Josh McNeill

Author: Josh (Page 13 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.

How 6 seconds grows.

December 4, 2011 / / 0 Comments

This explanation of how a 6 second drum break from a little-known 1969 song can spawn innumerable sounds and subcultures is quite beautiful. I really couldn’t hope do a better job of explaining how sampling and technology have redefined the potential for musical expression so here it goes:

I’m really glad that the creator of the video inserted all the issues with copyrighting at the end, too. Imagine how different music might be if The Winstons had sued every artist that wanted to use their music right from the beginning. We seem to have moved closer and closer toward that being the norm and it’s a shame. Who knows how many remarkable uses of samples have been stifled by stringent copyright laws.

Also, it strikes me that this is essentially the opposite of what I’m doing with my one year project. Whereas this simple 6 second drum break has been manipulated to create innumerable musical expressions, expanding it endlessly, my idea is to take an enormous amount of recorded sound and stuff it into one small, digestible package. Actually, I would love to see someone take a snippet of my end product and expand it out again. It could be as if the music is alive, inhaling and exhaling.

There’s a piece by Steve Reich called Proverb which puts the phrase, “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!”, to music and expands on that. I just like the piece, and the quote (from Ludwig Wittgenstein), and thought it seemed in the same vein as the video above, even though it’s classical music.

This has really turned into more of a miscellaneous post than a post about sampling. Oh well. Here’s the Reich piece:

Noiseless concerts.

November 24, 2011 / / 0 Comments

This morning I came across this post on Alex Ross’s blog about a recent skirmish at a London Philharmonic concert of Bruckner’s 4th symphony. Norman Lebrecht, while giving more in depth coverage of the incident, attracted the attention of the instigator, one Alex Verney-Elliott, whose response was posted on Lebrecht’s blog.

Mr. Verney-Elliott, apparently, got up in the middle of the 4th movement and called the performance “rubbish” before storming off, as the YouTube clip on Mr. Ross’s blog shows. I listened and, honestly, it’s barely audible. I understand that unwrapping a piece of gum at a classical performance can sometimes be loud enough to be distracting, due to the lack of amplification and extreme dynamics of the music, but this doesn’t seem to be the case here. What’s more, wasn’t this a common occurence in past eras? Don’t misunderstand me, like some commenters, I think Mr. Verney-Elliott probably should have waited until the end of the performance to “boo”, but mid-performance outbursts have not always been so frowned upon (I’m fairly certain this pertains even to “booing”, which I believe I’ve read about happening at opera houses in Rossini’s day on Greg Sandow’s blog). Essentially, outbursts are an extremely effective way of calling attention the perceived competence level of performers. Of course, the drawback is that those making the noise could be an extreme minority, as Mr Verney-Elliott seems to be.

In any case, the responses are interesting. Calls for “banning” Mr. Verney-Elliott seem ridiculous. While admittedly not going quite this far, it’s almost as if other concert-goers are against having people in the audience who won’t reliably clap at the end, regardless of how they feel about the performance. That’s unfortunate. How often do bad performances receive bad ovations? Or no ovations? Or “booing”? Perhaps Mr. Verney-Elliott was at one end of the politeness-spectrum in this case but it seems to me that the vast majority of listeners are at the other of this spectrum where they aren’t even willing to tell a performer that they sucked. How can things improve in that atmosphere? Critics can pan performances but they’re not necessarily the voice of the people.

So maybe Mr. Verney-Elliott went too far, but I think it only appears to be an extreme actions because of the culture surrounding classical music performances. As one commenter stated, this heckler should maybe have been at a rock or jazz concert where such actions are acceptable. Therein lies the crux of why your average music lover is way more likely to do just that.

The race card, you know, like the joker.

October 19, 2011 / / 0 Comments

This morning, as I was waiting for class to start, this white guy in my class starts talking to me about a disruptive fellow that sits near him that happens to be black. Now, I haven’t really noticed a problem up to this point but I do sit on the other side of the room. What really struck me is when he said something to the extent of: “Like, what’s this guy’s deal, right? I almost wanna play the race card. I mean, I don’t want to but I dunno.”

What the hell does that even mean and why does this guy I’ve never talked to feel so comfortable using this racist speech with me? Are black people naturally more disruptive than white people or something? I was a bit shocked, flabbergasted even. A moment later he was mentioning how he’s an honor student.

