During last class we focused on the Great Migration and how that affected music preferences in America, and so this class we focused on white migration, namely during the early 1900’s and with a boom during the Great Depression. They moved into cities for better economic opportunities, and like with the Great Migration, brought with them a nostalgia for the positive elements of country life they had left behind. There were multiple levels of displacement with the style of Country music that evolved from this situation; first of all in the theme of some of our earlier discussions, records themselves were a displacement of time and space as pictures and railways were. When a record was recorded, it was a moment in time and space that would never happen again being preserved forever. Country music was understood at the time as Country people looking forward to the advantages of their new city lives, combined with a nostalgia for their old way of life, something that artists such as Hank Williams tapped into. Most of his songs were about people coming from a slower, country way of life dealing with situations they find themselves in while living in the city. Another slightly earlier artist named Jimmy Rogers, considered to be the first country music star, capitalized on this trend in a more obvious way; in his recorded performances he dressed up in rough country clothes with a country backdrop behind him. For country music stars of both that era and today, and really in any sort of music, there is a pressure to fit a certain image or idea that certain artists should dress a certain way, and if they don’t then they are not “authentic” enough for audiences.

One of the main points we talked about this class was The Great Migration, and how the changing social and racial structure of America changed and affected music in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Because of the influx of African Americans who had formerly lived in the country to major cities like Chicago, the style of music heard in those places changed. Unfortunately the Great Migration was a not a happy one, but was born out of a need for African American families to flee the south for their safety, and to escape monstrous injustices. Jim Crow laws disenfranchised and discriminated against African American people, starting mostly in the 1880’s and 90’s, and escalating quickly into violent lynchings and torture. One of the things that I found especially sick about the whole process is that postcards of the lynching were sold afterwards, and people who attended would send them to their family members like it was just a fun day out with the family. It honestly horrified me. And the fact that it only stopped when the NAACP started reprinting the postcards in their magazines and the audience changed from a white audience to an outraged African American audience is also extremely troubling. Anyway, the Great Migration lead to a nostalgia for the familiar country life in cities, and so country and folk artists came into demand. Sold as “Southern” records to both white and black people living in the cities, they were a way for artists to integrate behind the scenes without being in the public eye. I thought this was interesting, that black and white artists could collaborate on a record, but the same artist couldn’t perform together in public.

One of the big topics we started to get into this class is the relation between music and race relations in the US. The first thing we looked at was the difference between the beat structures of New World music with European origins, which emphasizes the 1 and 3 count, and Afro influenced music which emphasizes the 2 and 4 count. This was something I had never realized before, but could definitely recognize when I thought about it and watched the examples in class, and I had the same reaction when it was pointed out that songs by traditional black artists tend to have a lagging beat when compared to white artists. This lagging beat gives the song a more sensual, relaxed, and laid-back feel that a lot of white artists can’t achieve with their energetic, fast-paced leading beat. There was also a weird displacement thing going on between the entertainment production companies and black and white artists, for example Louis Prima was an Italian American man who grew up in New Orleans and was influenced by the music style of the predominantly black artists who lived there. He made a name for himself as a white artist who imitated “black style” and when Disney was producing their animated film The Jungle Book, they cast Prima as a pseudo-Louis Armstrong character, King Louis the Ape. The association with a black artist being portrayed as an Ape in a popular and respected film of the time is bad enough, but the fact that it isn’t even a black artist playing the character is just an example of so many weird levels of displacement in the industry at the time, and the lingering white fascination for what they view as black culture.

