Music; The Modern Day Transformer
After being sick, temporarily forgetting my blog password, and being swamped with projects in every single one of my other classes, I am back with a post to blow your socks off. Here’s my review of the last few weeks.
I’ve decided that Claude Shannon was way too abstract of a thinker, and am still trying to decide his best addition to society. I mean, we did get pretty far thanks to him, but I can’t help but think about how he believes information and meaning are two different things. I can’t understand how one thinks that way. Isn’t meaning made from information?
We also talked about Funk music in class. I always found it to be a funny name. but never quite understood it as a genre. I must say, Professor O’Malley believes hip hop has more bounce and swing in it, but I believe you can’t get any more “all-over-the-place” than funk. It’s the kind of music that makes me tap my feet or snap along to the beat and that’s the bounciest music you can get. It is so interesting though to hear how funk music is sampled. I think about how today, so many artists are making money off of singing covers of other artists’ songs, and during the age of funk, that was so popular! Sampling is such a neat idea.
It’s fun to see how it’s been transformed too, such as the guitar lick sound. It might be taken from one song to another, but because it is such a simple “move,” it’s hardly recognizable as the same thing.
In the most recent class, we talked about the frequency or changes of pitch in music, but also about instruments such as electric organs and keyboards which can take sounds, change them into different sounds, and again, totally transform a song/bit of music. It’s gotten my so excited to think about my Final Project in creating a song for this class.
This is why, over the last few weeks, all I can do is compare music to a transformer. It can go from an everyday thing to something completely different/new. Music is awesome.