Raman, Thought Experiments

Thought Experiments and Empirical Experiments (2/2)

(This post is the second in a two-part series on the relationship between thought experiments and empirical experiments. The first post can be found here.)

I am going to knock out all of the design theory up front so bear with me for one paragraph and then we can get back to the fun stuff. According to Roger Kirk, who wrote one of the most widely used textbooks for research design in the behavioral sciences, “Experiments are characterized by the: (1) manipulation of one or more independent variables; (2) use of controls such as randomly assigning participants or experimental units to one or more independent variables; and (3) careful observation or measurement of one or more dependent variables. The first and second characteristics—manipulation of an independent variable and the use of controls such as randomization—distinguish experiments from other research strategies” (Kirk 1968). A good experiment isolates the variables being studied to remove outside influence and allow researchers to make strong, causal claims about relationships between variables.

Now that the basic theory is out of the way, lets see how it applies to empirical experiments. Good empirical experiments start with at least one scientific hypothesis (and usually one or more statistical hypotheses) that is falsifiable and offers one or more predictions that can be experimentally tested. Because good empirical experiments isolate from and control for outside influences, they are consistently reproducible. Good experiments allow scientists to assess the accuracy of the predictions they made based on their hypotheses and accordingly determine whether the hypotheses themselves are supported or rejected by the data.

Thought experiments follow a similar model. Like empirical experiments, thought experiments isolate particular variables in order to study the relationship between them. This generally takes the form of creating a hypothetical situation in which all of the parameters of the experiment are set by the philosopher in order to limit consideration to the specific decisions or phenomena being studied. The purpose of this is generally to understand how something would be in an ideal case, free from the confines of circumstance, so that decisions themselves can be isolated from their circumstances and general statement of principle can be made. These statements of principle, like predictions from hypotheses, are then tested with further experiments to find circumstances in which they do not hold or to show that they do hold in cases where they were previously believed not to. To see an example of this, check out my series of posts on the Trolley Problem/Surgeon Problem (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

These two types of experiment compliment each other well because the things thought experiments are good for, making falsifiable predictions and assessing the implications of facts and principles on real-world circumstances, are the same things empirical experiments do poorly. Because empirical researchers face a tradeoff between internal and external validity, the most internally conclusive experiments are the ones that require the most conceptualization to put in context and evaluate. Similarly, empirical research provides a way for philosophers to determine if the assumptions on which they construct their theories are consistent with what we “know” about how the world works and human behavior. Neither type is useful without the other, and everyone would do well to become familiar with both.

It is not a coincidence that many of the greatest thinkers in the history of humanity were both scientists and philosophers. Many of humanity’s greatest achievement have come from people who were willing and able to harness the analytical and predictive power of both disciplines and use them in tandem. It is vitally important that scientists have a working knowledge of philosophy and analytical thinking, and that philosophers appreciate empirical research and the sciences. In a society that tends to sort people by academic discipline and force them to specialize early, there is perhaps no rarer but more vital skill than that of thinking across disciplines and recognizing that knowledge is most powerful when it is most complete.

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This brings us to the conclusion of my blog on thought experiments. Thank you to everyone who has read, commented, and given me feedback; I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed reading my posts as much as I have enjoyed writing them. When I started this blog, I had to chose something to put under the title at the top of the page. I settled on the quasi-official motto of western philosophy: “the unexamined life is not worth living.” I believe very strongly that thought experiments are an excellent tool for this kind of critical examination, and I am glad to have been able to share this tool with you over the course of the last several weeks.

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Raman, Thought Experiments

Thought Experiments and Empirical Experiments (1/2)

If you are a natural-science person (or a psychology person), you will most likely have to take a class in experimental design while you are here at Penn State. Experiments are the cornerstone of the scientific method, so it makes sense to devote significant attention to understanding how they work, what makes some better than others, and what their limitations are. For the last several weeks, I have talked about thought experiments and the role they play in philosophy and science (If you haven’t already and you are interested in thought experiments in science, check out my posts on Relativity and The Importance of Thought Experiments to Modern Physics). For these last two posts, I want to shift gears and talk about the relationship between thought experiments and empirical experiments.

