LATimes | The exit of Young and Mitchell was enough to get Spotify Chief Executive Daniel Ek to release a lengthy statement
on Spotify’s “critical role to play in supporting creator expression
while balancing it with the safety of our users.” He didn’t mention
Rogan by name.
There’s a reason Billboard put Ek at No. 4 on its music business
Power List for 2022. The Stockholm company counts 381 million users,
including 172 million paying subscribers, in 184 countries, and in 2020
paid out $5 billion in music royalties, accounting for roughly 20% of
recorded music revenues that year.
Cutting off that profit
pipeline would be a big deal for artists and their labels. Young said
leaving Spotify would cost him 60% of his streaming earnings.
“Streaming
income, while by no means the whole income picture, is the key income
source now, and it’s driving the sky-high valuations that are allowing
some artists to sell off and then sail off into the sunset with a
yacht-load of cash,” said Bill Hochberg, a music industry lawyer in Los
Angeles.
Spotify’s power extends beyond the balance sheet. The
company, through its curated playlists such as RapCaviar, functions as
the equivalent of a Tower Records in its heyday, combined with the
biggest radio station conglomerates. Getting onto a popular Spotify
playlist is a supercharged version of getting onto a record store end
cap in the 1990s, exposing new artists to millions of listeners.
The
company’s status as a promotional tool is as important as its function
as a moneymaker through actual listening, and that helps touring bands
develop the fan bases that buy concert tickets.
Music rights are complicated
Even
when artists want to leave Spotify — and some do — it isn’t as simple
as pressing the skip button. The top musicians typically don’t have
direct relationships with streaming services; their music appears on the
app through licensing deals with their labels and publishers.
The
big labels — Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music — all have
licensing deals with Spotify, as do the indies through music rights
agency Merlin. Artists such as Mitchell have to go through their labels
to get their tunes off the platform.
Many artists don’t even own
their catalogs, creating additional difficulties. Top-tier songwriters
such as Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen have sold their songs and
recordings for nine-figure payouts. It’s unlikely the owners of those
catalogs would want to forgo Spotify’s streaming revenue after forking
over so much money in the hopes that streaming would make their
investments pay off.
theatlantic | Old songs now represent 70
percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from
MRC Data, a music-analytics firm. Those who make a living from new
music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—should
look at these figures with fear and trembling. But the news gets worse:
The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the
market is coming from old songs.
The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5 percent of total streams.
That rate was twice as high just three years ago. The mix of songs
actually purchased by consumers is even more tilted toward older music.
The current list of most-downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the
names of bands from the previous century, such as Creedence Clearwater
Revival and The Police.
I
encountered this phenomenon myself recently at a retail store, where
the youngster at the cash register was singing along with Sting on
“Message in a Bottle” (a hit from 1979) as it blasted on the radio. A
few days earlier, I had a similar experience at a local diner, where the
entire staff was under 30 but every song was more than 40 years old. I
asked my server: “Why are you playing this old music?” She looked at me
in surprise before answering: “Oh, I like these songs.”
Never
before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating
so little cultural impact. In fact, the audience seems to be embracing
the hits of decades past instead. Success was always short-lived in the
music business, but now even new songs that become bona fide hits can
pass unnoticed by much of the population.
Only
songs released in the past 18 months get classified as “new” in the MRC
database, so people could conceivably be listening to a lot of
two-year-old songs, rather than 60-year-old ones. But I doubt these old
playlists consist of songs from the year before last. Even if they did,
that fact would still represent a repudiation of the pop-culture
industry, which is almost entirely focused on what’s happening right now.
Every
week I hear from hundreds of publicists, record labels, band managers,
and other professionals who want to hype the newest new thing. Their
livelihoods depend on it. The entire business model of the music
industry is built on promoting new songs. As a music writer, I’m
expected to do the same, as are radio stations, retailers, DJs,
nightclub owners, editors, playlist curators, and everyone else with
skin in the game. Yet all the evidence indicates that few listeners are
paying attention.
Consider the recent reaction when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Perhaps I should say the lack
of reaction, because the cultural response was little more than a yawn.
I follow thousands of music professionals on social media, and I didn’t
encounter a single expression of annoyance or regret that the biggest
annual event in new music had been put on hold. That’s ominous.
Can
you imagine how angry fans would be if the Super Bowl or NBA Finals
were delayed? People would riot in the streets. But the Grammy Awards go
missing in action, and hardly anyone notices.
Use of these audio files requires good quality headphones or ear buds. The files are in .flac format for highest possible audio fidelity. Two .flac files per CD and 3 CD's per zip file except for the Experience Discovery zip file which also contains a detailed usage manual as well as most of the books referenced in the DoD Analysis and Assessment document. These .flac files should play with sufficiently high fidelity using any contemporary smartphone or PC audio player. They're zipped and average 900 MB per zip file except for Experience Discovery which is 2GB. They were created using 7zip.
academia | There is no question that something happened 11,000-12,000 years ago in Anatolia. By putting Archaeoacoustics into the mix, we may have an answer.