I can only imagine that he had no idea how racist he sounded or realized it immediately after and didn’t even want to bring it up again even just to correct himself. In any case, it’s stored for posterity on my recorder now, probably as one of those moments when someone simply does not listen to themselves.

So it goes.

October 17, 2011 / / 0 Comments

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Here lies the last two hard drives I’ll need to finish recording a year of my life.

My roommate mentioned to me the other day how it didn’t seem like I had been doing this for almost a year. It hasn’t seemed like that long to me either; it’s behind just part of my routine. Wake up, change the batteries, download yesterday to my computer while I shower, transfer data from the computer to hard drives while I eat breakfast, format, record.

I think I’m gonna feel a bit naked when this recorder is no longer in my pocket; it’ll be like walking around without a cell phone. But all things must end I suppose and make way for new beginnings. In this case, the new beginning is facing what I’ve gotten myself into by trying to organize and convert 12 terabytes of sounds from the last year into music.

Manga + laughter = …music?

October 9, 2011 / / 0 Comments

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It’s hard to tell which is more strangely humorous: this anime/manga image of a character laughing or the guy I recorded repeatedly laughing out loud on the bus while reading a manga. In any case, I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself regardless of the fact that I had no idea what the joke was.

This got me thinking, what the hell makes laughter alone so funny? Maybe it’s just the situation that the laughter occurs in. This nerd was laughing in a public place, by himself, over something many people wouldn’t even admit to reading. That’s humorous to me. Then again, I know certain people who make anything that’s already funny ten times funnier with their laughter.

There must be some scientific literature on laughter that could shed some light on this, right? Bill Nye or some other “scientist” who’s supposed to be funny has probably done a whole series of experiments to decipher the effects of laughter. Nope. The science guy seems to have failed me. I did end up reading a bit about how you can seemingly understand someone’s emotional state by their voice even if you don’t know their language, though. (If you’re interested, see: Cross-Cultural Recognition of Basic Emotions Through Nonverbal Vocalizations, Sauter et al.; Recognizing Emotions in a Foreign Language, Pell et al.; Vocal Emotion Recognition Across Disparate Cultures, Bryant, Barrett.)

In any case, I’m hoping that I can use laughter as a compositional device. If the rhythm is the culprit, I can use that maybe to create false expectations and then resolutions. Even if not, it will at least be highly useful for creating rhythms in general. Just think of how many crazy laughs I’ve recorded that can be turned into a frightening army of stupid.

All Art is Theft: Theory of a Deadman vs Our Lady Peace

September 22, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I listen to a lot of music. A lot of disparate music. And sometimes I come across similarities that I never would have expected. Then I get excited–a rare occurrence for me–and go hunting the interwebs to find out what the deal is. Some jackass with a blog out there must have noticed this as well, right? Nope. I’m almost always let down, left dejected and isolated. So I thought, “I could be that jackass with a blog!”

In the spirit of the idea, I’m stealing a tag that I linked to in another post about stealing music and art and all that jazz. This strikes me as an idea hard to argue with. Of course art is theft. Artists aren’t reinventing the wheel every time they create something; there’s always a certain amount of borrowing going on. With that in mind, I’ll say that I generally think accusations of musical plagiarism are ridiculous. What I’d really like to accomplish here is to have some random internet music nerd e-mail me with: “Hey I noticed that too! Yeah it probably means nothin’.” It’s the small things that count.

This is one that I’ve heard a bagillion times but only picked up on recently:

Yeah, that’s a terrible song. BUT, the guitar intro is markedly similar to the beginning of Our Lady Peace’s Superman’s Dead:

Both song start with a solo guitar strumming Bbm-Db-Ab, with the Our Lady Peace song adding a B to the end of the progression instead of sitting on the Ab for two bars. Both are in 4/4. The strum pattern for both is essentially the same. Even the beats per minute for both tunes is similar: ~84 for Theory of a Deadman and ~92 for Our Lady Peace. Both of these bands have even tuned their instruments down a half-step.

