Zip codes are something that everyone has I’ve never really thought about what a zip code is. In class, we talked about Johnson and how he did a study to see which cities were most likely to riot in the 1960s. He then used this idea for marketing and business purposes and started a company that correlated your zip code to everything you did from buying clothes, vacations, and many other things. He then sold this information to companies who wanted to know where to sell their products and market their goods.

Then I was able to sample a service based on Johnson’s concept of selling consumer’s zipcodes to businesses. It was interesting how they would break down the income leaves and the demographic in my area and how spot on everything was. A majority of my county is either empty nesters or newly married with a small child. The income level is fairly high and other zipcodes similar to mine are all located on the upper east coast.

I can see how a concept like this would make a big splash in the business and marketing world. Pretty much all of the music, clothes, and ADs we see on TV are specifically designed for our zip code population. I never thought about how I can connect with a lot of the ads I see when I’m shopping or on TV. Or even those ads that pop-up on the computer for stuff that I would totally buy. It looks so enticing because the marketing companies have picked those ads specifically for someone like me. It’s crazy how far technology has come and how we can’t even see some of the ways that it is affected our everyday lives.

I think I may have mentioned this in another post, but this is a question that Professor O’Malley brings up a lot: Who does the past belong to? When you think about your memories in the past of those road trips with friends with the music blaring and now whenever you hear that song it brings you back to that time. But does that memory really belong to you if the song belongs to someone else? The author of that song has the copyright to that song, they own that song and by making that song they created that memory for you didn’t they? Would the memory still be as impactful in your life if there had been no music? Or the memory or going to the drive-in movie theater and having your first kiss while the movie was playing so now that movie makes you think of that time. Is that really your memory? You wouldn’t have been the drive-in if there was no movie so the director of that movie really helped to create that memory.

So, in a world where pretty much everything is under copyright do we actually own any of the memories that we have? Does our past really belong to us or do we just think it does? It’s a complicated thing to grasp and is one of the most interesting questions that professor O’Malley has asked. It makes you think about all your memories and how many of them involved something that actually belongs to someone else due to copyright. And with everything that is under copyright would have things in our lives that sparked a memory as much as books, music, movies, and most forms of entertainment do in today’s society. It just boggles my mind!

In Stephen Whitt’s book How Music Got Free he talked the finding of Zwicker and how, “ … Zwicker had shown that the auditory system canceled out noise following a loud click.” I think that is super interesting because it all has to do with our human auditory systems. Our auditory systems are basically so focused on the loud click that it is all we focus on. For example, the same thing can happen in a movie theater. The movie will be the loudest sound in the room, but we are so focused on the baby crying the front row that we can no longer hear the movie, but solely the baby crying. It’s kind of like selective listening in my opinion and shows how A.D.D our minds are and that then translates to our auditory system.

In class, we watched a video about why our auditory systems cancel noise out when it comes after a loud click, but I didn’t completely understand that. The young guy in the video also mentions that we cancel out sounds directly before a loud click as well. Whitt also talks about that in his book stating, “Fourth—and this is where it gets weird—Zwicker had shown that the auditory system also canceled out noise prior to a loud click.” And he is right this is freaky to me! How do my brain and my ears know that a loud click is coming????? Why do my ears just decide to stop working right before a loud click, that makes no sense! It just adds to the list of things that I don’t understand about the human body.

Wikipedia has always been given a bad reputation by every professor I have ever had. I love that you encourage us to use Wikipedia because I have always thought it was a good source. Wikipedia is the epidemy of crowdsourcing! It’s putting everyone’s brains together and creating excellent information about almost anything you could think of. The whole concept of this source is that people are only going to add information to the pages that they have knowledge and passion for. This eliminates people from the putting random information into pages just because they can. However, when this does happen then there is someone who is reviewing all the edits that are made to every page to make sure that it is relevant.

The concept of Wikipedia is the same as the Free Software movement by Richard Stallman. There were 4 freedoms of the software:

1. The freedom to run the software for any purpose
2. The freedom to redistribute copies
3. The freedom to study how the software works and make changes to improve the software
4. The freedom to improve the software and release the improvements to the public

This brings back up the concept of public domain and making everything available to everyone. This is a great idea in theory, but as mentioned in another post, our society today is all about capital gain and getting the reward for our work. So, in today’s world, we are more about silo-ing data and only allowing it to be distributed if someone pays for it.

Today’s conversation about copyrighting I really enjoyed. It is something that we see all the time but we never pay a lot of attention too. We also never really think about it means. I found it fascinating how the length of copyright ownership increased in length to 50 years are more. This gave the authors of the work more time to make money off of the work that they had put so much time an effort into.

But thinking of it in terms of music in today’s society a lot of artists are not getting the recognition for their work because people are playing their songs in public and not paying the artists for the use of their lyrics or notes. What DJ’s do is illegal! I kept thinking about how in modern times and trying to save money on wedding expenses many people have turned to just creating a wedding playlist and using that for all the music that will be played during their wedding…..again illegal!

But then came the question as to why things should be copyrighted and not free for public use? Why not just allow everything to be part of the public domain so that everyone can evaluate and expand upon each other’s research and songs and help make them even better? In a Eutopia, yes this idea of everything being public domain would be ideal. However, we are a capitalist society and we want to make money on the things that we put our time into.