Researching a subject about prehistory that cannot be photographed or handled requires input from a wide range of disciplines combined with informed observation. Those of us working with Archaeoacoustics: the archaeology of sound in ancient ritual and ceremonial spaces, have always thought that the next step was a collection of on-site biofeedback. Happily, Neuroscience is now filling in the gap of knowledge about the psycho-physiological impact of certain resonant sound which is present in the world’s oldest monuments. Add that to new discoveries in Anatolia, and a solution for the “Sapient Paradox” practically leaps right out of the stone.
A paper published in 2008[iii] is recognized as the first official source indicating an effect on brain activity of sound in a specific frequency that has been measured in various megalithic enclosures. While a range of 90 to 130 Hz is the target area, this report cites abrupt changes at 110 Hz in a small group of volunteers. Thanks to the internet, this number has taken on a cultish following and prompted wild speculation about all the ways and places that 110 might be significant. This is the sort of stuff television shows are made of, but it is not grounded in science.
What has been scientifically detected is a “megalithic range” for highest resonance between 90 and 130 Hz in stone chambers, which has also been confirmed in Malta’s incomparable Hal Saflieni Hypogeum. An estimated 2000 tons of stone were removed to create this place, by the same people who built the megalithic temples above ground on the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Gozo. By virtue of being undetected underground until 1902, Hal Saflieni is still acoustically intact. We hear sound in there today exactly as it was heard by the folks who were using it 5000 years ago, and it can be hair-raising.[iv] Since its discovery, a sort of mythology has been built up about the way sound behaves in Hal Saflieni. Echoes that last as long as 13 seconds and sound waves that circle around the walls create a sonic atmosphere that is difficult to describe.
One chamber called the Oracle Room, functions as a giant resonator. There is a high carved out shelf curving around the dead end of the chamber that seems to serve no purpose but to channel sound waves. The remains of red ochre on the ceiling in this chamber are an intricate pattern of disks and curls that begin above a side compartment and spin out like some kind of prehistoric musical notation, stopping at the entrance portal that frames more finely carved halls beyond.
The side compartment was cut into the wall of the eggplant-shaped Oracle Room at face height. It has been said that a male voice speaking into this niche is heard throughout the three stories of the underground complex in a way that is far different from a female voice. There is a scientific explanation for it. Like Newgrange passage tomb and every other tested megalithic site, the range for standing wave resonance in Hal Saflieni is within the range of a bass baritone. Basically, it means that in Hal Saflieni, the echo of a deep voice is occurring at maximum strength in those pitches.
Actually the acoustics of Hal Saflieni are even more complex, with a second peak and loads of low frequency vibration that is beyond human hearing, although one might be able to feel it.[v][vi] Try to imagine standing in that space in the presence of sound in the range of that standing wave. It’s like being inside a giant bell. The air is vibrating; the walls and floors and ceilings are vibrating; the sound is swimming all around and can be felt in the tissues of the body. There can be a sort of buzzing in the ears that one sometimes gets when singing along with the radio in the car, when a pitch has been exactly matched. It’s mesmerizing. When it stops, this writer always wants to say “do it again.”
5,000 years ago, visitors to this site shared it with the bones of their ancestors which were kept here, treated with red ochre and placed into communal beds, as if they were planted in some sort of rebirth ritual. That would fit the ideology of the time. Workers in the space, even talking to each other, would have been exposed to the acoustic effects. Quite a bit of the architecture in Hal-Saflieni suggests features of our performance spaces today. Considered with artifacts recovered from this site, it is clear that something more than interment of the dead was going on in here.
It is difficult to imagine that human beings would let the potential a sound phenomenon such as that in Hal Saflieni go unexploited. If it’s impressive today, for people who have answers for everything. the thought of what they might have created in here thousands of years ago is extraordinary. Were they listening for the voices of the dead, or perhaps spirits of the earth? There would have been an aroma, as well as an echo, creating a very sensory and emotional experience. We now know that while the goosebumps were rising, dopamine was being released in their brains.
reuters | From love songs to dance tunes to lullabies, music made in disparate
cultures worldwide displays certain universal patterns, according to a
study by researchers who suggest a commonality in the way human minds
create music.
The study, published on Thursday, focused on musical recordings and
ethnographic records from 60 societies around the world including such
diverse cultures as the Highland Scots in Scotland, Nyangatom nomads in
Ethiopia, Mentawai rain forest dwellers in Indonesia, the Saramaka
descendants of African slaves in Suriname and Aranda hunter-gatherers in
Australia.
Music was broadly found to be associated with
behaviors including infant care, dance, love, healing, weddings,
funerals, warfare, processions and religious rituals.
The
researchers detected strong similarities in musical features across the
various cultures, according to Samuel Mehr, a Harvard University
research associate in psychology and the lead author of the study
published in the journal Science.
“The study gives credence to the idea that there is some sort of set
of governing rules for how human minds produce music worldwide. And
that’s something we could not really test until we had a lot of data
about music from many different cultures,” Mehr said.
Penn State
University anthropology professor Luke Glowacki, a study co-author, said
many ethnomusicologists have believed that the features in a given
piece of music are most heavily influenced by the culture from which the
music originates.
“We found something very different,” Glowacki
said. “Instead of music being primarily shaped by the culture it is
from, the social function of the piece of music influences its features
much more strongly.”
Well,
this episode has long been in the making. One of the hardest things I
ever went through, and most dancers will go through in my salsa, is
finding the beat in the music.
