Josh McNeill

Author: Josh (Page 11 of 19)

I'm currently a PhD candidate in sociolinguistics at the University of Georgia.

Je suis actuellement candidat de doctorat en sociolinguistique à l'University of Georgia.

Nationalistic international opera.

February 22, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I went to the New Orleans Opera to see The Barber of Seville this past fall and one thing in particular struck me: we sang the national anthem before the performance began.

I’ve never been to the New Orleans Opera, in fact I’ve only been to The Met once and the San Francisco Opera once, even though I’ve seen over a hundred operas on video. (They’re just too damn expensive for my poor soul and I’d rather dish out the money only if it’s a new opera, a rare creature these days.) At the other two performances, the national anthem was not played, though, and I assume it normally isn’t. I don’t know why, but it struck me as a bit odd to use it for such a European art form. I mean, we were all there to see an Italian opera. Nationalism is nothing new to opera, but I don’t think it’s ever been done in this way. It usually involves developing a style distinct from that of the operas composed in other countries, or simply using the language of one’s own country.

This might not be obvious to people who don’t listen to opera, but it was historically not composed in one’s native language. Italians had such a stranglehold on the form for so long that Mozart, for instance, wrote most of his operas to Italian language librettos, even if they were premiered in Vienna. It makes me wonder what audiences did to cope back then. Today, if you go to see an opera, you’ll be given supertitles somewhere so you can still understand what the singers are saying but I don’t think this technology existed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This almost seems like it could explain why opera librettos are often so ridiculously bad: no one really cared about the story. For instance, Anthony Tommasini, writing about seeing Renata Tebaldi performing La Bohème in his youth says:

I had only the vaguest idea of what the opera was about. But listening to her uncannily sumptuous singing, I was overcome with indefinable feelings of longing, sadness, bliss and loss.

Before supertitles, people could enjoy opera purely for the music. Maybe this is part of the reason composers always get top billing in operas while the librettists are often so overlooked that only hardcore fans even know who they are. By contrast, musicals often give equal billing to the composer and the the writer (just look at Rodgers and Hammerstein or even teams that put together psuedo-musicals like Arthur and Sullivan). The difference between musicals and operas here is musicals are usually adapted to the language of their audience. Les Misérables was originally in French but it’s known in England and the US in English. In fact, it’s known in a number of languages as is made obvious by this special performance:

To my understanding, translation of operas is extremely rare, although The Met has begun doing it for works like Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The difficulty lies in how intertwined the words and music become in opera, as attested to in the linked to New York Times article. Translations of writing are difficult enough, let alone singing. There’s also the issue of how absurdly conservative opera audiences are (attested by the fact that there are many many opera houses who put on season after season of works all dated before 1900).

The extent to which this is about nationalism might be questionable, though. The premier of Wagner’s Lohengrin in Italy was actually performed in Italian, for instance. Of all people, Wagner, the pillar and effective founder of German opera, was performed in Italian while he was still alive. I’m fairly certain that he approved and wanted this to happen more often, too. I can’t find it now but I recall a tweet by @CosimaWagner that claimed Wagner expected his operas to be translated. Yet, Wagner was about as nationalistic as composers come.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I think my whole point is that this is simply an unusual way of asserting one’s nationality. I understand it for baseball games, it would even make sense to me if they were performing an American opera, but it’s just an unusual coupling with Rossini. Although this wouldn’t be the first time the United States National Anthem has found its way into an opera. I’ll leave you with American music in Italian by Giacomo Puccini, sung beautifully by a Swede:

Boys have penises, girls have vaginas.

February 8, 2013 / / 4 Comments

Apparently, CocoRosie discovered Antony Hegarty long before I did. Besides possessing a unique and powerful voice, Hegarty is widely known for being transgender. This term, in itself, is rather confusing. In Hegarty’s case, he’s biologically male and seems to have no intention of changing that but many people (or at least that’s my impression) who consider themselves transgender have a desire to change their biological sex. This has always been odd to me but not due to the reasons people tend to find it odd (disgust, mainly) but because it’s difficult for me to understand why someone who doesn’t believe in the confines of gender labels would have such strong feelings about what their genitalia looks like.