Over the course of writing this passion blog, one of my major objectives has been to dismiss the notion that thought experiments are something people use to speculate about the world from their armchairs without actually observing anything, and that empirical experiments are “better” for learning about “real” things. Empirical experiments and thought experiments are both important tools people can use to understand our world, and they each have their own distinct purposes. Especially in fields like Physics and Neurology, thought experiments can help scientists both to determine what kind of empirical experiments to perform and how to make sense of the results of those experiments. There are certainly places where empirical experiments are “better” than thought experiments, but there are also places, even in the natural sciences, where thought experiments are “better” (one of which is in determining what makes a given method of examination “better”, but this is a subject that requires a more thorough treatment than I am prepared to offer here).

In the 21st century, one of the places where empirical and thought experiments have both come into conflict and complimented each other tremendously is in neurology. If you are interested in neurology, philosophy of science, or intellectually stimulating conversation in general, I highly recommend that you take 13 minutes and 22 seconds to listen to a Philosophy Bites podcast interview with Barry Smith on the interaction between these two tool sets for exploring the mind (the interview can be found at http://philosophybites.com/2008/09/barry-smith-on.html) and, if you enjoy that, as many of their neuroscience focused interviews as you can handle (which can be found here http://philosophybites.com/neuroscience/). Essentially, Dr. Smith lays out the role that each method has in advancing both neuroscience and the various related philosophical disciplines. To him, philosophers are too skeptical of evidence from empirical experiments that contradicts their expectations, which he believes is hampering the discipline’s progress. On the other hand, he recognizes that philosophers were the first people to raise the kinds of questions neuroscience explores, that their thought experiments provided an important starting place for the empirical research, and that, in his own words, when it comes to “pathologies and neurological breakdown, help is needed by the neurologists and biologists from the philosophers to help to explain how to characterize these experiences, to understand what they’re like, and to contrast them with normal experience.”

In my next post, I am going to discuss what makes a good empirical experiment, what makes a good thought experiment, and compare and contrast the two.

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Raman, Thought Experiments

Physics or Philosophy

Last week I wrote about the value of thought experiments in the sciences. To illustrate my point, I used the example of Einstein’s theory of relativity and talked about how scientists never could have arrived at the concept empirically and the fact that they had still been unable to prove it. Apparently my challenge was accepted, because earlier today scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) confirmed that they were able hear the sound of two black holes colliding 1.3 billion light years away by registering ripples in space time. The results announced today are the first empirical conformation of the existence of gravity waves, which Einstein predicted as part of his general theory of relativity (which I discussed in last week’s post). It is also the first ever direct detection of black holes, which have been impossible to observe until now because of the fact that they do not emit any radiation. The fact that after 100 years of technological and methodological progress scientists have only now been able to confirm Einstein’s theory, and only with his research to tell them what to look for, shows how far ahead of his time Einstein was and further proves my point about the incredible power of thought experiments.

Rather than pick another though experiment to talk about, I want to give a quick overview of how thought experiments have driven the refinement/development of relativity, quantum theory, and many of the other most significant discoveries in physics of the last century. This is not an appropriate venue for an overview of the theories themselves (and I would certainly not be qualified to give one even if it were), but there are a few unifying themes that make thought experiments particularly useful in these fields.