We all go through this problem,
and with this part 1 of a multiple part series, I will try to do my best
to help you practice on how to find the beat in salsa music. I will
play some songs, do some counting and hopefully give you some tips on
how to train your ear to listen and feel the clave of the salsa music.
soundtravels | We live in a vast ocean of sound, whose infinite waves ripple the
shores of our awareness in myriad patterns of intricate design and
immeasurably complex vibrations … permeating our bodies, our psyches, to
the very core of our being.
So begins the program, Of Sound Mind and Body: Music and Vibrational
Healing and so begins this whirlwind account, unveiling the mysteries of
sound. Perhaps because it is invisible, less attention has been paid to
this sea of sound constantly flowing around and through us than to the
denser objects with which we routinely interact. To those of us for whom
‘seeing is believing’, Cymatics, the science of wave phenomena, can be a
portal into this invisible world and its myriad effects on matter, mind
and emotions.
The long and illustrious lineage of scientific inquiry into the
physics of sound can be traced back to Pythagoras, but this article will
focus on more recent explorations into the effects that sound has upon
matter. However, a brief sum- mary of the last three centuries of
acoustic research will help to highlight a few of the pioneers who
blazed the trail so that Cymatics could emerge as a distinct discipline
in the 1950s.
READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE (PDF) - click this link (opens new window)
opentheory | I think all neuroscientists, all philosophers, all
psychologists, and all psychiatrists should basically drop whatever
they’re doing and learn Selen Atasoy’s “connectome-specific harmonic
wave” (CSHW) framework. It’s going to be the backbone of how we
understand the brain and mind in the future, and it’s basically where
predictive coding was in 2011, or where blockchain was in 2009. Which is
to say, it’s destined for great things and this is a really good time to get into it.
I described CSHW in my last post as:
Selen Atasoy’s Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves (CSHW) is
a new method for interpreting neuroimaging which (unlike conventional
approaches) may plausibly measure things directly relevant to
phenomenology. Essentially, it’s a method for combining fMRI/DTI/MRI to
calculate a brain’s intrinsic ‘eigenvalues’, or the neural frequencies
which naturally resonate in a given brain, as well as the way the brain
is currently distributing energy (periodic neural activity) between
these eigenvalues.
This post is going to talk a little more about how CSHW
works, why it’s so powerful, and what sorts of things we could use it
for.
CSHW: the basics
All periodic systems have natural modes— frequencies they
‘like’ to resonate at. A tuning fork is a very simple example of this:
regardless of how it’s hit, most of the vibration energy quickly
collapses to one frequency- the natural resonant frequency of the fork.
All musical instruments work on this principle; when you
change the fingering on a trumpet or flute, you’re changing the natural
resonances of the instrument.
CSHW’s big insight is that brains have these natural resonances too,
although they differ slightly from brain to brain. And instead of some
external musician choosing which notes (natural resonances) to play, the
brain sort of ‘tunes itself,’ based on internal dynamics, external
stimuli, and context.
The beauty of CSHW is that it’s a quantitative model, not
just loose metaphor: neural activation and inhibition travel as an
oscillating wave with a characteristic wave propagation pattern, which
we can reasonably estimate, and the substrate in which they propagate is
the the brain’s connectome (map of neural connections), which we can
also reasonably estimate.
theoccidentalobserver |It
is unfortunate, to say the least, that Black hip-hop scholarship never
mentions the elephant in the room: Jewish control of the music industry.
If hip-hop is, indeed, ethno-politics set to music, if hip-hop has
taken the place of the civil rights movement in the hearts and minds of
Black youth, it is impossible to ignore the historic Black-Jewish
alliance against WASPs. For much of the twentieth century, that
alliance was a constituent element in what Black nationalist Harold
Cruse called the “fateful triangular tension among national
groups…coming to the fore” in the 60s.[28]
It is a truism of American political history that, from the Leo Frank
trial and the founding of the NAACP in the early twentieth century down
to the Black Lives Matter movement, Jewish intellectual-activists have
worked tirelessly to imbue disaffected American Negroes with their own
revolutionary spirit.[29]
Cruse
was himself a Negro member of the American Communist Party. By that
time, Jews had displaced Anglo-Saxons as the vanguard of American
Communism. Unlike WASP Communists, the Jews shaped radical politics in
accordance with “their own national group social ambitions or
individual self-elevation.” Negroes were relegated to the status of a
national minority in the party while Jews were free to pick up or drop
their Jewish identity as it suited them.[30]
This arrangement enabled Jews to become experts on “the Negro
problem.” Not surprisingly, Jewish artists, musicians, and radicals
then became highly visible players in the Civil Rights Movement of the
1950s and 60s. “As a result,” Cruse observes, “the great brainwashing
of Negro radical intellectuals was not achieved by capitalism, or the
capitalistic bourgeoisie, but by Jewish intellectuals in the American
Communist Party.”[31]
In
the contemporary hip-hop community, Jewish leadership has been hidden
behind the corporate veil. Tricia Rose vehemently denounces the
corrupting influence of corporate control on the hip-hop community but
her treatment of the subject obscures the identity of the corporate high
command.[32]
The music industry is absorbed into a vast impersonal system of “White
power,” a matrix whose denizens all routinely swallow the blue pill.
