moving forward with music.

Unless you have been frozen in some sort of cryogenic chamber since July of 2010, you’ve heard Katy Perry’s song, “Teenage Dream.” Whether you wanted to or not… it’s been blasted into your ears dozens of times.

Like you, I have not escaped its grasp. Personally, I think it’s a fun song, full of energy and a very catchy, beltable hook (and that “second chorus” for lack of a better term is really fun, too!). If history is any indication, somebody will want to take this opportunity to talk to comment on the appropriateness of the song for impressionable youth (it happened during my defense of “Glee”, you know… before it was “bad awful,” rather than the “fun awful” it had been before). This post is about the recording of the song and the deliberate decisions the producers made.

While I was listening to my Spotify “Party Mix”, I noticed something I had not heard before. Considering the number of times I’ve heard the song, I was surprised when I discovered something completely new.

Listen to the first two measures (headphones definitely help):

Did you notice it? That opening guitar part isn’t perfectly in time! Listen to the first couple of 8th notes and the couple of beats starting on beat two of the second measure. In case you are having a hard time hearing it, I’ve looped the first two measures a couple of times:

If you prefer visuals, here ya go. The line indicates the attack from the guitar in the left ear. Notice the placement of the attacks in the right ear. (Click to enlarge)

Why do I find this interesting?

(Read below the break for the exciting conclusion!)

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I made the above video for an undergraduate class taught by Matthew Thibeault a few years ago (actually, the class that I now teach). It’s silly, but perhaps a good demonstration of how students can demonstrate knowledge in other ways besides writing a paper. Through researching this video, interacting with the Sousa Archives, and assembling everything, I learned a LOT about Sousa. Additionally, I have used this video in classes that I have taught when introducing the man, the machine - J. P. Sousa.

If you or any of your students make another “____ in 60 Seconds” video, please let me know!

You and/or your students will learn:

• What software you can use to de-vuvuzela-tize your World Cup experience.
• How to run set-up your stereo system while watch the big game.
• Other reasons knowing how to do this might be interesting.

All apologies, but these instructions are for an Apple computer running OS X 10.5 or later. For some help with other operating systems, try here.

(I’ll update tomorrow shortly with video. You can join the Twitter feed @JaworskiMusic for the riveting footage.)

Who would have thought last Friday that we’d all know what a vuvuzela was by the following Tuesday. For those who don’t know, the vuvuzela is driving soccer (err… football) fans crazy at the World Cup in South Africa. If you watch 30 seconds of any World Cup game, you will instantly recognize the constant drone of the swarm of vuvuzelas that are being played at all times.

Some have called for the banning of the vuvuzela at the World Cup - including this creepy website [Spoiler Alert: I wouldn’t fill out any of the information on there]. The BBC has begun to entertain ways that they could provide a vuvuzela-free broadcast (basically stripping all of the crowd noise).

So, while watching the USA/England World Cup game last Saturday, my friend Bert and I began to wonder what ABC could do to remove the sound of those annoying vuvuzelas. Bert asked a very simple question:

“Why can’t ABC just remove the exact frequency of the vuvuzela?”

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