laurasseniorproject

[laurasseniorproject]

Week 11-12

Lots of writing out text and clipping video and album covers together. David gave me the idea of making all jazz songs have just the album covers, and all hip hop songs have their music video or a video of some sort to clearly differentiate and present a chronology. Otherwise, there are some jazz songs that seem like they could be the hip hop song, and it gets messy and confusing.

Trying to finish up my video. Been showing it to a lot of people and getting advice, as in if people understand it or not. Some of the transitions from song to song aren’t great so trying to make them smoother and not as abrupt.

[laurasseniorproject]

Week 8-10

The video project has grown. I keep adding songs and now am adding visuals. I want to drop in the music videos of the hip hop songs and maybe videos of the jazz artists performing. It’s really cool to see a full blown orchestra playing something, and then clip into a rap music video. Different but similar art forms. I think I want the visual to look like Spotify’s visualizer. Met with David (my advisor) and he thought my mockup looked like and seemed like some sort of a meta analysis on Spotify. He doesn’t recognize the visualizer, though.

[laurasseniorproject]

Week 7

I opened Adobe Premiere to mess around a little bit. I really geeked out when discovering the samples for my playlist that I made. Every time I listen to a sample from a song I have listened to a lot, it’s pretty insane to hear. Listening to Shirley Bassey’s Jezahel, after playing Harder Than You Think by Public Enemy every single day for 1 month straight, was an absolute trip. Public Enemy truly molded that song to make it their own, yet hearing it in a very jazzy instrumental way makes me completely reevaluate and rethink the hip hop song. It’s wild! 

But anyway, I wanted to preserve that feeling of excitement and disbelief and create an audio component. Unsure if I want to add video or what. I’ve been blending the sampled with the samples. As in, I’ve been dropping in the jazz clips, like the Shirley Bassey song, and then spending a bit of time cutting and moving to have the audio blend seamlessly from the original song to the hip hop songs, as the point at which the sample is used. It’s a lot of replaying and replaying and timing, but it’s very fun to do. 

[laurasseniorproject]

Weeks 3-6

Here is my final paper. 

I found a large amount of information about rap, jazz, jazz rap, sampling, and copyright. It was a lot of digging to find the material I needed. I began my paper examining copyright law as I had no idea what I wanted to make and was just interested in the subject of jazz rap and sampling, which is inflicted with a lot of copyright issues.

Then, I began to look at sampling specifically, and how jazz vs. rap is regarded in society. Jazz is seen as very high brow, very bougie, and rap is seen as the complete opposite, yet they are both immensely intertwined and similar int heir structure, and mutually dependent on one another. It’s fascinating. 

Finally, I looked at the R.A.P. - Rap Analysis Project that some students at U.C. Berkeley did. It’s a series of data visualizations that made me think I should veer in that path.

[laurasseniorproject]

Week 2: Brainstorming

Project topic is on hip hop sampling and music sampling in general, touching upon appropriation versus sampling, and the history behind it

What is the difference between appropriation and sampling? When did sampling begin in modern music? What is the sociology and anthropology behind music sampling? What specific types of genres are sampled? What was happening during that time and does it intersect with what is happening now? History repeats itself

How might data visualization and the intersection between sampling and archeology intersect? Are there common themes? Locations? Are large archeology scenes situated in cities or out of cities? Is hip hop sampling situated in similar urban areas?

To point paper and project, is there another societal experience that mimics sampling? Similar to academic citation.

Project positioned on data visualization, design, potentially a website

Studying various musicians that are known for sampling, as well as the artists who were sampled and the time periods (i.e. jazz in the early 1900s)

[laurasseniorproject]

Week I: Hunch

I began thinking of ideas for my senior project by writing down a hunch. I had a couple: extinction and music sampling. I connected extinction to bones and how they bring us a sense of revival and unearth something that we did not know happened. We find them underground and work on them to piece together a history we keep on discovering. My other hunch is music sampling, drawn from my passion of hip hop music and the power of good sampling. It reminds us of older artists like James Brown and Funkadelic, bringing them into a new sphere of music and adding layers to their already treasured works. These thoughts led me back to extinction, because it’s all about the revival of old stuff. Whether it be from the 1970′s or 100 million years ago, we are constantly rediscovering and uncovering and reexamining artifacts from our past. 

I seek to either connect these two or examine one of them more thoroughly. I want to have some sort of accessibility feature in my final project because I’m passionate about accessibility in art and technology (i.e. sound and visuals). I want to consider the various forms I can make this into, and I hope for this project to leave a lasting mark in people’s minds.