The basic idea, for those who don’t have friends steeped in human sexuality studies, is that sex is what you’re biologically born with, meaning which genitalia you have, but gender is defined by your culture and, I suppose, the role you play when interacting with others in your culture. For instance, maybe you’re born with a female genitalia but all your interests and mannerisms fit into the mold of the prototypical male in your culture. Your sex may be female, but your gender could then be considered male.

This is exactly what’s interesting to me about sex changes, though. If the hypothetical person I’m speaking of feels their gender is male, they may choose to make their sex match their gender. Why make such an extreme change when gender is simply an ephemeral quality anyway? This sounds strange, to me, because you could become part of a different culture and find that your gender suddenly matches your sex without physically changing anything. For instance, Conrad Phillip Kottak claims that in Brazil transsexuals (at least, biological males who live as females) are seen essentially the same as biological females that identify as female (Anthropology, 13th ed.). In fact, I recently had a conversation with a guy whose part Brazilian (close enough that he visits occasionally and speaks Portuguese) and he claimed that cheap “female” prostitutes in Brazil are often biologically male and yet their clients are often heterosexual males (in gender and biology) that simply don’t care about the genitalia of the prostitute. It seems that someone from my culture in the US, for instance, who is born with the sex of a female but identifies as male would be completely accepted as is in Brazil. Maybe this has something to do with why Hegarty doesn’t feel a need to change his sex either, because he may have become involved in a subculture that accepts his sex/gender combination as perfectly normal.

I guess, in a way, this is a discrepancy in definition. It’s actually difficult to write about this topic because I feel like I have to constantly specify if I’m talking about sex or gender because we link these two so closely that there aren’t separate words for male sex and male gender, etc (that I know of). It’s so confusing to me that I don’t even know what someone means when they say they feel as if they were born as a male in a female’s body, a description I’ve read a lot when learning about sex changes. Does this really mean anything when talking about such a transient idea? It’s like there’s some sort of psuedo-Whorfian thing going on here where even transgender people end up with confused ideas because of the terminology available to them. If your culture uses the same terms when speaking about gender and sex, are you more likely to want a sex change when your sex and gender don’t match up with cultural expectations? I bet there are studies on this that I will never have enough time to read so anyone in the know should comment and clear the matter up.

Update: Coincidentally, today my Japanese professor asked us what gender/sex we’d want to be reincarnated as. We’re gonna have a discussion next week; maybe I’ll post about it.

How models work.

February 1, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I was reading this article a couple weeks ago and seeing yet another prediction of sea level rise that goes beyond IPCC expectations reminded me of my family. Well, mainly my dad and my cousin-in-law, who both asserted their denial of climate change to me a couple years ago based on the idea that models are completely meaningless. I didn’t know as much about how models are put together at the time as I’ve never needed to know, so I understand what their confusion was about (although I was particularly shocked about my cousin-in-law as I’ve always seen him as a really smart dude [not that my dad’s stupid, but he’s not really into science]).

So their idea was that scientific models are like like model airplanes, essentially. They’re just programs that someone puts together with whatever information they and constraints that they want and some nutjobs take it as fact. They could put anything they want in these models, they just get tailored to whatever outcome these “scientists” want to see. If this were the case, clearly, models would suck. Scientific models are not model airplanes, though.

Scientific modeling involves taking two or more known pieces of information, first of all, and drawing a line between them. This idea was best impressed upon me when I took an astronomy class (I don’t even know if linguistics really uses modeling; maybe historical linguistics? Someone tell me). Models are constantly used in astronomy, particularly cosmology, because it involves changes over enormous amounts of time and areas that stretch enormous distances in every direction. So basically, an astronomer can take a point in the past which is widely understood, documented, and even observed (ya know looking into space is looking back in time, right?), then take a point closer to the present that is equally understood, documented, and observed, and attempt to figure out how to get from one point to the other. This involves building a model filled with theories that could possibly explain how this change occurred. That’s the model airplane part of this, in a way, but even the steps taken so far involve known information that’s difficult to debate and usually theories that have be refined over long periods of time. The next step is what makes scientific models much different from model airplanes, though: every bit of observed information that can be obtained that falls between the two end points of this model get injected into the model to see if it still works.