The closest we come to identifying those in charge is when Dyson
criticizes the “White corporate interests” exploiting Black talent.[33]
Jews
are never mentioned in Dyson’s work on hip-hop. Not surprisingly,
Dyson has unimpeachable philo-Semitic credentials. Blacks and Jews, he
believes, are united in common struggles against oppression in White
America. Far be it from him ever to cast Jews as an enemy of Black
folk. On his account, Blacks love Jews and Jews love Blacks.[34] Professor Rose also tip-toes around the issue of Jewish influence in the hip-hop community; The Hip Hop Wars
has no index entry for Jews. Only in passing does Rose name names.
But, when she does identify a few of the corporate heavyweights involved
in the hip-hop community, the elephant moves onto center stage.
In
a chapter on hip-hop’s responsibility for sexist and misogynist lyrics
and imagery, Rose mentions a rare public appearance by leading figures
in the corporate record industry. In their statements “corporate
executives such as Universal chairman Doug Morris, Warner chairman and
chief executive Edgar Bronfman, Sony chairman Andrew Lack, and Viacom
president and CEO Phillipe P. Dauman have defended their role as
distributors of intensely sexist content by subsuming sexism under
artists’ rights to express themselves freely.” Interestingly, in the
same paragraph, Rose urges us to “pull back the veil on the corporate
media’s manipulation of Black male and female artists and the impact
this has on fans and the direction of Black cultural expression.”[35]
Why does she not see fit to mention that the four corporate kingpins
she names are all Jews? The ethno-political fact is that Rose leaves
the corporate veil intact by ascribing blame for the corruption of the
hip-hop community to an abstraction called corporate greed. Rose heads
the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown
University.[36] How can she not be aware of the stunning success Jews have had in mixing business with ethno-politics?
After
all, a simple Google search on “Jews run hip hop” turns up a wealth of
investigative leads for a researcher eager to see how the “triangular
tension” between Jews, Negroes, and Anglo-Saxons” has accommodated
itself to the new players in American ethno-politics. Black scholars
typically ignore the criticisms of Jewish control commonly made by
rappers and fans.[37]
Traditional Catholics such as E. Michael Jones are also critical of
rap music as “one more manifestation of the behavior which goes along
with the Jewish revolutionary spirit that took over the Black mind
during the course of the 20thcentury.”[38] The Jewish revolutionary spirit has pioneered the techniques of using sex as an instrument of political control.[39] The hip-hop brand of sexuality is no exception.
Bearing
that in mind, it comes as no surprise to learn that hip-hop is deeply
involved “with the multibillion dollar pornographic industry. The strip
club has long been an integral part of both the music video and
business end, but since the start of the new century, there has been a
complete cross-over into pornography.” Orlando Patterson describes
scenes from these productions as “the most degrading and abusive
depictions of women imaginable.”[40]
Small wonder, then, that a Google search for “Jews run pornography”
yields another treasure trove of investigative leads sure to be left
unexplored (for fear of the Jews?) by both Black and White scholars.
scientificamerican | You walk into a bar and music is thumping. All heads are bobbing and
feet tapping in synchrony. Somehow the rhythmic sound grabs control of
the brains of everyone in the room forcing them to operate
simultaneously and perform the same behaviors in synchrony. How is this
possible? Is this unconscious mind control by rhythmic sound only
driving our bodily motions, or could it be affecting deeper mental
processes?
The mystery runs deeper than previously thought,
according to psychologist Annett Schirmer reporting new findings today
at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans. Rhythmic sound
“not only coordinates the behavior of people in a group, it also
coordinates their thinking—the mental processes of individuals in the
group become synchronized.”
This finding extends the well-known
power of music to tap into brain circuits controlling emotion and
movement, to actually control the brain circuitry of sensory perception.
This discovery helps explain how drums unite tribes in ceremony, why
armies march to bugle and drum into battle, why worship and ceremonies
are infused by song, why speech is rhythmic, punctuated by rhythms of
emphasis on particular syllables and words, and perhaps why we dance.
Schirmer
and her graduate student Nicolas Escoffier from the University of
Singapore first tested subjects by flashing a series of images on a
video monitor and asked them to quickly identify when an image was
flipped upside down. While participants focused on this task, a
synthetic drumbeat gently tapped out a simple four-beat rhythm in the
background, syncopated by skipping the fourth beat of each measure.
theoccidentalobserver |It
is unfortunate, to say the least, that Black hip-hop scholarship never
mentions the elephant in the room: Jewish control of the music industry.
