1

3

UNIT 6

Readings and Resources

Readings and Resources

Textbook or eBook:

Campbell, M. (2019).  Popular music in America. 5th ed. Cengage Learning.

This unit discusses the changes in technology in the music industry and its influence on the development of electronica and rap. Additionally, it explores the new methods of processing and manipulating sound using digital technologies such as Music Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), Sampling and Streaming audio.

· Chapter 17: Electronica and Rap (pgs. 312-331)

Articles, Websites, and Videos:

What is electronica music? This site offers information concerning electronica music.

· What is electronica music? . (2017).   worldatlas. 

Rap music has articulated a black aesthetic that is influencing the pop culture around the world. But does it also promote violence, misogyny, and crime? This program featuring rap master Melle Mel describes the history of rap and hip-hop from its roots in earlier oral and musical traditions to its full flowering in the mid-1990s. Commentary by Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa, rap’s early innovators; music critic Nelson George, author of hiphopamerica; radical jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron; movie star and rapper Ice Cube; former gangsta rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg; members of Public Enemy, Arrested Development, and the jazz/hip-hop fusion group UFO; and others speak out about the urban African-American experience, civil rights, social responsibility, and other pressing topics. Clips from music videos provide a visual perspective on the genre. Some images and lyrics may be objectionable.

· Digital Classics Distribution. (2009, Mar 5).  West coast gangster rap . 

CH. 72

The Digital Revolution

72-1 Digital Audio

Digital audio introduced a fundamentally new and different process for the manipulation of sound. Electronic technologies convert sound waves into electrical signals, process the signals, then convert them back into sound. Digital technology adds an extra step: It encodes the waveform generated by the electrical signal into a binary format, then reverses the process for output. This encoding is accomplished by sampling the wave at regular intervals, with several possible gradations. On a standard compact disc (CD), the wave is sampled 44,100 times a second; there are 65,536 (16 × 16 × 16 × 16) possible gradations of the wave. This high sampling rate, coupled with the thousands of gradations, makes it possible to simulate the shape of the wave so closely that the original waveform and the digital sampling of it are virtually identical.

Digital audio fools our ears in much the same way that digital images fool our eyes. In introducing what Apple calls the “Retina Display” on the iPhone, Steve Jobs said, “there’s a magic number around 300 dpi (dots per inch), if you hold something about 10–12 inches away from your eye, it’s the limit of the human retina to distinguish pixels.” When magnified, what seems to be a smooth image a foot away is actually a grid of squares, each a single color or shade of gray. However, the size of each square is so small that our eyes are fooled into seeing color blends, curves, and other continuous images. In much the same way, our ears are fooled by digital sampling.

This ability to encode waveform data digitally has had several benefits. First, it eliminates signal degradation. In analog tape recording, there were inevitably some unwelcome sounds: One can hear tape hiss on predigital recordings that have not been remastered, or on cassette copies of recordings. The more a tape is copied, the more pronounced the extraneous sounds become. By contrast, digital information can be copied an infinite number of times, with no loss of audio quality, as anyone who has burned a CD or used a filesharing service knows.

Second, it became possible to maintain quality despite unlimited use. Previously, the quality of sound degraded over time because of the physical contact of a stylus with a record groove, or tape with the tape head. A recording played for the one-hundredth time on a turntable or cassette player will sound worse than the first time, no matter how much care is taken. This problem disappeared with digital audio.

Third, the high sampling rate has enabled those working with computer audio to isolate musical events with a precision that earlier generations could only dream about. Instead of shuttling a tape head back and forth to find the right starting point, those working in the digital domain can quickly identify and mark the beginning and end of a musical event. Once isolated, they can manipulate it at will—compressing or expanding it, changing its pitch higher or lower, changing its timbre, or enhancing it with special effects.

The  audio CD  required more than the ability to convert sound into digital data; it was also necessary to apply laser technology to encode data to and decode it from the storage medium (hence “burn” a CD). Research on the laser dates back to a 1958 paper by a physicist at Bell Labs. By the early seventies, lasers were being used to read digital data stored on discs. By 1980 Philips and Sony, two of the leaders in audio research, had agreed on a standard for CD audio: 16-bit sampling and a 44.1K sampling rate.

