreciated it if Prof. O’Malley had done more than act as a devil’s advocate for the pro-suit side. At any rate, even if some aspects of that discussion bothered me, I’m glad we had it; I don’t think I’d ever had a reason why I don’t like wearing suits before besides “I don’t like suits”. I like it when I’m stimulated to question my positions, as I may be persuaded to change them, and even if I’m not, as was the case this time, it often leads me to a better understanding of my own beliefs. That intellectually challenging aspect is maybe my favorite part of this class.

Naturally, the origins of folk MUSIC have been lost to time immemorial, that’s the whole nature of folk music.  however, there are origins of the TERM “folk music” which can undoubtedly be traced in the english language, and in the history of people thinking and writing about that music.  In every case, on every platform on which I looked for the term, there were references to it in ways that would be completely recognizable and consistent to refer to “folk music” to a modern listener–that is to say, in reference to the traditional music of a particular people, in opposition to music in the art tradition such as classical music.  Its first references are often to English minstrels, as well as the indigenous music of african-americans, the Irish, and Native americans. Indeed the first reference of any kind that I could find is in an 1805 edition of the magazine Music (https://books.google.com/books?id=rBGBQ3bHl5MC&pg=PA206&dq=%22folk+music%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDEQ6AEwBDgyahUKEwi91qO8p_DIAhWLaD4KHXuNDuU#v=onepage&q=%22folk%20music%22&f=false), found through google books and n-grams alike, where the reference is to the music of the Omaha Indians, described as belonging “aesthetically…to the primitive origins of melody, proceeding along harmonic lines” and noting that “from an ethnological point of view, these melodies are interesting”.  Similarly we see in the Philaelphia Evening Telegraph in 1870 (http://search.proquest.com/news/docview/171377199/260E886B50CE4739PQ/1?accountid=14541) that “Scotland and Germany stand pre-eminent for folk-music”, a term which is used interchangeably with “people’s music”, hinting at the german origin of the term in the word “volk”, meaning “common people”.  The article also notes that the significance of folk music in the cultures it looks at is two-fold: “not only the number, richness and beauty of these songs, but their present vitality in their fatherlands”.  There are references in an Atlantic Monlthy article from 1873 (http://search.proquest.com/news/docview/171377199/260E886B50CE4739PQ/1?accountid=14541) to Chaucer and how his works are imbued with folk-song traditions, showing clearly just how far back these traditions were recognized to go, even from the earliest days of discussing them. These references makes plain three things: One, that the term folk music is used not only to describe the music itself and how it sounds but also to ground that music in a particular culture and highlight that its study is essential to the study of that culture. Two, that the term “primitive” was clearly less troubling to use in the 19th century than it is today to refer to non-western cultures. Three, that the term “folk music” was probably in use much longer than the time period covered by the databases available, as it’s difficult to see any “evolution” of the term’s use.  Every reference to it is in a recognizable use, the one you’d expect to see going in to this blind.  If I had to guess, I’d say that using the term “folk music” to refer to this traditional, ethnic-cultural music which has value in study not only culturally but anthropologically, and which is defined in opposition to the formal tradition of art music, dates at least back to the 18th Century, and given the resources to study documents from further back, I’d be interested to see the genesis of the term, which clearly predates the available sources in these databases, as I doubt the term emerged fully-formed like Athena from its very first reference.