If hip-hop is, indeed, ethno-politics set to music, if hip-hop has
taken the place of the civil rights movement in the hearts and minds of
Black youth, it is impossible to ignore the historic Black-Jewish
alliance against WASPs. For much of the twentieth century, that
alliance was a constituent element in what Black nationalist Harold
Cruse called the “fateful triangular tension among national
groups…coming to the fore” in the 60s.[28]
It is a truism of American political history that, from the Leo Frank
trial and the founding of the NAACP in the early twentieth century down
to the Black Lives Matter movement, Jewish intellectual-activists have
worked tirelessly to imbue disaffected American Negroes with their own
revolutionary spirit.[29]
Cruse
was himself a Negro member of the American Communist Party. By that
time, Jews had displaced Anglo-Saxons as the vanguard of American
Communism. Unlike WASP Communists, the Jews shaped radical politics in
accordance with “their own national group social ambitions or
individual self-elevation.” Negroes were relegated to the status of a
national minority in the party while Jews were free to pick up or drop
their Jewish identity as it suited them.[30]
This arrangement enabled Jews to become experts on “the Negro
problem.” Not surprisingly, Jewish artists, musicians, and radicals
then became highly visible players in the Civil Rights Movement of the
1950s and 60s. “As a result,” Cruse observes, “the great brainwashing
of Negro radical intellectuals was not achieved by capitalism, or the
capitalistic bourgeoisie, but by Jewish intellectuals in the American
Communist Party.”[31]
In
the contemporary hip-hop community, Jewish leadership has been hidden
behind the corporate veil. Tricia Rose vehemently denounces the
corrupting influence of corporate control on the hip-hop community but
her treatment of the subject obscures the identity of the corporate high
command.[32]
The music industry is absorbed into a vast impersonal system of “White
power,” a matrix whose denizens all routinely swallow the blue pill.
The closest we come to identifying those in charge is when Dyson
criticizes the “White corporate interests” exploiting Black talent.[33]
Jews
are never mentioned in Dyson’s work on hip-hop. Not surprisingly,
Dyson has unimpeachable philo-Semitic credentials. Blacks and Jews, he
believes, are united in common struggles against oppression in White
America. Far be it from him ever to cast Jews as an enemy of Black
folk. On his account, Blacks love Jews and Jews love Blacks.[34] Professor Rose also tip-toes around the issue of Jewish influence in the hip-hop community; The Hip Hop Wars
has no index entry for Jews. Only in passing does Rose name names.
But, when she does identify a few of the corporate heavyweights involved
in the hip-hop community, the elephant moves onto center stage.
In
a chapter on hip-hop’s responsibility for sexist and misogynist lyrics
and imagery, Rose mentions a rare public appearance by leading figures
in the corporate record industry. In their statements “corporate
executives such as Universal chairman Doug Morris, Warner chairman and
chief executive Edgar Bronfman, Sony chairman Andrew Lack, and Viacom
president and CEO Phillipe P. Dauman have defended their role as
distributors of intensely sexist content by subsuming sexism under
artists’ rights to express themselves freely.” Interestingly, in the
same paragraph, Rose urges us to “pull back the veil on the corporate
media’s manipulation of Black male and female artists and the impact
this has on fans and the direction of Black cultural expression.”[35]
Why does she not see fit to mention that the four corporate kingpins
she names are all Jews? The ethno-political fact is that Rose leaves
the corporate veil intact by ascribing blame for the corruption of the
hip-hop community to an abstraction called corporate greed. Rose heads
the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown
University.[36] How can she not be aware of the stunning success Jews have had in mixing business with ethno-politics?
After
all, a simple Google search on “Jews run hip hop” turns up a wealth of
investigative leads for a researcher eager to see how the “triangular
tension” between Jews, Negroes, and Anglo-Saxons” has accommodated
itself to the new players in American ethno-politics. Black scholars
typically ignore the criticisms of Jewish control commonly made by
rappers and fans.[37]
Traditional Catholics such as E. Michael Jones are also critical of
rap music as “one more manifestation of the behavior which goes along
with the Jewish revolutionary spirit that took over the Black mind
during the course of the 20thcentury.”[38] The Jewish revolutionary spirit has pioneered the techniques of using sex as an instrument of political control.[39] The hip-hop brand of sexuality is no exception.
Bearing
that in mind, it comes as no surprise to learn that hip-hop is deeply
involved “with the multibillion dollar pornographic industry. The strip
club has long been an integral part of both the music video and
business end, but since the start of the new century, there has been a
complete cross-over into pornography.” Orlando Patterson describes
scenes from these productions as “the most degrading and abusive
depictions of women imaginable.”[40]
Small wonder, then, that a Google search for “Jews run pornography”
yields another treasure trove of investigative leads sure to be left
unexplored (for fear of the Jews?) by both Black and White scholars.
FinalCall | Some of our greatest icons, such as Sammy Davis Jr., Billie Holiday,
“Little” Richard (and the list goes on) lived rich, yet died broke while
Jewish managers, accountants, attorneys, business advisors and others
fed their families for years off of their largess. Few entertainers in
the history of Black America have been able to say that their assets and
true net worth were as prominent as their talent and popularity. Sadly,
hip-hop is no different. And while hip-hop has produced a handful of
millionaires, they are like a teardrop in the Pacific Ocean when
compared to the many rappers who, like most Black people, are living
“show-to-show” and “check-to-check.”
Over the years I've had many personal acquaintances who were in the
hip-hop music industry with hit records, global popularity and a healthy
fan base. It always puzzled me the way they struggled financially;
worse than some school teachers or sanitation workers. I watched many of
them try and maintain the image of the rich and powerful, yet couldn't
pay their taxes, child support and in some cases their rent. Popular
hip-hop magazine, XXL, recently published an article titled “Hard Times”
about fiscal problems rappers face that the hip-hop community doesn't
like to talk about. Truth is, most rappers are broke; owing more money
to their record labels than they have in their bank accounts. As a
matter of fact, most contracts for rappers are just as horrible as those
for entertainers in other genres where artists sell millions and
receive pennies while the record companies make out like fat rats. Who
are the owners of these major record companies? Forgive me if I sound
monotonous, but they just happen to be Jewish.