Imagine you’re doing a connect-the-dots puzzle and there are all sorts of ways you can connect some of these dots but when you try out some of the paths you end up skipping over dots that you need to include so you know that path wasn’t the way to go. It’s just like that. The dots are all the empirically understood bits of information and the lines you draw are the theories that you hope explain the relationships between these dots. So, when a climate expert predicts that the ice on Greenland is melting very quickly and they base this on a model they created, that means it’s also based on mounds of empirical evidence that was injected into that model to ensure that it’s as accurate as possible. These things are never perfect, as no science is perfect, but they’re far from being the same as the hobby your weird uncle partakes in.

There could actually be a linguistic issue involved in this whole misunderstanding. To laymen, “model” involves designs and, possibly, a sense of creativity. Science, on the other hand, I’d wager doesn’t evoke the idea of creativity for most people at all (it is creative, though, they just like to test their creative ideas afterward). What you end up with is something that appears to be trying to prove how a complex system works using painting. Maybe this is also an instance of nerdview, where the disparity between the needs of those involved in a field to refer to complex ideas quickly and easily and the needs of your average Joe who doesn’t know what those complex ideas are to begin with is just exceptionally great. Have you ever tried to read a peer-reviewed study on the minutiae of a subject you’ve never really studied before? It’s difficult. Every two sentences or so usually require a trip to Wikipedia to keep up. For the researchers involved, though, they need these technical terms to avoid having to use extremely long descriptions of phenomena that all their peers should be aware of anyway. Maybe the failure with “model,” in this case, is that they chose a rather common word. It could help to call this something stranger, maybe a connectogram… or something.

This difference in needs also reminds me of the Japanese kanji debate that I’ve written about before. It’s all about the target audience I guess.

Prosody and Janacek.

January 25, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I posted a long time ago about a study that tried to apply both linguistic analysis and musical analysis to the composer Leos Janacek’s notations of speech melodies. Janacek transcribed the speech of those around him for some 30 years at a time when prosody in speech was barely even considered by linguists. The field itself was still relatively young at the time and it seems that prosody is one aspect of phonetics that is still poorly understood today.

Initially, this interested me greatly as the intersections of music and linguistics are what I plan on focusing my studies on, but half way through reading the study I was sort of wishing it would just end. The thing is, this wasn’t so much as a scientific study as it was a whimsical look at Janacek’s pet habit. Occasionally, Jonathan Secora Pearl, the author, compares what Janacek notated to how the phrase in question might actually be said based on our modern understanding of Czech prosody, but more often then not he simply describes what was notated. These descriptions are complete with tonal analyses as if they were literally musical scores in A minor, or whatever.

What was more troubling was that, even though Pearl acknowledged multiple times that we have no recordings of what Janacek heard to determine the accuracy of the transcriptions, he still attempts to draw conclusions. At one point, he describes an oddly placed rest in the middle of a phrase, stating that this could actually happen but would be very difficult to notice. This was meant to be some sort of remark on Janacek’s keen ear but, really, we don’t know what Janacek was actually notating. Even if he wrote down something that was in every way possible and even common, we don’t know if notated the phrase accurately or just coincidentally notated something that’s possible.

The paper reads as if the author is desperately searching for ways to connect music and linguistics via Janacek’s speech melodies but, ultimately, none of his attempts make any sense specifically because there’s no way to be certain of the accuracy of the transcriptions. Maybe my expectations were too high because I also would’ve liked to connect the two fields but it seems this is the wrong way to go about it.

I’m still hopeful, though. My own attempt at analyzing speech through software was fairly eye opening. One thing I’ve done is taken my own speech and converted the first three formants of all the vowels into musical pitches to create chords. The results were pretty dissonant for the most part, or simply full of octaves. I was hoping they would align with chords found on tonal harmony in a fairly regular way but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Of course, I also used an equal tempered tuning system for reference, which is probably not the best way to do this. I’ll be reworking the comparison using just intonation soon enough to see if the results are still the same and, either way, I think I might just make some music out of the chords I do get. Because, ya know, why not?

