Miles Runs The Voodoo Down

Registration for spring classes starts next week, and as I was perusing this Polcolonial Musicology course and other related tutorials, I came across the fascinating Dr Henkjan Honing.  Daniel Levitin mentions Honing’s research in his book, but Honing himself articulates the subject much better:

Watch this video.

I may try to sneak into a few lectures for Honing’s Music Cognition course next semester!

Gimme Shelter

The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

At The Archive’s webpage, Paul Mawhinney highlights the scope and impact of the collection, writing:

If you started listening to the music in this collection on the day you were born, and listened every minute of every day, by the time you finished, you’d be 57 years old. That’s a lot of music. And it’s a lot of history.

Agreed.  Make one wonder how a place of higher education, like Miami University, can drop millions into expansion and construction, but apparently can’t consider the historic preservation of this music collection and the enrichment it would bring to the public.  In my head, I keep returning to what Mawhinney said in the documentary about how the Library of Congress had assessed that of Mawhinney’s recordings from 1948 through 1966 only 17 per cent of that music is available to the public currently.  Incredible.  That means, roughly, that 83 of every 100 songs recorded in those twenty years isn’t/can’t be listened to anymore.  In a discursive sense, it illuminates how the vast majority of those chords, harmonies, rhythms, expressions, behaviors and opinions committed to record–and given quite a chance to circulate–never make it in the end.  What facet of life did they reflect and reveal, narrate and question?  For Americans, just like our appetite for the easy, lifeless mp3, our sonic genealogies are compressed, reduced, and commodified.

A larger, HD video is also available here at director Sean Dunne’s site.

Ego Tripping At the Gates of Hell

More gems from the minds of mad musicians at LP Cover Lover.

D.A.N.C.E.

I just found out this morning I was accepted to the Cultural Analysis research master’s program at the Universiteit van Amsterdam!  It’s been two years since I was last in Amsterdam, and I’ve been trying to get back there ever since; now I’ll be living there for the next two years!

So what is Cultural Analysis and why the heck am I going to the Netherlands for grad school?  Well the program is an incredibly interdisciplinary adventure that studies and creates inquiries into several phenomena surrounding the production and circulation of contemporary culture using objects and artifacts (in the broadest sense) as a point of departure.  More specifically, the faculty encourages students to

analyze cultural phenomena – such as social systems of belief and value, works of art and literature, film and the new media – and their conceptual underpinnings as well as their aesthetic and social-material structures. We emphasize textual, visual and historical details and also the implied normativity and the ways in which identity, difference and otherness are negotiated across the various media.

Eanie Meany

Obscure Sound posted about Jim Noir yesterday!  It’s a great write-up and the streaming songs included are making me itchy for 8 April when Noir’s new LP is released!

And Liz: that Facebook music player is annoying as fuck.  I recommend using Songza–it’s fast and able to extract audio from Youtube, so you can find some really obscure recordings easily.  Just a heads up for ya’ll.

Moonage Daydream

The Music Illusion

Five sweet auditory illusions from New Scientist.  Fun times, I got stung by them!

New Scientist magazine this month is running an excellent series on music and (obviously) the science behind it.  Fascinating stuff, really.  The cover story (‘The Music Illusion’) is penned by Daniel Levitin–a long-time music producer who’s worked with some of the greatest rock acts since the 70s (including Dylan and The Band).  His article is a distilled version of his awesome book ‘This Is Your Brain On Music,’ which I’m currently finishing.  He now approaches music, having worked in the producing and mixing field for years, as an academic, and more specifically, an evolutionary psychologist (read Wired’s related story from last year here).  And man, he get into the nitty-gritty of not just ‘music’ as a cultural production, but how individual pitch vibrations are intercepted by the ear and distributed throughout the brain, giving rise to emotions and behavior.

By better understanding what music is and where it comes from, we may be able to better understand our motives, fears, desires, memories, and even communication in the broadest sense.  Is music listening more along the lines of eating when you’re hungry, and thus, satisfying an urge?  Or is it more like seeing a beautiful sunset or getting a backrub, which triggers sensory pleasure systems in the brain?… This is the story of how brains and music co-evolved–what music can teach us about the brain, what the brain can teach us about music, and what both can teach us about ourselves.

Good eats, guys.  Check it out.

Also, after talking with a political science professor friend of mine Monday, she suggested I read some George Lipsitz.  He’s a professor of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz (as well as being part of the Black Studies faculty at UC Santa Barbara) and last year published ‘Footsteps In The Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music.’  I just scored the book yesterday, but so far, it’s an amazing collection of the genealogies and migratory patterns of the musical influences heard in many bands and genres.  I approached with caution because I’m aware Lipsitz’s framework is based on essentialisms of cultures (actually, ‘anti-essentialisms’, but it rallies the same origins of the arguments, hence giving them a passive credence), but I’m definitely impressed by his sonic mapping skills thus far.  A gem in the first section of the book about boy bands:

Of course there are plenty of reasons to dislike boy bands.  Every aspect of their identities–from the physical features of group members to the songs they sing to the answers they give in interviews–is scripted and carefully coordinated on the basis of market research.  They are never original, innovative, or unpredictable.  In their stage personas and song lyrics, the boy bands succeed because they hint at the provocation of erotic desire only to contain it by presenting themselves ultimately as adolescent, innocent, wholesome, and cute, simply longing for longing rather than for love or lust.  Their celebrity status seems to reduce the dignity of their fans, enlisting them as spectators and admirers of boys they do not know, apparently for the simple reason that other girls have focused on the band members as objects of desire.

As opposed to, say, musicians.  My sentiments exactly.  Wow, so two of the three posts on this blog so far have bitched about crappy consumerist record labels (thanks Jive)… I promise more love in the future!