In a review of a recent book about Einstein and Schrödinger, the author notes that “each had a strong philosophical bent, which shaped his worldview” and that “those philosophical influences contributed to their mutual dislike of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics.” One of the main reasons that physicists often resort to using thought experiments to make their points is that the theories they work with often deal with unobservable phenomena that are either far too large (think black holes), far too small (think fundamental particles), or far to abstract (think space time or the alternate dimensions required by string theory) for people, even theoretical physicists, to conceptualize (as a side note, all of those examples started as thought experiments). Thought experiments, when well designed, allow physicists to think through conceptual problems without getting bogged down in cumbersome details. The physicists can then work backwards to test their intuitions empirically. They are not always right, Einstein was wrong about quantum entanglement and most modern physicists believe that Schrödinger was wrong about superposition, but the thought experiments give them a starting place for empirical testing.

Stephen Hawking famously said that “philosophy is dead” because there was nothing else for us to learn about the world without hard data. While his commitment to data and evidence may resonate with many in STEM fields, you unfortunately will not be rid of us philosophers so easily. The story of the last century of physics is philosophy first, math later. In the same interview, Hawking himself admits that scientifically testing his preferred unifying theory, called “M Theory,” would require a particle collider the size of the Milky Way galaxy; but he defends his commitment to it with synthesis, logical syllogism and thought experiments: much like a philosopher would. If Stephen Hawking is correct that philosophy is dead, someone should probably tell Stephen Hawking: he may be out of a job!

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Raman, Thought Experiments

Brain in a Vat

Imagine that a mad scientist created a machine into which he could place a human brain. This machine, which we shall call a “brain vat”, would not only keep the brain alive and functioning, but it would allow the scientist to create virtual stimuli and feed them directly into the brain. The brain would register all of these stimuli in exactly the same manner as normal human sensory experiences, as these are already interpreted as electrical signals anyway. In this way, the scientist could create an entire fictitious world that, to the captive brain, would feel completely normal.

What if I told you that you, the person reading this post, were not actually a human being but instead merely a brain in a vat? You may attempt to prove me wrong, but you would find that quite difficult, and you would not be alone. This thought experiment has puzzled philosophers since it was first proposed in 1641 by René Descartes (Though Descartes’ experiment used an evil demon in place of a vat. The vat was proposed Gilbert Harman in 1973 to update the experiment to accommodate modern understandings of psychology and neuroscience). The idea of the brain in a vat (BIV) is that no brain could ever know whether it was in a skull or a vat, and could therefore never know whether everything it experiences is real or an illusion.

Descartes answered his own version of the experiment with his famous cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). I do not have the time or space to fully explain the Cogito in this post, but I highly encourage everyone to read about it. Essentially Descartes argues that either the world is real and he is experiencing it, or he is being deceived. Even if he is being deceived, he still exists in order to be deceived. Therefore, the fact that he can question his existence is sufficient to prove that he exists.

Importantly, the Cogito does not prove that he is not being deceived (or, to use the BIV terms, that he is not a brain in a vat). What Descartes instead proves is that he is something, not necessarily a human or even necessarily a brain, but something. Based on the Cogito, a BIV can know that it exists, but it cannot know anything else about itself or the world.

This thought experiment has implications for ethics (if you are a brain in a vat and nothing else is real, there is nothing wrong with doing terrible things to others), epistemology (the study of knowledge and what it means/why it matters), our understandings of what it means to be human, and many other philosophical disciplines. Many scientists have also written about and studied this thought experiment for a variety of reasons and in a variety of contexts.

On a lighter note, if this all sounded very familiar, it may be because this thought experiment is the basic plot of The Matrix (though the matrix also includes some elements of the experiment from last week’s post, The Allegory of the Cave). On an even lighter note, here are some funny cartoons about this thought experiment. Have a great weekend, even if it’s all an illusion!
BIV Cartoon

BIV Cartoon 2

(cartoons from https://coelsblog.wordpress.com/2014/08/14/a-scientific-response-to-the-brain-in-a-vat/.)

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Raman, Thought Experiments, Uncategorized

The Allegory of the Cave

Ok, so before I start commenting on specific thought experiments I want to stop and explain what thought experiments are and why they are important. Often times philosophers find themselves dealing with very conceptual, multifaceted questions that are too abstract and complex to meaningfully discuss. To get around this, they will often create thought experiments. Thought experiments, like science experiments, seek to isolate the variable being studied to allow for meaningful exploration. This usually takes the form of setting up a fictitious scenario in which people are confronted either with a purer form of the initial question or some allegorical situation.

