Mapping the Musical Commons: Digitization, Simulation, Speculation

This essay is a speculation on how recent digitization and simulation technologies are providing a means of mapping cultural processes that may contribute to new ways of enclosing the musical commons. Three broad, shifting, and interwoven themes permeate this speculation: contested concepts of ownership between a disorganized and reorganized capitalism; blurred distinctions between cultural products and human processes; living beings between the convergence of technologies for mapping and simulation. By outlining a potential paradigm shift in how people understand music, the essay suggests some new directions for ownership and control of primary cultural resources, especially with respect to embodied and simulated musical processes.

Searching for Swing: Participatory Discrepancies in the Jazz Rhythm Section

Swing is sometimes described as a groove, pulse, or feel, and I assume that there are as many words for comparable concepts as there are musical styles, languages, and cultures. On the syntactical level (that is, in the realm of crotchets and quavers and their subdivisions), jazz swing has never been effectively notated. Ridetaps, the drummer's tapping on a ride cymbal, are often represented by dotted rhythms or eighth note triplets, while a bass line is usually written as straight quarter notes. To these notated sketches, musicians add the "swing," making the notes come alive. What is it that they add? What is swing on the sub-syntactical level? Some may argue that swing results when musicians are playing precisely together, while others may insist that swing occurs when the musicians are a bit out of time, or out of phase with each other. Both musicians and analysts may disagree about these "together" and "apart" issues, so it is important for us to develop a systematic method, an etic grid, for measuring degrees of synchrony and discrepancy between musicians.

The Distillation of Dr. Hiller: Choices in Editing Oral History

After completing an interview, we begin the task of organizing and editing our tapes and notes. During this process, we must continually make choices, and often these choices are interrelated and interdependent; making one choice often lead us to confronting another. This article considers such editing choices on several different levels, ranging from the mechanics of transcribing a distinct set of interview problems, to the question of making them useful in presentation, to the broader issue of editing sound as well as written documents. On this last level, we will see how new technology now gives the old issue of orality a particular vitality. Editing permutations will be presented, culminating in a demonstration and comparison of two routes to a final prose transcription - one route derives from editing a visual document; the other explores editing the aural document, before transcribing, with new tools of sound-processing designed for an aural medium such as radio.