In 1984 the first CD pressing plant in the United States—in Terre Haute, Indiana—started producing CDs. The first CDs were expensive because the production process was seriously flawed; only a relatively small percentage of the CDs produced were good enough for release. As a result, the cost of a CD was high—higher than cassette or vinyl. Not surprisingly, given the nature of the music business, the cost of a CD remained higher than that of a cassette, even though production costs were soon much lower.

72-2bMIDI

Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or simply  MIDI , is an industry standard that allows electronic instruments to communicate with one another and with a computer. In theory, this seems like a natural and modest step. In practice, it was a tremendous breakthrough for two main reasons. First, it enabled a single person to simulate an orchestra, a rock band, or a swing band, using just one instrument. Using a MIDI-enabled electronic keyboard or other similarly configured device, musicians could choose from an array of MIDI-out sounds—usually no less than 128. They could perform the passage as if playing a piano or organ, but the sound coming out would be like a trumpet, or bells, or violins, or a host of others.

For just a few thousand dollars, anyone can create a home studio that can do just about anything that could have been done only in a million-dollar studio less than a generation ago.

Second, MIDI devices could interact with sequencers. A  sequencer  is a device that enables a person to assemble a sound file, track by track. Using a sequencer that can store eight tracks, a person can re-create the sound of a band: one track for the bass, another for the rhythm guitar, and so on.

Sequencers can also be used to create loops. A  loop  is a short sound file—such as a drum pattern or a bass line—that can be repeated and combined with other loops or freely created material to create a background for a song, whether it’s rap, pop, techno, house, or something else. To make this process easier, loops are usually a standard length: eight beats (two measures), sixteen beats (four measures), and so on. With these kinds of resources, assembling the rhythm track to a song can be like building with Lego. Users simply snap them into a track in their digital audio software.

72-2cSampling

A  sample  is a small sound file. (Please note that this meaning of sample is different from the sample of a waveform; the two meanings are related but different.) A sample can be the recorded sound of a voice or group of voices, an instrument (e.g., the Steinway grand piano) or group of instruments (such as a violin section), or some other sound. This sound can then be replayed through some other device. For instance, one can buy a disc with the sampled sound of several cellos playing every note on the usable range of the instrument, recorded in many different ways. Then the buyer can install it on a computer, activate it inside the appropriate software, and produce a passage that sounds like a recording of the cello section of a first-rate symphony orchestra.

Primitive forms of this technology have been available since the sixties. The first commercial “sampler” to achieve any kind of currency was the Mellotron. It was a keyboard instrument in which depressing a key would activate a looped tape of a string sound. It was not very flexible, but it was a cost-efficient alternative to hiring violinists. However, sampling didn’t really become practical until digital technology.

Now, sampling has reached such a level of sophistication that it is often impossible to determine whether a passage was recorded live or created using samples. In effect, this kind of sampling is a more advanced version of MIDI playback because the sounds are rendered more accurately.

Another primary kind of sampling involves lifting short excerpts from existing recordings to use in a new recording, much like a visual artist will use found objects to create a collage or assemblage. It has been a staple of rap background tracks since the technology became available in the mid-eighties.

72-2dComputer Audio

In 1965 Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, predicted that the number of transistors on a computer chip would double every couple of years. Moore’s Law, as it has been called, has largely held true. What this has meant is that the amount of computing power one can buy for $1,000 has doubled every eighteen months or so.

Because CD-quality digital audio requires over 1 million samples per second, the first personal computers could not handle audio processing in real time. Fast-forward to the turn of the century, though, and it’s a different story. One can burn CDs at … I hesitate to write a number here, because by the time you read this, the number will be out of date. Digital audio workstations, sequencers, special effects plug-ins, notation software—there is almost nothing in the process of creating and producing a recording that cannot be done on a computer equipped with the right software and peripherals.

72-2eThe Internet and Its Impact

The first attempts to create an Internet, or network of networks, date back to the seventies. By 1980, a protocol that enabled different networks to communicate with one another was in place. During its early years, the Internet was mainly under government supervision and control; the National Science Foundation managed it in the United States. However, in 1993, the Internet backbone was opened to the private sector in the United States, and Mosaic, the first browser, became available. (Mosaic became Netscape the following year.) Browsers simplified access to the Internet by providing a graphical user interface, similar to those found on Windows and Mac operating systems.

An iPhone 7 from 2016 has at least quadruple the RAM, a CPU that’s 10 times as fast, more storage, and a display with more pixels than an iMac from 2000. It fits in the palm of your hand and enables you to access the Internet from almost anywhere.