To illustrate this, consider Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave” (or “Allegory of the Den” depending on the translation). In the allegory, Socrates (Plato’s teacher and the narrator of all of Plato’s dialogues) asks a friend named Glaucon to imagine that there are prisoners in a cave chained against a wall. Behind them there is a fire and a walkway (see image). Throughout the day, puppeteers walk down the walkway with puppets that cast shadows on the wall. The men can see the shadows, but they cannot see the objects themselves. If the shadow were of a book, the prisoners, knowing nothing else of books, would say that they see a book. We know that what they see is merely a shadow of a book, an approximation of the real object, but they would not understand this.

Socrates asks Glaucon to consider what would happen if a prisoner was released and able to see the sun and real objects in their true forms. Glaucon observes that he would likely be put-off at first, but that he would soon come to understand that these new objects were real and that the old ones were all shadows. Socrates then asks what the man would do if he was taken back into the cave and made to again watch the shadows. Glaucon points out that he would likely be frustrated by the triviality of it all, and that he would be especially incapable of trying to assign meaning to the shadows like the other men, since he would know that the shadows were not really the objects the men assumed they were.

Plato wants us to learn a few things from this allegory. Specifically, he trying to illustrate the life of people who do not understand his theory of forms. The theory of forms holds that the universe has a creator and that there exists only one of each object/concept in the world, which is located in the mind of the creator. According to Plato, the physical incarnations of these forms (the name given to the original object/concept) are merely copies of the forms and are therefore imperfect. Plato equates these copies to the shadows on the walls of the cave and himself to the man who has been let out to see the original objects, the forms.

While few people seriously believe his theory today, there is still much to be learned from the allegory. While Plato intended it to represent ignorance of the forms, it can really be used with any kind of ignorance. It is also commonly used to illustrate the concept that, while we develop perceptions of objects in our minds, these perceptions are distinct from the objects that created them and not all of our “knowledge” about these objects is correct.

Hopefully this has helped you to see how thought experiments can be useful in illustrating complicated concepts. I picked an easier one for the first post, but I will try to get into some more complicated and abstract ideas as the semester progresses. On a side note, I am trying to decide whether or not to discuss paradoxes on this blog. They have a completely distinct purpose from thought experiments, but they are also useful ways of thinking about tough questions and force readers to challenge their minds. If you have an opinion, let me know in a comment.

 

platoscave

https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm

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Music, Raman

Rock ‘n’ Roll

(Quick note: The name of the style is usually stylized as either “rock ‘n’ roll” or “rock and roll”. I will be using the first, but some of the sources use the second. I have left the original styling intact in any direct quotes.)

 

Break out your leather jackets, jeans, and assorted hair products because we’re going to be talking about rock ‘n’ roll. Rock ‘n’ roll is a fusion of blues, rhythm & blues, jazz, country, and a variety of less well known styles. It originally featured either saxophone or piano, but evolved to generally feature the electric guitar (an instrument that it helped to popularize). It generally consists of a 12-bar major chord progression, swing or shuffle rhythm, heavily emphasized backbeat, and a blend of blues and country melodies. (Remember, rock ‘n’ roll is not the same as rock. We will discuss that distinction a little later.)

Like jazz before it, the rise of rock ‘n’ roll was met with outrage and disgust. Frank Sinatra said that “rock and roll is the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression — lewd, sly, in plain fact, dirty — a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac and the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth” (America Rocks and Rolls). It was banned from certain schools and radio stations and was decried by churches as “Satan’s music.” As one author put it, “Because rock and roll originated among the lower classes and a segregated ethnic group, many middle-class whites thought it was tasteless” (America Rocks and Rolls). Also like jazz before it, the resistance was swiftly brushed aside.

