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.