This class began with the sad but painful truth: White people can not clap on beat. Eurotraditional music  typically features songs with emphasis on 1 and 3, while New World Beats feature emphasis on 2 and 4. According to the slides New World Beats also feature a third displaced beat and this swing beat has […]

This week’s topic focused heavily on the influence and presence of race in American music throughout history. Professor O’Malley stated that during the 1800’s and 1900’s, and I would argue even today, “American popular culture is strangely integrated in comparison to the distinctly segregated political atmosphere.” According to the lecture, the concept of the Minstrel […]

This week we discussed Claude Shannon and his concerns with how we maintain quality of sound, and that information does not regard the “meaning” of the message as to deliver it more effectively. The latter argument can be supported by redundancy in the English language, which has been gradually degraded in the modern age through […]