By 2000, the mechanics of the now-familiar Internet experience were in place. Since then, the pace of innovation and evolution has been breathtakingly fast and remarkably comprehensive. Driving this growth were astounding technological advances, in computing power, storage, portability, access, and more. By way of example, a current iPhone is a more powerful computer by far than an iMac a decade earlier.

Internet access and speed have grown at a comparable pace. Between 2000 and 2017, global Internet access grew 934%, an almost ten-fold increase. In 2000, less than 6 percent of the world’s population could go online; by March 2017, almost half have access, and in North America the ratio is 8 out of 9.

Numerous new businesses and services have leveraged these technological advances to open up all aspects of commence: as author Craig Anderson has discussed in depth, “free” is now an option. Consider the cumulative impact on the music industry of these developments:

· Napster: Napster went public in 1999 as a peer-to-peer filesharing application. By 2001, Shawn Fanning, its creator, had closed down the service after several artists sued the company. However, BitTorrent sites continue to make music available (illegally) for free. Legal and ethical issues aside, such peer-to-peer networks can function much like a greatly enhanced version of the preview clips on digital download sites such as iTunes and Amazon. They give enthusiastic listeners with more time than money the opportunity to sample a large body of music by a particular act before deciding whether to buy one or more albums.

· iTunes/iPod: iTunes appeared in 2001 as an application for organizing and playing back audio files on a Mac computer; the first iPod was introduced a few months later. The iTunes Music Store opened in April 2003, offering tracks from the top record companies and, somewhat later, numerous independent labels. In less than five years, the iTunes Store had become the number one music retailer in the United States; by late 2010, Apple had sold 10 billion tracks and by 2014, cumulative sales reached 35 billion. However, sales of digital downloads have been dropping precipitously with the rise of streaming services.

During the middle of the twentieth century, composers in Europe and the United States, using equipment as sophisticated as the first tape recorders and synthesizers, and as everyday as nuts and bolts, explored virgin musical territory. Shortly after World War II, French composer Pierre Schaeffer began creating music using recorded sounds, rather than musical ideas inside his head, as raw material. The recordings could be of any sounds at all, and they could be modified or transformed before being assembled into a music event. Schaeffer called this process  musique concrète  (“concrete music”).

Others—among them German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, French-American composer Edgard Varèse, and American composer John Cage—assembled compositions completely from synthesized sounds, recorded, then spliced together to form a complete composition. In 1958, Lejaren Hiller set up the first computer music studio at the University of Illinois. Among these new electronic works were the first examples of the recording as the creative document—with no performer involved in the creative process.

Much of this music was conceptual: It grew out of a particular idea that the composer wanted to explore. The results probed every possible extreme. American composer Milton Babbitt created works in which every musical parameter was regulated by a predetermined mathematical series, a process called total serialism. At the other end of the spectrum were works by John Cage, in which events were determined by chance. One famous work required the performer to sit in front of a piano without playing it for 4 minutes and 33 seconds; the composition was the ambient sounds in the performing space. Stockhausen composed a work for piano in which fragments of music were printed on an oversized score; the performer determined the sequence of the fragments during the performance. Varèse created Poème électronique, an electronic piece that mixes synthesized and concrète sounds, for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, where it played over 425 loudspeakers.

All of these concepts have found their way into the various electronica styles. For example, the loudspeaker setup for Poème électronique anticipates the “total immersion” sound systems of dance clubs. Stockhausen’s piano piece, where the performer switches arbitrarily from fragment to fragment, anticipates the DJ mixing on the fly. Musique concrète anticipates the found sounds that appear in so much electronica and related styles like rap. And totally electronic pieces anticipate the millions of synthesizer-generated dance tracks.

This isn’t to say that there’s a straightforward causal connection between mid-century avant-garde music and the electronica of the last 25 years. Rather, it should suggest three things. First, even the most esoteric ideas and concepts have a way of filtering down; in this case, they made it all the way to the underground—the club scene that has nurtured this music. Second, electronica could blossom only when the necessary equipment became accessible and affordable. Third, electronica involves more than simply making dance music on computers. Its most imaginative creators have radically altered or overturned conventional assumptions about music-making.

Ambient music , the first significant electronic style to emerge in popular music, dates back to the seventies. Its early history includes Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk, and Tangerine Dream. The father of ambient music, though, is Brian Eno; his recording Ambient I: Music for Airports (1978) is seminal. Eno’s early music, which shares common ground with the classical minimalist composers, was a bridge between the more esoteric world of classical electronic music and electronica in the popular tradition.