This class we moved away from our previous discussions of computers and those sorts of technologies and started to focus more on the political and social implications of music. One of the main examples of this that we discussed were minstrel shows, and how they represented both blatant racism and a fascination for “black culture”. Humans have always been fascinated by what we deem as “boundary transgressing animals”, or people/creatures that do not fit into the categories that we as a society have come up with. One of the concepts that stuck with me this class is the idea that “pop culture is weird, politics is very segregated.” Which is something that I never realized, and I thought it was weird when it was first brought up, until I thought about it more and realized that in every example I can think of, political change has been brought about because of social change, not he other war around. Action happens in the political sphere because the citizens of the nation fight for it, I can’t think of any policy enacted that did not a first have a majority of the people behind it. Except maybe prohibition but we fixed that fairly quickly. The idea that the minstrel shows of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were anything but a racist caricature of black culture used to propagate negative stereotypes of the black community had never occurred to me. I mean they still are terrible racist caricatures, but the fact that in a historical sense, they illustrate a fascination with black people and black culture that I had never realized was in society at the time. That white people could make and pass laws limiting the basic human rights of black people, lynch them, and then the next day be entertained by a show claiming to portray black culture is fascinating in its hypocrisy to me.

The industrial production boom that started during WW2 gave us our first electric computer near the tail end of the war in 1944. Where we had had analog computer based on gears for years, this was the first example of a computing technology based  on electric signals, and it was created for use by the military sector to help calculate missile trajectories. This was significant as it was the first large-scale use of the technology of converting numbers into electrical signals and vice versa, forever changing the computing industry and turning the process into one people couldn’t see, unlike with gears. And while WW2 may have sparked military computing interests, we can thank the Cold War for many of the modern innovations we take advantage of today when we use our personal computers. The internet, for example, was formed out of a need for physicists and scientists to be able to communicate quickly and effectively with one another when it came to developing weapons technology. I think its very interesting and even a little sad how much military spending influences our technology, I never knew that so much our daily technologies were brought about because we were afraid of what another country might do to us, which I think says a lot about us as people, that we really aren’t willing to invest a significant amount of resources into a project unless it has some sort of potential military benefit.

One of the main concepts we focused on this class is the signal to noise ratio. The definition of signal is “a gesture, action, or sound that is used to convey information or instructions, typically by prearrangement between the parties concerned.” and the definition of noise isa sound, especially one that is loud or unpleasant or that causes disturbance.” according to Merriam-Webster. Basically, signal is the meaning of what you want to hear in a message, and noise is anything you’re not intending to hear. It can be electrical interference in a message, ads on a website, the sound of children yelling or an annoying roommate talking too loudly on the phone. I’d never known those definitions of the words so I found that interesting, as well as our discussion on Claude Shannon. Even though I didn’t entirely understand everything going on during that discussion, I still found it fascinating and a little disturbing that Shannon’s assertion that all computing can be solved through a series of “yes or no” questions. It’s odd to think of all the complicated technology being as simple as that.

We started the class with the understanding that modern computing and computers arose from the technology created from the pressures of the Cold War. We spent a massive amount of military money at this time on manpower, new forms of weapons technology, and weapon systems, which had never been done before. I was surprised to learn that an important part of the US military history is that before WW2, the policy of the country was that there should be no standing army, and that in a time of war America would mobilize and demobilize its army quickly. Between the increased demand for military technology and the advanced information management systems that lead to modern computing, most of our current technology arose from systems and ideas created by men such as Meigs, Weber, and Babbage. This leads to a  question we discussed  when we read Carr’s book The Shallows, do our minds adapt to the new technology we create, or is this technology simply an outward expression of how our minds already work? I’m inclined to believe it’s a little bit of both. Carr laments the days when we weren’t on the internet or our phones all the time, complaining that it has made us unable to focus on one thing at once, bit since when has multitasking been a negative thing? Using myself as an example, I oftentimes do something productive, like knitting, while I catch up on my favorite shows, and I do believe because of the technology I grew up with I’m able to divide my attention this way. My mind would become bored with doing just the knitting, just as I would become bored trying to write an essay I wasn’t particularly interested in, and so I play some classical music so I can still concentrate on my task and my mind doesn’t wander. I believe instead of the simple answer of whether technology influences the mind or if the mind influences technology cannot really be answered, but it instead cyclical. Yes technology alters our minds as we grow, and then those people create new technologies when they are adults, which influences a new generation who goes on to create better and faster systems, and so on and so forth.