When searching for the earliest reference it would found that it was first referenced in the 1980s. But when searching in the historical newspapers for the phrase “hip hop” what turns up is all about medication for hip disease and pills for the pain. But I was able to find a cartoon from the Washington Post in 1922 which was before the time that the genre of music hip hop was created. In the cartoon, the phrase hip hop is used as gibberish to depict someone speaking Chinese as a person is trying to talk into this new telephone type device that can supposedly talk to China. The cartoon is called “The American Flyer” Railroad. It looks to be a very comic cartoon clip about the new railroad systems and the telephone lines that are being built.

I find it interesting that the phrase hip-hop was used as gibberish at this time because gibberish is kind of like scat. Scat, in my opinion, could be a kind of hip-hop because it was just making sounds to music rather than actual words so I think it was appropriate.

Today in class professor talked about when he was a grad-students at a museum and was working when a new exhibit was opening about Japanese camps during WW2 I believe he said. When all these Japanese people came into the museum to see this new exhibit and they were furious when the saw the representation of the barracks that the museum claimed the Japanese lived in. The museum had created a very picturesque version of the barracks when in reality they barracks did not have a nice view of the mountains but of barbed wire and machine gun towers. This story made me think of something that my mom said this week. My parents went to the new movie I can Only Imagine which is about the life of the lead vocalist for MercyMe Bart Millard. My dad makes that comment that the movie isn’t actually in the chronological order of Millard’s life. My mom’s response was that none of our lives are movie worthy the way they actually happened. To be movie worthy out lives would need to be rearranged and exaggerated.

This is so true in today’s world. Just like the barracks which were re-envisioned for the public so are the “true story” movies that come out in theaters. This probably happens to a lot of the relics in museums so what is real? Is our vision of what history is the actual facts or just a juiced up story to get more donation or money?

My background tends to be different from most. I was adopted at six weeks old into a white family. I was the second child to be adopted into this family and both my older adoptive sister and I were biracial, half black and half white. This racial mixture led to a lot of uncomfortable situation growing up being because we looked black and our parents were both white. I struggled with an identity crisis in middle school trying to figure out if I was white or if I was black because I never really fit in with either crowd. I remember volunteering at an inner-city summer camp and all the kids were around 6 years old and they were all black. One day for lunch they were having collard greens, which is something that I had never had before. So, when I tried them and did not like them the first question that these 6 years-olds asked me was,” Were you raised by white people?” This seemed like a strange question to ask, but I learned that collards greens are an African American culture thing. Since I did not like them or know what they were even these little kids could tell I was not raised in a black culture.

So if I’m biracial which culture do I belong to? That was the question that I tried to answer for so many years. One of the largest issues that I was found was in the types of music I listened to. My parents are Christians and always listened to a lot of Christian music in the car when I was growing up. They also liked the listen to country music so of course, those were the genres of music that I started listening to. However, when people started telling me that it was weird that I listened to county music because black people listen to rap music I switched to listening to rap. But it wasn’t for me in the long run. This segregation in the genres of music is the main point in Segregation of Sounds by Miller. He brings up the point that different genres of music were categorized based on peoples race. For example, hip-hop and rap or black music and country and pop are white music.

These stereotypes of music and culture did not help me to find out who I was really was. So as I grew older I learned that I don’t fit into a mold or a stereotype. I have raised my white parents, I talk white (which is apparently is just being able to use propertEnglishsh), my clothing choices are a mix of both white and black,  and my music playlist is a mix of everything. I no longer let stereotypes that society has conjured up over time define who I am because I am not white and I am not black, I am both. I guess that kind of makes me a rebel but I think it just makes me, me

Ever since I learned about time displacement of time I think it is such interesting topic becuause there are thousands of examples of displacment throught history. The funny thing is that no one really thinks about. For example, during the black and white migrations during the early 1900s records were a type of time displacement. I mean think about any kind of recording of music it allows anyone from any time the means to be able to listen to the songs/songs at their own free will. Gone are the days of having to go to the opera house and listen to a live performance. In today’s busy world we would find that very inconvenient.

However, during this time when records were being made so was the line between white and black musicians. Record labels were segregated and the genre of music was too. White artists were known for singing hillbilly music. They would dress up in overalls and sings about some random things that did not make all that much sense. There were also different norms between white artist and black artists. For example, Cowboy Copas in his song Filipino Baby basically talked about the love of his life but only in terms of individual body parts, which sounds creepy. But there were many sounds about by white male artists singing about their minority colored lovers but if it was unheard of for a black male artist to sing about his white lover. It most likely would not have ended very well if a black musician had because of all the racial tension during this time period.

I feel like most people have heard about the migration of people from the rural South up North to the big urban cities. However, I don’t think I really ever put two and two together that around that same time is when Jim Crow laws were created to try to prevent African American’s from doing a lot the same things that white people were doing. The white people were trying to disenfranchising the black population very openly.

With this migration of African Americans out of the south, there was new kind of culture because of the change in geography. This also lead to a change in music…….sort of. With many blacks looking to make it big in the big city whites took advantage and tried to make some money off of the innocent. Blacks where signed to record companies and some were told what lyrics to sing. But the ironic this is that most of the lyrics were about moving back down south….which made no sense, but it was sung to a southern folk tune that the new African Americans that had just moved from the South could connect to. Then as the market started to change these new artists would completely change their genre of music to something like jazz because the authenticity of a singer was dependent on the market and what people wanted to hear.

I just found it so interesting how an artist who was a folk singer in the South could just switch to singing jazz. But the more they continued to change from genre to genre the more credible they were because they never got left behind with the changing taste in music. Also, it’s surprising how famous some of the artists became after all the restriction in where their records could be sold because society tried as hard as they could to keep black culture in the black population and only the black culture. All because of Jim Crow laws, but the irony in Jim Crow is he is a minstrel character who is a white man posing as a black man.