No one is ever the bad guy.

January 18, 2013 / / 0 Comments

… From their perspective that is. I was having a back and forth with a friend about various political/historical junk and it got into the merits or lack of for using the atomic bombs during World War II. I’ve always been under the assumption that they ended the war but he pointed me to a source that doubted that theory. The discussion kinda moved me away from being secure in my assumption but the alternative theory still wasn’t as convincing. In any case, the conversation ended with him talking about how he loves history because it changes and how it would be interesting to look into textbooks from other countries to see how slanted their descriptions of the same events are.

So I recently went to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, just because it seems like I should at least visit all the tourist sites in the city while living here. I didn’t actually have any particular interest in it but it turned out to be a propos to the conversation I had with my friend.

There was a large section devoted to racist propaganda between the Japanese and Americans. For instance, there was this comic which was from the New York Times:

New York Times comic during WWII

I’m glad this sort of material was available because reflection on this sort of thing in hindsight seems like one of the most beneficial aspects of such a museum. I’m not personally as interested in what kind of guns were used as I am in what the social climate was at the time. What was a bit frustrating was their attempt to place equal claims of racism on both sides. Certainly, there was racism in Japan at the time but their example of such was the following:

Anti-American manga during WWII

It’s really hard to draw comparisons between the two. The first seems to be promoting extermination of a lower race while the other seems to be saying the people we’re at war with are mean. Should we really be claiming that the Japanese were just as racist as Americans at the time? They did terrible things to prisoners, sure, but we probably did, too. But such actions are not necessarily based on racism so it seems more appropriate to go by what we find in their media to determine the level of racism, which is notably weaker than American racism judging by these images. Let’s not kid ourselves about this; it does no one any good.

Speaking of doing terrible things to prisoners, also absent was any mention of Japanese-American internment camps whatsoever. I don’t know why we have such trouble talking about this subject in the US. We did it, it was terrible, we admitted that when reparations were authorized in the 80s, yet I still don’t remember being taught about this part of our history at all during my high school years in the 90s. And you would think the one place where this could be openly discussed would be a museum dedicated to the war. What better forum could there be for bringing this out in the open? Instead, there was one newspaper clip that gave directions to Japanese-Americans to go to a specific location on a specific date and that was it. The clip didn’t say what they were going there for and never used the word “internment.” There was also no caption explaining what the clip was a reference to. It’s like we’re willing to hint at the idea that we did something bad but no more than that.

This isn’t completely off-topic, however. Part of what I love about learning other languages is that it almost forces you to learn about other cultures and in a more direct way than just reading about them in your native language. For instance, one of my Spanish classes at City College of San Francisco spent one day a week where someone in the class would present a topic involving the country we were learning about at the time. This almost always turned into sort of guilt-ridden sessions about the evils of US activity in other countries but there was good reason for this: there was truth to it. And this was almost always buoyed by my Chilean professor who seemed to have a pretty robust knowledge of the history of all of Latin America. In fact, I really wanted to ask her personally why she came to the US because I later learned about how the US supported the takeover of her government by a pretty brutal dictator.

I never did work up the nerve to ask, but this is something I could only really get an inside perspective on by speaking the language. Likewise, my Spanish professor last semester was Cuban and even spent some time being locked up for his religious beliefs. I really wanted to ask him questions about Cuba but couldn’t work up the nerve either, unfortunately. But even the possibility of having that conversation is very unlikely to occur in monolingual situations. I even enjoy reading Wikipedia articles in both Spanish and English to see what changes from the other perspective. It’s interesting, to say the least.

Now that I’m learning Japanese, it will again be very tempting to ask my professor about her perspective on things like WWII. Maybe this time I’ll actually work up the nerve to take advantage of such an opportunity.

But anyway, for clarification for anyone who didn’t realize it: the US rounded up Japanese-Americans during WWII, especially on the west coast, and sent them to camps that they weren’t allowed to leave. Their property and possessions were often sold, etc. It was a pretty terrible thing and it happened.

