It’s nice to get a reminder of the subjects we discussed earlier in the semester, even if those subjects are hard for me to grasp. Then again, repetition can be good for remembering and understanding something if you didn’t get it the first time.

Speaking of which, we started today’s class with a reminder of beats. We listened to some James Brown music. “He hit it on the one,” Professor O’Malley said. It was something I didn’t really notice until he pointed out. Along with that, he showed us a Bob Marley song to illustrate the reverse, where the music hit every beat except the first one.

“Africa is a big place,” Professor O’Malley said, “It has a large and beautiful musical heritage.”

We then discussed the issue that was the focal point of Carr’s book, mainly how the digital media grabs our attention. Professor O’Malley explained that this class was meant to teach us the digital tools that are available to us, to help us understand the origin of music that inspired these digital tools in the first place.

With the topic on digital tools, the class moved on to the digital scavenger hunt and what we managed to find about our terms. Turns out that most of the terms could be discovered as early as the 19^th century, but they didn’t really become focused until the 20^th century. It also lead to an interesting topic in terms of disco and punk rock

Actually, I think the disco discussion interested me more. I’ve never really given disco much thought, as I believe that it was a genre that fell out of style by the 1980’s, but Professor O’Malley gave more insight in how disco was viewed. It was actually associated with homosexuals and African-Americans, and was disliked by white people. I’ve never really taken time to consider the impact disco had, but as Professor O’Malley reminded us, politics tend to become involved in all genres of music, which I’ve definitely seen in a lot of songs that I have listened to.

We spent the rest of the class talking about echoes, and how echoes had an effect in the reality vs ideal argument. Echoes were used in churches by priests to give their sermons a magical feeling to their listeners. Having never been to a church before I didn’t really relate to that, but I can understand where Professor O’Malley was going with this. After explaining how a Harvard physics Professor named Wallace Sabine had discovered ways to manipulate the sound and echoes of a room, we learned that this rationalized echoes. There wasn’t really a magical explanation for it anymore.

I’ve never really given the magical quality of echoes much thought before, but that is an interesting concept. To have something that you take for granted be considered deeply important in the lives of other people is something of a way to realize how many factors make up the world around us.

We ended with a discussion of how the microphone impacted the media, mainly movies and recordings, and we were told that we would discuss copyright next class, which I am looking forward to.