Rock ‘n’ roll was incredibly popular. The music of artists like Elvis, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Richie Valens, and Jerry Lee Lewis resonated with a generation of teenagers seeking to rebel against their jazz-loving, conformist parents (read my post on jazz to understand the irony of this). The “side-burned delinquents” Sinatra spoke of became known as greasers (yes, the ones from Grease), but they were not the only rock ‘n’ roll fans. One of the reasons the style was so controversial was that it appealed to both black and white audiences, who would often listen and dance to it together. Some historians credit this with helping to break down racial barriers and playing a role in the success of the civil rights movement (Rock).

It also became very popular overseas, which is where the line between rock ‘n’ roll and rock began to form. In the early 1960s, foreign artists began to release their own takes on American rock ‘n’ roll. Much of this was very similar to the American style, but some of it was different. The face of this newer style was the Beatles, who were a British band that traded in the swing rhythm, piano, and saxophone (remnants of American jazz) for straight eights and vocal harmonies. Some of their early music still had the 12 bar call-and-response verses and swing rhythms that characterized rock ‘n’ roll, but they were moving away from that and towards something new: rock.

After a decade of rock ‘n’ roll, people were ready for a fresh sound. British rock and bands inspired by it spread like wildfire in mid-sixties America. Rock had many of the same elements as its immediate predecessor, and it offered the same rebelliousness as rock ‘n’ roll once had, but it was really something new. As one historian explains it:

The differences between rock ‘n’ roll and rock are aesthetic and generational; there is a strict correspondence between the age cohorts performing the music and their aesthetic tendencies. Rock ‘n’ roll performers, born generally in the mid-1930s, represent the fusion of existing trends in popular music at very particular points of time. Rock performers, born generally from the early 1940s through the 1950s, represent later fusions, of which rock ‘n’ roll is itself a major element. The differences are far more than aesthetic; they represent sensibilities related to cultural evolution, social perceptions and historical events. Within each aesthetic-generational location there are stylistic genres, such as rockabilly, doo-wop during the period of rock ‘n’ roll; country rock, blues rock, acid rock, glam rock, heavy metal, punk, new wave and many others during the period rock era. (The Eclipse of Rock ‘n’ Roll)

Rock is deserving of its own post, and I will get to that at some point, but for now it is enough to know that it is different from rock ‘n’ roll and that it has a more global heritage than its strictly American predecessor.

Works Cited

“America Rocks and Rolls.” Ushistory.org. Independence Hall Association, Web. 17 Nov. 2015. <http://www.ushistory.org/us/53d.asp>.

“The Eclipse of Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Last Music of the ‘Mechanical Age’” Divergences. Web. 17 Nov. 2015. <http://divergences.be/spip.php?article1187&lang=fr>.

“Rock.” America’s Music. Tribeca Film Institute, Web. 17 Nov. 2015. <http://americasmusic.tribecafilminstitute.org/session/view/rock>.

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Music, Raman, Uncategorized

The Blues

As a guitar player, this is one of the blog posts I have been most looking forward to. Many of the world’s greatest guitar players began with or were inspired by the blues, and when I teach kids how to play the guitar I always start by teaching them the blues. In addition to their significance to guitar players, the blues are also considered to have been an essential part of black identity in the early part of the 20th century: they can be found in the works of literary icons such as Langston Hughes and August Wilson as well as in the works of scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois.