There have been many examples of independent success in hip-hop's
music industry such as Master P (No Limit Records), James Prince
(Rap-a-Lot Records), Luther Campbell (2 Live Records) and others.
However, because none of these outfits had the power to control their
own distribution they were eventually left at the mercy of those who
did. Who are the owners and controllers of the distribution channels
that deliver rap music to the world? You guessed it. They just happen to
be Jewish. Cash Money/Young Money Records, a popular imprint from New
Orleans who houses artists Lil' Wayne, Drake, Nicki Minaj and others
reportedly has one of the last lucrative independent deals in existence,
but still do not control their own distribution. So even those
Black-owned rap labels who appear to be the front-runners are in a
dangerous position.
This opinion editorial is not an effort to weaken the powerful image
of our great hip-hop artists. I love hip-hop. I am part of the hip-hop
generation. This is why I felt the need to write this article. Hip-hop
is leading the youth of the world, but if our artists are under the
inordinate control of those who control their careers then where will
the youth of the world be led? I'm only trying to, as they say in the
streets, “keep it 100.” It's time for rappers to become just as tough
and assertive in the boardroom as they are in the recording booth.
Anyone thinking about music and social control in the early modern period would tend to look for precedents in antiquity, the most significant authors in this regard being Plato and Aristotle. The two crucial texts by Plato are his Republic and the Laws, both of which are concerned with the nature of the best form of political organisation and the proper kind of education for individuals that lead to a stable and harmonious community.
Education of the republic's citizens includes early training in both gymnastics and mousike, which Andrew Barker defines as 'primarily an exposure to poetry and to the music that is its key vehicle.' (For the rest of this discussion I will simply refer to 'music' but will be using it in the broader sense of poetry set to musical accompaniment.) The crucial point is that within Plato's ideal society the kinds of 'music' that are performed must be firmly controlled by the law givers, the argument being that freedom of choice in music and novelty in its forms will inevitably lead to corruption and a breakdown of society.
Plato's distrust of musical innovation is made concrete in his Laws where he describes what he thinks actually happened once in Greek society, namely that the masses had the effrontery to suppose they were capable of judging music themselves, the result being that 'from a starting point in music, everyone came to believe in their own wisdom about everything, and to reject the law, and liberty followed immediately'. (To Plato liberty is anathema since some people have much greater understanding and knowledge than others.)
This close association between the laws of music and laws of the state exists because according to Plato music imitates character, and has a direct effect on the soul which itself is a harmonia, the consequence being that bad music results in bad citizens. To achieve a good state some form of regulation must take place, the assumption being that if the right musical rules are correctly followed this will result in citizens of good character.
It is fascinating to discover that Plato looks to Egypt with approval for its drastic control of music in society, claiming that its forms had remained unchanged for ten thousand years because of strict regulation that 'dedicated all dancing and all melodies to religion'. To prescribe melodies that possessed a 'natural correctness' he thinks 'would be a task for a god, or a godlike man, just as in Egypt they say that the melodies that have been preserved for this great period of time were the compositions of Isis.' (In fact as we shall see there were similar arguments made for the divine origins of sacred music in the Hebrew tradition.)
Perhaps thinking himself to be a 'godlike man', Plato lays down a series of strict rules governing musical composition and performance, a prescription that if correctly followed would ensure the virtue of citizens and the stability of the state, as well as the banishment of most professional musicians from society.
First, Plato wants to limit the kind of poetry that is set to music at all because songs have such a direct and powerful effect on people's morals. Thus any poems that portray wickedness, immorality, mourning or weakness of any kind must be banned, leaving only music that encourages good and courageous behaviour among citizens. The next thing to be curtailed is the range of musical styles allowed in the city, which Plato would confine to the Dorian and the Phrygian 'harmoniai', a technical term for organisations of musical pitch that for the purposes of this paper need not be discussed in any more detail. Between them these two 'harmoniai' appropriately 'imitate the sounds of the self-restrained and the brave man, each of them both in good fortune and bad.' Thirdly, as well as controlling the words to be sung and the manner in which they are performed, Plato would also regulate the kinds of instrument used for accompaniment, the two most important being the lyra and the kithara. Those that are forbidden include the aulos as well as a range of multi-stringed instruments capable of playing in a variety of different modes. Finally, Plato is emphatic in stating that the metrical foot and the melody must follow the words properly for the right effect to be achieved, rather than the other way around.
Of course these rules are intrinsically interesting, since they tell us about what Plato thought was wrong with music of his own time. However, for my purposes they are also interesting because they seem to have had a discernable influence on would-be reformers of music and society in the early modern period (that is, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries) which I will come to further on in my paper.
soundhealthinc | Welcome to The Journal of BioAcoustic Biology (JBAB), sponsored by the
Sound Health Research Institute, Inc., a duly recognized exempt
organization (SHRI). This Journal has been established in response to
the calls for a peer-reviewed venue for the publication of articles and
practice notes on the subject of Human BioAcoustic Vocal Profiling and
Sound Presentation.