As its name suggests, ambient music is more atmospheric than dance oriented, with more attention to texture and less emphasis on rhythm. As a genre within electronica, it hasn’t had a home, but it has merged with both house and techno, introducing a more varied sound world into both. In these hybrid genres, it began to catch on in the late eighties and early nineties.

73-3 Music for Dancing, Places to Dance

The dance club is the home of electronica. The dance scene that has nurtured the music since the early eighties has been an underground continuation of disco. The songs produced by Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder were among the best and most successful examples of early electronica. In essence, there were people who still wanted to dance after disco declined in popularity. The club scene, and the music created for it, gave them the outlet.

During the eighties, two major club scenes emerged in the Midwest:  house music  in Chicago and  techno  in Detroit. Both would have a profound influence on dance music throughout the world. House music was a low-budget continuation of disco. DJs like Frankie Knuckles would use bare-bones rhythm tracks as part of mixes that included disco hits and current disco-inspired songs. The Detroit scene was almost exclusively the work of three friends and colleagues—Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson—who had known one another since junior high. Despite their Detroit base, they were drawn to techno pioneers like Kraftwerk rather than Motown acts. As Atkins said in an interview, “I’m probably more interested in Ford’s robots than in Berry Gordy’s music.” As DJs and producers, they delivered a stark, dark kind of dance music under numerous guises, including Atkins’s Model 500 and May’s Rhythim Is Rhythim.

A rave is a huge dance party conducted in a large space: outdoors, an abandoned warehouse, or even a large club.

By the mid-eighties, the music had migrated to Great Britain. The event that brought the music, the culture, and the drugs up from the underground and into the public eye was the 1988 “Summer of Love,” a rave that went on for weeks. A  rave  is a huge dance party conducted in a large space: outdoors, an abandoned warehouse, or even a large club. Ecstasy and other designer drugs were very much part of the scene; they suppressed the need to eat or sleep. (Never mind that the drugs are dangerous—even deadly—especially when consumed with alcohol.) Indoors or out, however, electronica offered a novel musical experience.

73-4 Mixes

Dance music has defined a new performance paradigm for popular music. The nature of the venue—the dance club, rather than the arena, auditorium, night club, or coffeehouse—has fundamentally altered what is performed, how it’s performed, how it’s created, and how it’s experienced.

The obvious difference, of course, is the use of recordings, rather than live musicians, to produce the music being heard. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t the spontaneity and performer–crowd interaction that can be part of a live performance; it’s just that it comes from a different source—the DJ—and it occurs mainly in the sequencing of tracks rather than within an individual song.

The idea of stringing together a series of songs has a long history in popular music. From the thirties on, dance orchestras and small dance combos would occasionally play a  medley , a group of songs connected by musical interludes. Often medleys were slow dance numbers; bands would play one chorus of each song rather than several choruses of one song. But they could be any tempo.

It was the DJ who transformed the practice of connecting songs into an art. A DJ with a two-turntable setup was able to mix a series of songs into a set, an unbroken string of songs.

During the early years of the rock era, medleys were harder to create in the moment, because the identity of a song was more comprehensive. More than just the melody and harmony, it included every aspect of the song as preserved on the recording. It was more difficult to alter songs so that one would flow easily into the next. Still, the idea of connecting songs did not disappear, as landmark albums such as Sgt. Pepper and The Dark Side of the Moon evidence. However, it wasn’t until disco that the idea of creating medleys resurfaced, in a much-updated form.

It was the DJ who transformed the practice of connecting songs into an art. A DJ with a two-turntable setup was able to  mix  a series of songs into a  set , an un

Collepals.com Plagiarism Free Papers

Are you looking for custom essay writing service or even dissertation writing services? Just request for our write my paper service, and we'll match you with the best essay writer in your subject! With an exceptional team of professional academic experts in a wide range of subjects, we can guarantee you an unrivaled quality of custom-written papers.

Get ZERO PLAGIARISM, HUMAN WRITTEN ESSAYS

Why Hire Collepals.com writers to do your paper?

Quality- We are experienced and have access to ample research materials.

We write plagiarism Free Content

Confidential- We never share or sell your personal information to third parties.

Support-Chat with us today! We are always waiting to answer all your questions.