On April 9, 2018, our HIST 390 class talked about sound, pitch, and various other sound-based and music industry terminology and trivia.  For starters, sound is pressure waves traveling through the air, and, when one can visibly see them, resemble ripples in water.  The pitch of a note is determined by “frequency” and how frequently it vibrates.  Overtones are harmonic sequences and are the reason why instruments sound different from one another.  Harmonic intervals are so important that they are actually built into the strings of a guitar, having physical proportions embedded into the very string.  Different combinations of notes determine different chords (chords being comprised of three notes, a root note and notes a third and a fifth away from said root note).  Vinyls were made by recording songs into wax, though by the 1950s, music was quickly switching to recording to tape.  Despite advancements into musical technology and hardware, however, there was ultimately a limit to all of it that those behind the scenes had to be careful of for one reason or another.  For one thing, producers had to account for the physical and amount of energy that their physical music products could handle.  And even then, they had to constantly remember that people, on average, could only her up to 20,000 hertz and nothing higher.  The switch to digital and analogue made things a bit easier, however, to fit these limitations.

While I could understand why our HIST 390 class would at least take a moment to talk about these concepts, when placed side by side, one after another like this, it really ended up feeling like a bit of a disjointed lecture.  It felt like we were going from one fact to another, as if following a checklist, and while the professor can actually do a pretty good job at making everything seem connected and intertwined with one another (which, to be honest, they probably were), when looking back at my notes about this particular lecture, I immediately became confused as to what the main idea of the entire thing was.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with sound, hearing, and music industry trivia, but as far as I can recall, and as far as I can tell from my own notes, it just seemed like a lecture with a very hard to pinpoint focus.  While I may certainly concede that this may be my own fault (and it probably is), having a lecture all about aspects of sound and then another part of the lecture being about the way the music industry and its physical products ultimately felt like two different lectures jammed into one.  Then again, we did lose a day in class due to the professor attending some personal matters, so maybe it was.