(Sorta) new chamber piece.

January 12, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Today I tracked down another piece I did last Spring for school. This was supposed to be under the theme of “world music,” which for me just meant using a few Japanese instruments and employing a pentatonic scale. I’m never really satisfied just trying to mimic a style that already exists. Most people in my class composed straight Latin music or bossa nova or something along those lines. I like making statements so I tried to warp something that starts out sounding very traditional into something else entirely. There was a point in doing this that involved my perspective on Japan’s history as well as just how I was feeling at the time, but I won’t say more than that because I’d rather the music stand on its own.

I wasn’t even gonna post this for the longest time because I was dissatisfied with the synth sounds but I’ve come to the conclusion that I will probably never get around to fixing it up so keep in mind that the whole thing is rather rough and rushed. It’s No 4 in the Doodles for Chambers section of the music section (or just click on No 4 [to the left]).

You are where you speak.

January 11, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Continuing with posting papers I’ve done for school, here’s what I did for my phonetics class:

The Distance Between Acadiana and Cape May

This might be of more interest to my relatives than anyone else, really. I’ve taken out any reference to personal names since I didn’t get direct permission to publish this info but it’ll be obvious to those in the know.

I wish I had more time to devote to this paper but it took up probably more than 100 hours of work during the semester. There are definitely a lot of weaknesses in the analysis given that it’s the first thorough phonetic analysis I’ve ever done but I’m pretty satisfied with it given the constraints I did it under.

Also, I doubt I have anyone familiar with linguistic jargon (or even audio jargon) reading this blog so, if you’re actually taking the time to read the paper, you should totally ask about anything that’s not clear.

Meeting yourself.

January 4, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I was just trying to figure out where a particular song I was working on last year for school went so I could finish it up and I came across something with the filename “New.” “That can’t be true,” I thought. So I opened it up and found something I wrote, uh, I don’t know when. The whole thing was very mysterious. I listened to it and thought, “This person has good taste,” and decided it would be worth sharing.

But seriously, it’s kinda strange coming across work you’ve forgotten that you’ve done. I looked at the notes that I had put down–and there are many–and I can’t figure out how I decided to put just those notes down. I don’t even know what I was trying to accomplish because there wasn’t so much as a single dynamic marking let alone a title or tempo indication. It was just a bunch of notes on a page that played something sorta familiar and comforting but also strangely alien. There was probably one day when putting that music together consumed all my time and energy and focus and now it’s just this thing I discovered.

It’s No 16 in the music section (or just click on No 16 [to the left]).

The cost of art.

January 4, 2013 / / 1 Comment

The Chris Bennett posted recently about an argument he had with Jim McCann on Twitter. They spent an hour or two bitching about each other over the merits of purchasing comics versus downloading them for free without permission. Chris, who at least arguably could be called an aspiring comic book artist himself, was surprisingly arguing against the former. His argument seemed to be mostly based on the cost while Jim’s argument was that it takes a good amount of cash even to just put out digital comics.

To me, Jim’s claim seems pretty unlikely to be true. I can’t speak personally about the cost of creating digital comics but I can speak of the cost of creating digital music. The cost there is $0. Ok, that’s an exaggeration but it’s also almost the literal truth. In my case, for instance, I’ve purchased equipment over the years that allows me to record whatever I want. Let’s go over what’s necessary on that list.

  • A half-decent computer: This is something most people own now anyway as it’s used for, I dunno, everything one might need to do in life. But, in the unlikely case that this isn’t already owned, you can get a fully capable laptop for $379. The only requirement, really, is 2GB of RAM and a USB 2.0 or Firewire port. You can certainly get even cheaper if you find something refurbished or just look a little longer.
  • An audio interface: This is what gets sound into your computer. The interface I use is discontinued but there are plenty of others out there, like this Tascam US-1800 that I found pretty easily. It’s $300 and has more inputs/preamps than you could ever need outside of recording an orchestra. It also includes pro-quality DAW software (Cubase).
  • DAW software: This is where you do all your work on the computer. Like I said, this was included with the interface I picked out. If not, you can get the acclaimed DAW Reaper. And it’s $60 unless you’re making quite a bit of money off your work, in which case it’s still only $225.
  • Microphones: This can cover a pretty huge range of costs but you can really get away with only using SM57s if you’re careful with mic placement. Eight of these, more than you could ever need outside of recording an orchestra, are $810.
  • Speakers: You can get away with using your regular computer speakers that you bought for $25 but, to be fair, let’s add decent studio monitors to the cost. You can get M-Audio AV30s for $100 and they have a frequency response plenty flat enough to use for mixing.
  • Cables, mic stands, etc.: All these accessories can add up, sure, but if you can get by pretty cheap. For instance, I make my own XLR cables and you can get 100 ft for $50. I’m positive you can do this part for less than $400.

