I don’t want to completely cross currents with what I’m writing about in the annotation for my song, but I wanted to bring up an aspect of working with GarageBand that I’m not discussing at length there: GarageBand’s drummer tracks are super creepy and I’m kind of afraid of them.  A drum machine, I can deal with, it’s a machine, I program it to play what I want it to play.  These “drummers” though, they know what I want them to play already somehow.  And yes, it is unsettling that the vast majority of them are clearly meant to be white guys, and that the only “women” and “people of color” (scare quotes here intended to be indicative of how weird it is that I’m even for a second thinking of these tracks as people, but technology is really, really weird like that) are in the alternative, hip-hop, and R&B genres.  There’s this almost subconscious association being made between ethnicity, gender and musical styles that is really off-putting. What would Arthur Lee or Eminem have to say about this, or for that matter Meg White or Mo Tucker, to name some drummers?  Still, none of this stopped me from using “Mason” and his “loose, swaggering, fill-heavy beats on a vintage-sounding kit all over my song project, and you know what, he does a damn good impression of Levon Helm if you make him follow a funk beat and nudge up the “Swing” slider.

Maybe that’s the ultimate commentary on the themes of this course. Maybe no matter how much technology’s intrusion into our music and our lives weirds us out, we’ll just keep going along with it whenever it’s convenient.  That’s not to say that the course or the conversation are irrelevant; in fact, I think this makes them more relevant than ever.  Music is one of the basic foundations of our or any other culture, and now it, along with everything else is becoming wrapped up in and inextricably linked with technology.  Whether we’re comfortable with it is irrelevant, it’s happening either way, but it behooves us as educated, informed individuals to keep abreast of the pace and nature of those changes.  If we don’t understand these trends, we will not be able to participate in a culture which changes rapidly and leaves behind all it cannot use.  So, at the end of the semester, I’m really glad i stumbled unknowingly into this course, and not because I already know a ton about American music and therefore some aspects of it came easily to me, even though that’s true. Quite the opposite; this course taught me a lot I didn’t already know about a subject I thought I had delved the depths of, and has helped me understand difficult concepts in new ways. I now have access to an entirely different way of thinking about music, and for that I’m grateful.

I like what I like, and I can’t always describe why that is. To paraphrase Potter Stewart, I’ll know it when I see it. Take my music tastes: when I put my iPod on shuffle, it’s likely that within the first hour, I’ll hear Bruce Springsteen, Radiohead, Dvorak, The Band, Taylor Swift (don’t you dare judge me), James Brown, Coltrane, Hank Williams, Gnarls Barkley, Woody Guthrie, Arcade Fire, the Animals, and myriad other disparate styles of music, and I’ll be bopping my head and singing along to each just as passionately.  So, I’d argue the claim that people will always seek out things that are similar to the things they like already–the things I already like aren’t even necessarily similar to each other in the first place.  So, streaming services have never really worked for me the way they’re intended to.  I need to get recommendations about new bands from my friends, most of whom are voracious consumers of music and always on the lookout for something new–as I am.

What’s more, if I lived in a neighborhood that didn’t have a grocery store where I could get bok choy, tahini, or serrano chiles (“hispanic vegetables” are your friends, they’re delicious!) I’d either burn a lot of gas driving to one that did, move, or become depressed.  My taste in food is also eclectic. I can’t remotely imagine myself going to the same five restaurants for the rest of my life, not when there are a dozen different kinds of ethnic food I’d be in the mood for right now.  Maybe it’s because I’m from Los Angeles, a huge city with an incredibly diverse population, not only ethnically but economically, but I don’t see any value in not challenging myself to go outside my comfort zone.  In fact, I’d go a step further: If I was around a bunch of people who thought and acted and bought the same things as me, first I’d wonder if I was dreaming, since I’m not sure such a place exists, but if it was real, THAT’S when I’d be uncomfortable.  I think when you get large and diverse populations living in a relatively compact area like you do in Los Angeles, the Zip Code thing starts to break down. The Zip Codes are too small, and even so it’s hard to define a specific type of person that lives in any of them.  To expand, I drive through ten Zip Codes on the way to the beach from my house; crossing those boundaries isn;t only not unusual, it’s the norm.

Maybe I’m just an iconoclast, but I think that way of living is better, and most of the people I know had similar experiences of being exposed to diversity constantly from a young age, and I think they’d agree that it’s better than never challenging your expectations. Go online and find recipes you’ve never heard of before and make them! Listen to your friend’s iPod in their car even though they only like EDM! Maybe you’ll find something new to love, and either way it’s better than stagnation.  American nationalism can be a celebration of diversity as long as you’re willing to be adventurous, not a weakening retreat into a mosaic of separate, homogenous cultures.

The discussion of the Turing test and the Chinese room analogy was, for me at least, one of the most psychologically rewarding discussions in the entire semester, because of how I think it ties in with some of the other, larger themes of the course.  The immediate question at hand is as follows: can there be such a thing as an intelligent machine, and if there can, how can we as outside observers tell?  Turing’s theory posits that a machine can said to be intelligent when an outside observer cannot tell whether they are communicating with a human or a machine.  Searle, on the other hand, puts forth an example: if someone who spoke Chinese was communicating with someone inside a room who did not speak Chinese, but had an elaborate instruction manual which made it possible for them to give proper responses to any Chinese phrase, the outside observer would be convinced they were communicating with a Chinese speaker, when in fact, the person had no idea what it was they were communicating.  I find this example, which I didn’t know about before taking this class, an incredibly effective and eye-opening rebuttal to Turing.

The larger point to be made here, why Searle doesn’t think Turing’s requirements are enough to label something as intelligent, is a point with which I’ve come to wholeheartedly agree: intent matters, and meaning cannot be interpreted from form alone.  A machine would have to understand what it is communicating before I could label it intelligent.  Soon after I came to this conclusion, I realized it had ramifications for Tosches’ embrace of the minstrel show. Sure, all music is imbued with politics, with boundary-transgression, and often the best music is that which is most bound up in those things, such as the countless white musicians who are influenced directly or indirectly by the black American blues tradition. To say that cultural borrowing should be unacceptable in music is anathema to my sensibilities; I don’t want to live in a world where Dave Brubeck and Bill Evans weren’t allowed to play jazz.  As Picasso said, poor artists borrow; great artists steal.  Music is no exception, and without that (often cross-cultural) borrowing of musical tropes, no creativity would be possible.  However, I can’t go as far as Tosches does. I can’t say the minstrel show was altogether a positive development, even if it’s musically relevant, even if it influenced much of American popular music. The reason why is the same as why I’ve come to accept Searle’s take on what it means to have artificial intelligence: intent matters.  Because the minstrel show was intended at its core to portray overt racism, because it was meant to put down blacks, it doesn’t matter how many black artists got their start there, or how good some of the music was. It’s still a disgusting institution that did more harm than good to American society.