Recorded along JFK street while walking slowly down a few blocks. Even though "something's going on", the clip starts with some everyday sounds of the street corners of Harvard Square: crosswalk signals, people asking for and lighting cigarettes, conversations, and goofy noises. These more mundane rhythms are contrasted with the different, explicitly musical and not ordinary sounds of the end of the Honk parade. A set of quick edits highlight different voices, languages and, possibly, different perspectives on the parade: cops, children, English, Spanish. Finally, right in the middle of a performance that seems to overshadow ordinary street sounds, the traffic signal cuts through. Normally regulating movement, this rhythm is doubly out of place; its groove clashes with the parade's music, as well as with its temporary re-ordering of physical and social space.

Soundscape

The voice is often used as a symbol of personal interaction. In early descriptions of radio, the feeling of such interaction and indeed of intimacy through the radio was often dependent on speech and the voice. In this exercise, I have edited short clips of radio recordings taken on October 14 and 15 in Allston, MA. The resulting mix produces a simulated radio world that is all talk, all voices speaking in different registers, different levels of excitement, and different languages. The listener's relationship to the various voices depends on many markers of identity - religious, political, linguistic, sports, etc.  This collage is thus a reflection on the limits of radio voices to convey intimacy.

Radio

To make the backbone of this beat, I used drum sounds from Funky Drummer and Apache. Bass and snare, cut and dried, make a mechanical skeleton for the other samples. The two pieces I used for the other samples are "A Gızım" and "Osmanağa" from Arif Sağ's "Davullar Çalınırken", and feature (prominently) saz, davul, and zurna. I detuned these samples, partly so they would fit into the mix better, and partly to disassociate them from their original recording contexts in my mind. (For "Osmanağa", the original piece is in a slow 9, making cutting it into 4-beat pieces challenging. Larger pieces of "A Gızım" could be used because it is in 4.) I alternated between my chopped-up beat alone and larger chunks of the davul pieces to experiment with recontextualization and perceptions of strong and weak beats.

Project 3

A mashup of Barış Manço's "Domates Biber Patlican" and Can's "Vitamin C". I picked these two tracks for no other deeper reason than that they somewhat fit, and that "Vitamin C" comes from an album called "Ege Bamyasi" (Aegean Okra in Turkish). An album title that references Turkish vegetables and a Turkish song about vegetables (well, about love, but prominently featuring vegetables) seemed like a good enough mix. I had to decide which song to alter more; since "Domates Biber Patlıcan" is a bit more traditionally structured, I used it more or less unchanged. Can pops in and out of prominence, mostly adding a beat throughout.

Domates in a can

Christmas music is a strange genre of American pop music, unique in its seasonal nature, its religious reference, and its overlap with many other genres. Other than subject matter, Christmas songs are often marked by musical features. Flipping through the radio these past few weeks, I was struck by how I could immediately identify a Christmas station based on a few sounds, but could not precisely define what makes a song "Christmasy". In this mix, I put together music that is solidly Christmas/seasonal (honestly, though, they're pretty explicitly only about Christmas) with other songs that share a Christmas feature (jingle bells) but are not Christmas songs. I tried to pick some of the most egregiously Christmasy songs I could - songs that, I imagine, would rarely be played except at the end of the year (and that, personally, I find bafflingly irritating). 

Bells

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9PpNDv-4Qk

Hi, and thanks for listening. I'm Jon Withers, and I'd like to talk a bit about my YouTube mashup, which you can see on my YouTube channel. Why Youtube? Well, music is never just about sound. At least, that's what I believe as an ethnomusicologist. That's part of the reason I enjoyed this project. By pasting together YouTube clips, I had a chance to point to musical elements that go beyond sound that link otherwise distant performances.

The song I used is Kalenin Bedenleri ("The Walls of the Castle" in Turkish). In every performance (well, I suppose I should say in every performance I've seen or heard), the song has an infectiously upbeat tempo and a jaunty, danceable melody. Here's the soundtrack to one of the YouTube videos I used:

Perhaps it's not really accurate or appropriate to say I mashed up different versions of this song. Alongside different performances, in Turkish, of "Kalenin Bedenleri", I also spliced in performances of a Greek-language song, "Siko Horepse Koukli Mou". Here's a recording from Greek television of that song:

Now, a "spliced" version of these two clips; I'll play two lines of the Turkish-language "Kalenin Bedenleri" and two lines from the Greek-language "Siko Horepse Koukli Mou".

Perhaps it's quite obvious that the melodies of these two songs are as close to "the same" as is meaningful. The Turkish song is considered a Türkü, or folk song, from central Anatolia. Like many türküler, the lyrics to this song are generally considered to be anonymous "folk poetry", whatever that means. The Greek lyrics were first recorded in 1958 by Stelios Kazantzidis. Along with the melody, the two songs share the chorus:

Now that I've explained, somewhat, the background for these pieces, what can we learn by putting multiple versions side by side? For one thing, by mixing together these examples, I'm inviting listeners to consider whether these are somehow "the same". In one sense, each clip is unique, regardless of whether it is in Turkish or Greek. There are very few generalizations one can make about all the Greek-language versions I have selected, or about all the Turkish-language versions. Apart from language, of course, although some of them are instrumental. Similarities and differences cross-cut the Turkish-Greek categorical distinction, especially if you look at the setting and style of the clips. 

Compare these two Greek-language clips. Quite different, no?

So I suppose one reading of my mashup might be that Kalenin Bedenleri and Siko Horepse Koukli Mou share a common YouTube existence, much like other oft-covered YouTube hits. However, my arrangement might be a bit deceiving. I did have to work somewhat to fit these clips together smoothly. For example, I had to systematically alter tunings to match pitch. The Turkish pieces tended to be in a key of A, and the Greek pieces tended to be in D. I'm not alone in forcing these pieces to blend together; I know of several Turkish artists who have recorded this song with alternating Turkish and Greek lyrics, and I imagine there are similar examples by Greek musicians. I don't want to pin down exactly what blending these songs, whether by me or anyone else, means. I hope, though, that the juxtaposition allows for different ways of thinking about what makes a song "the same". 

jonswithers