The history of the blues is long and largely unclear, but there is agreement on the basic evolution. As PBS puts it in “What is the Blues?”:

At the turn of the century, the blues was still slowly emerging from Texas, Louisiana, the Piedmont region, and the Mississippi Delta; its roots were in various forms of African American slave songs such as field hollers, work songs, spirituals, and country string ballads. Rural music that captured the suffering, anguish-and hopes-of 300 years of slavery and tenant farming, the blues was typically played by roaming solo musicians on acoustic guitar, piano, or harmonica at weekend parties, picnics, and juke joints. Their audience was primarily made up of agricultural laborers, who danced to the propulsive rhythms, moans, and slide guitar. (1)

In 1912, dance orchestra leader W.C. Handy, who had become infatuated with the blues after an encounter with a traveling blues musician at a train station some years earlier, became one of the first to transcribe and publish sheet music for blues songs. It began to catch on over the following years and singers such as Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith helped to establish its place in American culture with the commercial success of their recordings (1).

As the music became increasingly popular it became a mainstay of the renaissance in black American culture. Langston Hughes began to experiment with what he called “blues poetry”, a type of poetry that “regardless of form, utilizes the themes, motifs, language, and imagery common to popular blues literature,”(2) and he “sought to catch this ‘blues spirit’–this compensatory expression of conflicting emotions–in his poetry, in part by imitating the blues themselves”(2). He was drawn to this style because “sad as Blues may be, there’s almost always something humorous about them–even if it’s the kind of humor that laughs to keep from crying”(2).

Playwright August Wilson had a similar experience in that the blues profoundly influenced him as well. He claimed that, when he first heard the blues, “the universe stuttered, and everything fell into place”(3). Like Hughes, he recognized the veiled hopefulness of the blues, noting that, “contrary to what most people think, it’s not defeatist, ‘Oh, woe is me.’ It’s very life-affirming, uplifting music. Because you can sing that song, that’s what enables you to survive”(3).

As the music became more popular, white blues musicians began to pop up and more white listeners began to enjoy blues music. Some people felt that white people playing and enjoying the blues detracted from its authenticity and emotional relevance to black identity. This argument was very similar to one that would be made about similar phenomena that occurred with rock and roll, r&b, hip-hop, and rap in later generations. This will likely be another blog post, but the blues was one of the earliest sources of the controversy over musical appropriation.

If you have never listened to the blues, go on YouTube and listen to BB King’s “The Thrill is Gone” and “Everyday I have the Blues”, the classic “Sweet Home Chicago” at the Crossroads festival, and Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughan playing “Stormy Monday”. If you like what you hear, I will gladly provide you with dozens more recommendations. If you play guitar (or any instrument really) and you like what you hear, I am always up to jam!

 

Resources:

  1. http://www.pbs.org/theblues/classroom/essaysblues.html
  2. https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v019/19.1chinitz.html
  3. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1700922

 

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Music, Raman

I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T

Last week I asked if you would want to read about Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ The Heist, and since a few of you said you would that is what I am writing about this week. My last post focused on albums recorded in home/project studios and how those reflect the culture of our generation. I mentioned in that post that The Heist was both self-produced and self-released. What this means is that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis worked out of their own studio, and occasionally in professional studios that they paid for themselves, to create the album and then distributed it without the backing of a label.

They wrote a song about being independent artists and, rather than try to explain their experience myself, I want to give a few quotes from this song and explain them. This song, called “Can’t Hold Us”, was a Billboard number one hit here in the United States during the summer of 2014; but it seems to be telling their story as if they were looking down from the top of the charts, not on their way there. In the first verse, Macklemore explains that “we did it our way / growin music / I shed my skin and put my bones into everything I record to it.” Here he is explaining that, because they were independent, he and Lewis were free to make their music the way that they wanted to. He also says “Trust me / on my I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T shit / hustler / chasing dreams since I was fourteen / with the four track / bussing.” Here he is telling audiences that they can trust that his music is authentic because he is independent. He then goes on to describe the recording process, saying that he started out working on a four-track (entry level recording system that only stores four tracks) and continued “hustling” to develop his skills as a producer to get to his current level. As a side note, the process of “bussing” in this context is sending the output of three of his four tracks into the fourth to save them as one track and allow him to record more than four tracks. To those who understand the reference, this demonstrates his familiarity with the struggles of entry level audio gear and helps to establish the authenticity of his story. Finally, looking at the success of his music, he says, “labels out here / now they can’t tell me nothing/ we give that to the people / spread it across the country”. This is him saying that, even though labels now want to sign him, he would rather continue to make his own music and “spread it across the country” because he knows, from his success, that his tracks are what people want to hear.