The SHRI trustees responded by adopting, as part of the Credentials
System sponsored by the Institute, authorization for the establishment
of this Journal. According to the enabling Resolution, “The Journal
publishes in the area of Human BioAcoustics as established by the
research initiated by Sharry Edwards…” articles and practice notes
subject to the oversight of the Peer Review Subcommittee. The general
Peer Review Standards can be found under the JBAB links to the right.
Our Premier Public Issue features a seminal article on the Theory of
Human BioAcoustics. This issue was prepared by the Journal staff under
the direction of Ms. Edwards. This issue represents the first public
issue of a Journal that has been privately published since 1995.
The Research Reports published in the Journal have had any specific
Frequencies referenced redacted (and usually replaced with the musical
note in which the Frequency occurs). The Reports are intended to provide
brief introductions to ongoing research.
thescientist | A man with Parkinson’s disease sitting in a crowded restaurant has to
use the rest room, but he cannot get there. His feet are frozen; he
cannot move. The more he tries, the more stressed he becomes. People are
beginning to stare at him and wonder what is wrong. Then he remembers
the song “You Are My Sunshine,” which his music therapist taught him to
use in situations like this. He starts humming the tune. In time with
the music, he steps forward—one foot and then the other—and begins
walking to the beat in his head. Still humming, he makes it to the rest
room, avoiding a potentially embarrassing situation.
Freezing of gait is a common occurrence for many people with
Parkinson’s disease. Such struggles can limit social experience and lead
to seclusion and depression. Unfortunately, available pharmacological
and surgical treatments for Parkinson’s do a poor job of quelling this
and many other symptoms. But where conventional medicine has failed,
music therapy can sometimes provide relief.
Music therapy is the use of music by a credentialed professional as an
intervention to improve, restore, or maintain a non-music-related
behavior in a patient or client. As a music therapist, I have worked
with many people with Parkinson’s disease and have seen how music can
provide an external cue for patients to walk in time to, allowing them
to overcome freezing. I have also used group singing to help patients
with Parkinson’s improve their respiratory control and swallowing.
Impaired swallowing can lead to aspiration pneumonia, which is a leading
cause of death among this patient population.
But perhaps the most powerful component of music therapy is the social
benefit derived from making music together, which can help patients
combat depression. When patients with Parkinson’s engage in music
therapy, often one of the first behaviors to emerge is smiling, and the
flat affect and masked face that are characteristic symptoms of the
disease fade away. These participants comment on how music therapy is
the best part of their week, and their caregivers state that their loved
ones are in much better moods—with fewer Parkinson’s symptoms—after
returning home from music therapy.
While all of this is interesting, it is not new. Aristotle and Plato
were among the first to write on the healing influence of music. The
earliest references to music as therapy occurred in the late 1700s and
early 1800s, and the field formally began after World War I, when
professional and amateur musicians played for veterans who had suffered
physical and emotional trauma as a result of the war. Nowadays,
certified music therapists seek to do more than just play the right song
at the right time. They use music to help people with many different
physical and emotional disorders or diseases.
So, my boy, this totality of cosmic substances named 'exioëhary,' resulting from the evolution of the first being-food in these beings-apparatuses, corresponds in its vibrations to the last stopinder of the being-Heptaparaparshinokh and, according to the particularity of this stopinder, it enters the 'higher intentionally actualizing mdnel-in' of the law of Heptaparaparshinokh. And in order to complete its transformation into new higher substances and acquire vibrations corresponding to the next higher degree of vivifyingness, that is, corresponding to the fifth stopinder of the fundamental process of the sacred Heptaparaparshinokh, it indispensably requires just that outside help which can be obtained in the presence of three-brained beings only through those factors mentioned by me more than once, and which are manifested in 'being-partkdolgduty', in other words, those factors which our Common Father Creator Endlessness consented to designate as the means by which certain tetartocosmoses — as a final result of their service to the purposes of the common-cosmic Iraniranumange— could become helpers in the administration of the enlarging world. And as for these factors, which are the sole possible means for the assimilation of the cosmic substances required for the coating and perfecting of the higher being-bodies, today we call them 'conscious labor' and 'intentional suffering'.(15)
Transforming Air - Second Being Food
Gurdjieff was very circumspect about breathing exercises which altered the natural rhythm of breathing. Some of the Movements naturally demand certain altered patterns of breathing. Beyond that, Gurdjieff encouraged the simple practice of conscious attention to the breath.
"This signified that the passengers of the ship Karnak were summoned to the "Djamdjampal," that is, that "refectory" of the ship in which all the passengers together periodically fed on the second and first being-foods."
"After the process of taking in the second being-food, Beelzebub did not immediately return from the "Djameechoonatra""(14)
"This whole attention of mine, I now intentionally divide into two equal parts. The first half I consciously direct to the uninterrupted constatation and continuous sensing of the process proceeding in me of my breathing."
Transforming Impressions - Third Being Food
In the book GURDJIEFF: ESSAYS AND REFLECTIONS ON THE MAN AND HIS TEACHING, there was a chapter on Questions and Responses, which contains transcripts from meetings from the 1940s in which Gurdjieff replies to a question by a pupil (p274-275) :
Dr. B.: I would like to ask a question about the relationship between work and fatigue. It seems to me there is a difference between work efforts and automatic efforts. Outer work takes energy. Inner work is the opposite— it should accumulate energy. It should even be restful if it is done correctly. But for me it is the opposite. At the moment of making an effort something believes that the gates through which energy escapes will close autornatically. But it’s the opposite. I become very tired. I lose my energy.