Of course, none of this is super-amazing. Theory of a Deadman may actually be familiar with Our Lady Peace but they could have just as easily picked up this stuff from any rock band from 1990 onward. It’s just a slight variation to a ii-V-I progression–probably the most used progression in western music ever–that replaces the V chord with a IV chord. Although, Our Lady Peace throws in that B which is not super-common. I can’t even explain where that comes from or why it works, theoretically, off the top of my head. It might be the IV/IV/IV, which doesn’t seem likely, or they’re simply modulating to F# when they play the Bbm and B–even though they never play the I chord in F#. This seems more likely as the song doesn’t have a clear tonal center to me; it seems fairly modal. Maybe that’s why I actually like this song also. They’re spicing it up a bit, throwing subtle curveballs and whatnot.

In any case, all the elements mentioned are pretty common in rock music. I think the thing that made my ears perk up a bit was the fact that they all came together at once.

If anyone has suggestions, feel free to send ’em my way. I’d love to do these quick song analyses on a regular basis.

Don’t speak to me in that tone and/or melody.

September 16, 2011 / / 1 Comment

Leos Janacek was the early 20th century version of Charles Spearin–check out The Happiness Project if you’re not familiar with it already–according to Jonathan Secora Pearl in his article titled Eavesdropping with a Master: Leos Janacek and the Music of Speech. Janacek apparently transcribed the speech of those around him into regular music notation. I did not know this, despite him being one of my favorite composers. I also didn’t expect to come across this information on Language Log, a linguistics blog.

Mark Liberman’s take on it seems to be that Janacek was simply fooling himself into thinking that speech contains discrete pitches as opposed to continuous slides, citing pitch-tracking software and Joshua Steele–whose 1775 essay related to the subject is awesomely available in full on Google Books. My hope is that he wasn’t naive but was simply trying to create a rough approximation of what he heard in speech. Afterall, Janacek was no scientist–notwithstanding his work in ethnomusicology. And music notation is only an approximation of actual music just as writing is an approximation of spoken language, if I’m not mistaken.

In any case, I’ll be reading through Steele’s essay and Pearl’s article as this seems to be combining all my favorite things. I’m anxious to find out just how much these transcriptions affected Janacek’s music as I’ve thought about incorporating this sort of thing into my own music–and I certainly have a large enough database of speech recordings to get started with.

I’m in your classrooms, stealing your musics.

September 5, 2011 / / 1 Comment

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Last week I recorded everyone in my composition class playing melodies they composed. I can now rock the music world with the mostly amateur sounds I have officially stolen.

Of course, whatever I produce from my recordings is going to be freely available so I’m pretty sure it will fall under fair use terms but there’s reason to believe that this classification isn’t always obvious–some awesome person tagged Jay Maisel’s building over this by the way. Luckily, it’s pretty unlikely that any college students are going to recognize a heavily modified version of an exercise they did years prior and then feel the need to sue me over it.

This does seem to fall into an odd category. I know I’m allowed to record what happens in a classroom as private conversation, legally, does not occur there, but how does this work when we’re talking about performances in a classroom? Hell, what about performances in general? I admit, I haven’t looked into this, but maybe I should.

In fact, if I were doing this right, I would have consulted a lawyer right from the beginning. It seems ridiculous to do so, though, so I didn’t. Eat that penal system! I suppose I’ll just have to wait until someone goes all Sita Sings the Blues on me.

Your secrets might be safe with me.

August 24, 2011 / / 0 Comments

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I recently got a text that asked if I was still recording and my initial thought was, “Music? Other people’s music? My own?” Hours later I realized the question was likely about the recorder that’s in my pocket 24 hours a day.

I’m not the only one who forgets, though. I have conversations all the time that probably wouldn’t happen if the person thought about it. This is good for the project, good for my potential career as a blackmailer of poor people, maybe not so good for people who confide in me. Don’t worry, I won’t put anything about that growth on your foot in my songs.

Imma walkin’ paradox.

August 23, 2011 / / 0 Comments

“I’m not trying to be sexist but guys can go whenever they want while girls gotta finish up early.”

This was the conversation I picked up today between two guys outside of City College. Interpret it however you like but what they were talking about starting college late. There were numerous other contradictions spoken (ie. “Yeah, no more partying for me; I’ve been taking school seriously. I’ll talk to you later though, I’m already late for class.”) but this is the one that caught my attention because it has the potential to do the most damage.

When people start sentences off with this type of disclaimer, it almost always seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. This guy may have thought that he pre-emptively cleared himself of accusations of sexism but he still said something sexist. It makes me wonder how often this is used by people who are too naive to realize what they’re saying and how often it’s used to preface something that can honestly be taken multiple ways without context. I guess I’ll find out.

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