This rejection of the conventional model of music distribution is not, however, the only way in which The Heist reflects our contemporary culture. The album is littered with references to trends and issues that resonate with millennial audiences. The most thorough example of this is the song “Same Love”, which he wrote to promote LGBTQ+ rights. This song includes references to stereotypes of gay men, the political and religious considerations at play in the debate about LGBTQ+ rights, the casual use of the word “gay”, the frequent suicides of gay and transgender teens, and the inherent injustice or prohibiting same-sex marriage. This song also contains two of my favorite lines in all of rap music: “America the brave still fears what we don’t know” and “whatever God you believe in / we come from the same one.” It is worth noting that several of the anti-religious lines in this long would likely have been censored if this album were released by a major label, so the content of the record is a direct result of the process that created it.

I am going to avoid talking about the fact that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis are both white and from Seattle for this week because I plan on doing a post about the appropriation of hip-hop culture another week and somebody requested one about the geographic expansion of rap. These are both important, so don’t think that I have forgotten about them, but I will need to revisit them when I have a chance to talk about them in the detail they deserve.

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Music, Raman

The Democratization of Music

If you have walked through the HUB in the last few days, you may have noticed signs for an acoustic performance by Iron and Wine that will be happening here at Penn State. To be honest, I was not familiar with his music prior to beginning this blog post, but his name sounded vaguely familiar. Before we delve into the main piece of this post, I want to give you a little background about me. Bear with me, I promise it is relevant.

Over the past five years, I have taken an interest in audio engineering and music production. I have worked in a few studios, built a home studio of my own, and recently began producing for clients. As a home studio enthusiast and aspiring music producer, I frequent a number of forums and blogs that deal with audio engineering. It was on one of these sites that I read about Iron and Wine, which is why his name sounded familiar when I saw it in the HUB.

When Iron and Wine recorded his first album, he did not go through the conventional path of recording in a studio and releasing through a record label. Instead, he recorded this album in his bedroom. You may be thinking, “How can someone produce a commercially successful album in their bedroom?” This is a good question. A few decades ago, this would have been far more expensive than renting studio time the old-fashioned way and it would have required a level of technical expertise that few people had. Today, however, self-producing a record has been made affordable and technically feasible by the rapid increase in computing power and the evolving nature of music.

When I said in the first post that music reflects the culture that creates it, I did not want to limit that to the music itself. We live in a culture in which the Internet and computing technology have opened up new ways of doing a wide range of things. Technology has changed the way we interact with our friends, the way we do business and the way we learn, why should it not change the way we express ourselves? Whether it’s computer-enabled EDM music or a classical quartet recording into a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), computers have changed the way we write, perform, produce and enjoy music.

This “democratization of music” has also impacted the musical mainstream. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ The Heist (which contained Billboard Number 1 hits “Thrift Shop” and “Can’t Hold Us” as well as #11 “Same Love”) was self-produced and self-released. Also, Bon Iver won the 2012 Grammy Awards for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album for Bon Iver, which was also self-produced. These are just two examples, but there are dozens more. Any artist who launched their career on YouTube or Soundcloud leveraged these technological improvements not only to record their music but to distribute it as well. The Internet has changed music in innumerable ways, and I can’t wait to see how it continues to allow musicians and producers to continue to push their limits and create new sounds, forms and styles of music.

 

(Sidenote: I reserve the right to analyze The Heist in a later post. There is a lot going on in this album in terms of cultural reflection and it could be really interesting. Is that something you guys would want to read? Let me know in the comments.)