GURDJIEFF: On the other hand, you keep it. Consciously. we eat the electricity that is in the body and transform it. This establishes in us a force. . . . In ordinary life you automatically lose this. But here it’s not the same thing; it’s not the same kind of fatigue. This other fatigue has a future. It’s tiring but it brings you a substantial result. It refills your accumulators. If you continue, a certain substance will refill your accumulator. Today the more you tire yourself, the more your organism will produce this substance.
DR. B.: Is fatigue favorable or unfavorable to the effort of concentration?
GURDJIEFF: If it’s ordinary fatigue, it’s not worth trying to make the effort; with that you can’t even do the ordinary things of life. You lose the last of your strength. Work depends on another accumulator. There is a law for this other kind of fatigue: the more you give, the more you receive.
The energy which triggers a sensory nerve never actually gets into the brain, it simply trips a switch, so to speak, which releases pre-existing energy in the nerve to initiate an ionic chain reaction and its accompanying electromagnetic field and transmit an 'electrical impulse' to the brain. The higher brain centers are receiving 'information' about a change of state of our internal electromagnetic environment, not any new energy from the outside world, like the food and air octaves.
The information is represented by different shapes and sizes of electrical impulses. The interesting thing about information is that it can be represented by almost any kind of medium. For example, these words appear on your computer screen by illuminated phosphors, they may then be printed on a piece of paper with ink. They have been transmitted to you with binary digits of 0 and 1's represented by pulses of electromagnetic energy. I could scratch these words in the sand with a stick or spell them out with stones. In other words, information exists on a different level of reality than the matter/energy used to represent it.
We 'eat' the information from impressions by moving electrical impulses that represent the information around the brain to certain places where that information is stored in another form of medium, possibly various combinations of proteins. Memory is a mental accumulator of information. The more attention we pay to our incoming information, the more of it gets stored in our accumulator.
frontiersin | The functions of dance and music in human evolution are a mystery.
Current research on the evolution of music has mainly focused on its
melodic attribute which would have evolved alongside (proto-)language.
Instead, we propose an alternative conceptual framework which focuses on
the co-evolution of rhythm and dance (R&D) as intertwined aspects
of a multimodal phenomenon characterized by the unity of action and
perception. Reviewing the current literature from this viewpoint we
propose the hypothesis that R&D have co-evolved long before other
musical attributes and (proto-)language. Our view is supported by
increasing experimental evidence particularly in infants and children:
beat is perceived and anticipated already by newborns and rhythm
perception depends on body movement. Infants and toddlers spontaneously
move to a rhythm irrespective of their cultural background. The impulse
to dance may have been prepared by the susceptibility of infants to be
soothed by rocking. Conceivable evolutionary functions of R&D
include sexual attraction and transmission of mating signals. Social
functions include bonding, synchronization of many individuals,
appeasement of hostile individuals, and pre- and extra-verbal
communication enabling embodied individual and collective memorizing. In
many cultures R&D are used for entering trance, a base for
shamanism and early religions. Individual benefits of R&D include
improvement of body coordination, as well as painkilling,
anti-depressive, and anti-boredom effects. Rhythm most likely paved the
way for human speech as supported by studies confirming the overlaps
between cognitive and neural resources recruited for language and
rhythm. In addition, dance encompasses visual and gestural
communication. In future studies attention should be paid to which
attribute of music is focused on and that the close mutual relation
between R&D is taken into account. The possible evolutionary
functions of dance deserve more attention.
royalsocietypublishing | Musicality can be defined as a natural, spontaneously developing trait
based on and constrained by biology and cognition. Music, by contrast,
can be defined as a social and cultural construct based on that very
musicality. One critical challenge is to delineate the constituent
elements of musicality. What biological and cognitive mechanisms are
essential for perceiving, appreciating and making music? Progress in
understanding the evolution of music cognition depends upon adequate
characterization of the constituent mechanisms of musicality and the
extent to which they are present in non-human species. We argue for the
importance of identifying these mechanisms and delineating their
functions and developmental course, as well as suggesting effective
means of studying them in human and non-human animals. It is virtually
impossible to underpin the evolutionary role of musicality as a whole,
but a multicomponent perspective on musicality that emphasizes
its constituent capacities, development and neural cognitive specificity
is an excellent starting point for a research programme aimed at
illuminating the origins and evolution of musical behaviour as an
autonomous trait.
WaPo | Some people just can't seem to keep a beat.
You know the ones:
They seem to be swaying to their own music or clapping along to a beat
only they can hear. You may even think that describes you.
The majority of humans, however, do this very well. We clap, dance,
march in unison with few problems; that ability is part of what sets us
apart from other animals.
But it is true that rhythm —
specifically, coordinating your movement with something you hear —
doesn't come naturally to some people. Those people represent a very
small sliver of the population and have a real disorder called "beat
deafness."
Unfortunately, your difficulty dancing or keeping time in band class probably doesn't quite qualify.
A
new study by McGill University researchers looked more closely at what
might be going on with "beat deaf" individuals, and the findings may
shed light on why some people seem to be rhythm masters while others
struggle.
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