Jefferson believes the U.S. must remain an agricultural nation of small independent yeoman farmers, a small farmer who owns his own land who owns the means of his own living, otherwise it will become corrupt. A society of wage earners was hardly different from a society of slaves. He believed that for the nation to survive there had to be a high degree of uniformity. He thinks diversity is the enemy. The natural course of life is acquiring a skill, land, professional, but you acquire your own subsistence. He directs that the U.S. should be surveyed in identical 640 acres sections and these would have subdivisions. This is why the U.S. cities look like squares of a checkerboard and people know each other’s property. His biggest concern was how do you have a country if you don’t have some degree of identity of interest? He thinks the U.S. should move through space to the west and by getting more land to remain a nation of farmers forever. Hamilton wanted the U.S. to be a diverse industrial nation. Freedom was realized in prosperity and individual diversity, not in land ownership. Human self is best when they compete and find what they are good at. He likes projects to build roads, damns, etc. He equated freedom with market opportunity and with social diversity with the ability to specialize according to your talents. He says diversity is coherence. He thinks the U.S. should ignore western space and move through time into the industrial future. Because of their differences, Hamilton and Jefferson hate each other.

Jefferson said technology corrodes nationalism. You lose the core values of the republic. My identity is dependent on others. I can’t exist as a student unless there is a teacher and my teacher can’t exist without me as a student. We are group dependent. However, things like fingerprints, DNA, and identification cards are unique to a person but make us easier to track. “The more individual you are the less free you are” (O’Malley).  Individualism equals state surveillance and control and the absence of freedom.  Modern life tracks peoples preference and makes them easier and easier to be who you are and harder to be someone different.  People cluster with people like themselves. We used that zip code website in class to explain this and it was very interesting. You type in a zip code onto this website and it shows you what people in that area are all like. We got to type in my zip code 23322 (Chesapeake, VA). When the information came out I was kind of baffled to see the results. I believed half of these things are definitely true about my area and the others were not. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought they were all true. The zip code region is a big area. Where I particularly live I may not see those present but across the water in an area with the same zip code I could see all of those being true. It’s very weird to see how accurate it could be. It also shows you where in other parts of the country people in that zip code are like other people in other zip codes.

If you are in a zip code where you get only stuff that you like and the catalogs that come to your mail are tailored to fix what you already like, it’s harder to find something in common with people in other places. For example, I can go grocery shopping in Chesapeake, VA and know where everything I like to buy is and buy it. I can then go grocery shopping in Fairfax, VA and be “in a different world.” The food at this grocery will not be what I’m used to seeing and will get in the way of my shopping and slow me down. This pushed me away from difference. Technology is destroying nations; it undermines mutuality. It’s hard to try to get along with other countries because were so use to saneness.

Sounds are constantly being masked by other sounds; you’re not hearing everything. My mom can come to my band concert and think she is just listening to me playing music but she’s not; it’s everyone. It’s more about the experience of playing together. Which leads me to the next question, would you argue that music is a social experience? I mean why go to a concert; for the music or social experience? I think we can all agree most singers are not as good live as they are on the radio. You typically go to the concert for the social experience. You know to have a good time with your friends, drink, and listen to the music you have similar interests in.

When someone leaks a song before it is released, it insights people to buy it. Why do people who are pirating music feel like they have a right to have 24/7 access to streamed music? Shouldn’t you be supporting the artists by buying their music? I mean that’s how they make their money. When you think about it that way, you sound like a terrible person. You could also argue that they have other ways of making money like performing concerts. But, information deserves to be free. Rather than arguing the moral pros and cons of “stealing music,” Stephen Witt in “How Music Got Free,” explains the range of motivations behind individuals who played a part in this. The most well-known example he describes is the North Carolina factory worker who became the world’s primary source for albums leaked ahead of their release dates for free because he thinks its cool. Witt calls this Patient Zero of music piracy.

With this, then comes the advancements in technology such as the mp3. Back then, they saw the mp3 as unburdened by knowledge. It was merely a near perfect way to compress audio files. And with this development of mp3’s, it eventually turned into apps on a smart phone to obtain music like Spotify, Apple Music, Itunes, etc. It still gave individuals the opportunity to leak a song before the album was even released. Is this immoral?

So, does the technology of music make it disposable? Yes it does. If you download a song on your playlist on your phone, you can delete it. If you were to have a CD like back in the day, you would have to find someone to buy it off of you. Now it is just so easy to go and delete.

Have you ever thought about comparing music to physics? It’s a physical material thing, has order to it, and is written in the universe. So why not? Sound is pressure waves traveling through air. There is no sound if there is no air. The pitch of a note is determined by its frequency, how frequently it vibrates. Pipe organs are used to display the different types of overtones there are in music. You play the main note and then other notes vary throughout where it can sound like other instruments. Flute and clarinet sound different because they’re producing different over tones.

When thinking about music in the forms of architecture, you would never think to compare the two. Renaissance artist Leon Battita Alberti, thought architectural proportions is based on comparing to harmonic relationships in music, harmonious buildings. “Architecture is frozen music.” You can look at a beautiful building, let’s say for example a church, and see shapes in the structures with beautiful designs. It is very harmonious and can be compared to that in the relationship of music. You can almost hear how beautiful it is.

The history of sampling music first started back in the 1980s. It was about borrowing another artists beat to the song into their own. But the sampling of recorded music evolved out of sound collage that started decades earlier. By sound collages, we don’t mean just instruments. It was the sounds of things like trains and mechanical noises. The Beatles’ dabbled with this with their song “Revolution 9.” The recording began as an extended ending to the album version of Lennon’s song “Revolution.” Then he, George Harrison, and Yoko Ono combined their vocals, speeches, sounds, and other short tape loops of this to come up with the longest track that the Beatles ever released. Music is way less original than we think. What is the most popular example of sampling you can think of? That’s right, a turntable for a DJ! It’s like a new form of music and it sounds cool.

In class we talked about one of the first examples of sampling known as the Mellotron. This was originally developed and built in England in the 1960s. It was an electro-mechanical keyboard that allowed musicians to play string of different instruments on tape triggered by a key. You could literally trigger like a whole string of orchestras just by pressing one key. They were first used by rock bands in the early 70s. An example where this is used is the song “Nights in White Satin” by The Moody Blues. You’re taking an instrument and making it playable by another instrument. If I was a person who knew how to play the keyboard I would not know how to play the violin. With the Mellotron I technically could. Is that cheating? This turned into a form of sampling developed using records in which artists could repurpose. They would repurpose the original sound with their own lyrics but with the exact same melody. “If you sample, you license.” Bridgeport Music case in 2005 says that if you sample anything, you have to pay to use or be sued. The Power Puff girls have to pay James Brown for using a sample in one of his songs to include in the introduction music.