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Pet Sounds

Brian Wilson was sick and tired of having to defend his latest creation. After confronting the skepticism of his band mates, still frustrated by the fact that their latest album had been produced with almost no input from them, Wilson was once again answering for Pet Sounds; this time to executives at Capital Records. The label was considering not releasing the album at all, and Wilson was so fed-up that he attended the last meeting with “a tape player and eight prerecorded, looped responses, including ‘No comment,’ ‘Can you repeat that?’ ‘No’ and ‘Yes.’ Refusing to utter a word, I played the various tapes when appropriate.” Ultimately, Capital reluctantly allowed him to release the album.

If you’re wondering whether or not they made the right decision, this story came from the article in which Rolling Stone declares Pet Sounds the second greatest record of all time. Their greatest record of all time is The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; which even Paul McCartney admits was heavily influenced by Pet Sounds (McCartney).

Rarely has a record had such a profound impact on the trajectory of music as Pet Sounds. At a time when most of the major innovations in music production and audio engineering were coming from Britain, Wilson’s pioneering use of non-pop instruments and convention-defying harmony helped to redefine pop music. Tony Asher, a cowriter and pianist who worked with Wilson on the album, remembers that he “plucked the (piano) strings with paper clips, bobbi pins and several other things until Brian got the sound that he wanted.”(Abbott 51) On several occasions, Wilson even rerecorded the same tracks, with the same musicians, over and over in different rooms and at different studios until he recreated the sounds he heard in his head (Abbott 53). As Kingsley Abbott puts it in his book, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds: The Greatest Album of the Twentieth Century, “What made Brian so extraordinary is that he… had the abilities of a singer, player, arranger, and producer combined; none of his competitors on either side of the Atlantic could come close.” (Abbott 55) In fact, Pet Sounds was such an individual effort that the other Beach Boys had almost no involvement with the project until Wilson had already finished recording all of the songs and called them in to record their vocals and harmonies, which he had already written and arranged (Abbott 67).

To the dismay of the Capital Records executives, who had doubted the commercial potential of Pet Sounds from their first listen, the album was a comparative flop. The album was so innovative and subtle that its genius was lost on much of the music buying public, who preferred the Beach Boys’ younger and more danceable surf rock hits. This commercial blow, however, did not diminish the respect and admiration of Wilson’s competitors. The Beatles’ Paul McCartney said that, while he had heard some of the Beach Boys’ earlier albums, “it was Pet Sounds that blew me out of the water… I’ve just bought my kids each a copy of it for their education in life. I figure no one is educated musically ’til they’ve heard that album,” and “I think was probably the big influence that set me thinking when we recorded Pepper.”(McCartney)

Today, most publications place Pet Sounds first or second on any list of the greatest albums of all time. It has also influenced some of the 21st centuries biggest producers. One of these producers, Ryan Tedder (One Republic, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Adele, Backstreet Boys, Maroon 5, One Direction, etc.), notes that Pet Sounds was one of the earliest influences in his development (“Artist Interview”). As a producer myself, I still employ many of the techniques Wilson pioneered on Pet Sounds in my own work. It is very unusual for any work to have such an enduring impact on its field as Pet Sounds had on music production. If you have never heard it, head over to YouTube and give it a listen: It may still sound familiar.

Works Cited:

Abbott, Kingsley. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds: The Greatest Album of the 20th Century. London: Helter Skelter, 2001. Print.
“Artist Interview: Ryan Tedder of One Republic.” The HUB. Musician’s Friend, 19 Dec. 2013. Web. 08 Oct. 2015. <http://thehub.musiciansfriend.com/artist-interviews/ryan-tedder-of-one-republic>.
“The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.” 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Rolling Stone, n.d. Web. 08 Oct. 2015. <http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/the-beach-boys-pet-sounds-20120524>.
McCartney, Paul. “Paul McCartney Comments on Pet Sounds.” Interview by David Leaf. Album Liner Notes. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Oct. 2015. <http://albumlinernotes.com/Paul_McCartney_Comments.html>.
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