Outside of these costs, you may want to add in instruments, if you’re doing that kind of music to begin with (the above gets a lot cheaper if you’re only doing electronic music) but this is the cost of being a musician period, not of recording and distributing music, so I’m leaving that out. As for distribution, torrents mean you don’t need to pay for bandwidth. You can also use sites like Bandcamp which not only give you a free way to distribute and sell your work (for free), it also provides methods for promotion. Then there’s promotion. Really, this can be done for free in the age of viral videos and internet memes. When was the last time you learned about a song by listening to 101.5 The Lame? You don’t need to be on the radio or TV anymore; those are antiquated forms of publicity.

So that’s it. $2214 max to create professional quality music, distribute it, and publicize it. And that’s a one time cost to boot. After that, you’re home free.

Certainly, there are materials that one needs to repeatedly restock if they’re an oil painter, for instance, but if we’re limiting ourselves to digital art, this factor is completely erased and the only cost is the initial cost of purchasing equipment, which has been getting cheaper by the day as technology has gotten more powerful and widespread.

I get the impression that what people really mean when they say that it costs a lot to create digital art is that their time costs a lot. That’s it. I mean I get it, artists want to live off their art because it allows them to focus exclusively on creating and, potentially, create better things. This is a different argument than what’s usually made, though. I’m totally open to a debate on whether art should be a hobby that one does outside of their day job or whether art should be the domain of professional creators. That sounds like a fair conversation. What is ridiculous to me is the idea that artists need to make money off everything they create because the costs of doing the work that they do are just so great that they couldn’t continue without financial support. That sounds like bullshit to me.

And for anyone who’s interested in the hobby versus job debate, let’s not be unrealistic about where financial support should come from. Check my previous post on that matter.

The Japanese writing system is difficult.

December 28, 2012 / / 4 Comments

At least one person, at some point, on Facebook, expressed interest in the research papers I was working on for my classes at Tulane University. Here’s one:

Efficiency Through Inefficiency

One of my classes was The History of Writing. It was all about writing systems and, since I was concurrently learning Japanese, I figured it’d be a great opportunity to create some synergy in my studies and research the Japanese writing system (I initially wanted to do something on the orthography of death metal logos but after a few days of digging I was able to find all of one paragraph that mentioned anything useful on the subject [if anyone can point me to some actual research, I would still like to do this]).

In particular, I’m very interested in the pros and cons of the Japanese writing system and the debate over reforms. I think a lot of this was spurred on by posts on Language Log by Victor Mair, who is an expert on Chinese. He posts about problems with the Chinese writing system fairly often, such as here, here, and here, and they tend to cross-over with Japanese. I sorta got into some arguments in the comments of the last two, the latter with Professor Mair himself who, in my opinion, seems strangely ethnocentric when it comes to this topic.

The paper I wrote ended up focusing on reforms from the Meiji Era (roughly the late 19th century) as reforms in all aspects of society was a big issue during that time. Much of the attempts at reforms then give insight into the debates that still go on today in that area.

And if you’re wondering about the title, because I don’t think I explained it explicitly in the paper, it’s a reference to the difference between the needs of the learner and the user. Japanese writing is monumentally difficult for someone still learning it but extremely efficient and expressive for those who already know it. This plays out a lot in reform debates.

Also, this isn’t meant to be particularly scholarly, as I was just learning myself as I went along, but I think it’s a good overview on the topic.

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