I like to think about the movement of people as being the sort of key drive behind sounds evolving, and so throughout history, you need to live in your village, your town, and you'd have access to what was happening there. But the second you went to a bigger city, all of a sudden you get inspiration and access to a whole different circle of musical activity. And if we'd like to listen to a recent example, I'd like to start off with a group from Southern Morocco, from a small village in Southern Morocco called Archach. And this is a song, Agharass Agharass. This is from the early '90s I believe, and then 15 years later, I've got a version of the same song made by a Moroccan expat living in Paris. And you'll hear all sorts of, you'll hear auto tune and vocal processing. You'll hear drum machines and synthesizers, and most importantly, the sort of the spare kind of country aspect of the first song that's present in this one, but then you'll hear other different types of Moroccan music and Moroccan rhythm patterns overlaid. So, it's kind of this pan-Maghrebi take on it that makes sense to this Moroccan, who's been based in Paris for a long time. So, this is Wary Sallama versioning Achach's Agharass Agharass. And what I really like also about this panning in addition to its kind of musical beauty is, often when people think of migrations, they have this one track mind of migration across continents or nations, right? When the largest migration in our generation is actually within one country, it's the Chinese migration, right? From the rural to urban. So, by you highlighting this example of rural-urban musical exchange, we're actually thinking about this kind of very large migratory process. Since we're talking about the movement of music and people, one of the contemporary flash points for that is refugees, just a factor of life. But this idea that for people living in a very precarious situation, what sort of music can they carry with them? How does that music relate to conceptions of home security and nation that might contradict or tell a different story to the geopolitical narratives. At a very basic level, how to hold on to sounds as you go through the world, often with a very little means. And here's a recording I'd like to share that a colleague of mine, Rebecca Wolf, recorded at one of the refugee camps on the Greek islands in 2016. So, this is at the Moravia camp, and it's a Kurdish saz player. Now, most of the other refugees showed up there with no instruments at all. So, she had a lot of a cappella recordings, but this gentleman had a saz, a beautiful metal stringed instrument. And here, you'll hear him performing to one of the groups of after hours socializing that happens and exposed a window into a sound world, and it's an idea to think about the crisis of refugees, humanitarian crisis but from a sonic perspective, around ideas of shared memories, shared enjoyment and transforming a space via music. As people move, travel, migrate, they travel, as you've already shown us, with their musical traditions, in languages, but they travel literally with sound, right? And in our times, that is taken on a huge digital dimension. So, how does digital sound travel. Yeah. The main driver is something called compression. So, an MP3 takes a much larger, kind of full resolution audio file, and crushes it down into something very small that you can download or send to a phone quite easily. An it does that by a process called perceptual coding, which says we're going to, it creates an algorithm that analyzes, and the least important bits of the sound have their information reduced. And so, scientists in Germany developed the algorithm that did that. One of their touchstone tracks was Suzanne Vega's a cappella, Tom's Diner, that soft and sensitive human voice almost everything seemed important. So, once they got the MP3 of the a cappella sounding good, they said, "Okay. We can release this into the public." There's a piece I would like to listen to now which is a sound artist named Ryan Maguire, who created a composition called Modernists. So, he went in, re-engineered what was omitted from the original Tom's Diner as it got compressed from a full audio file down to a tiny MP3, and he used that to make a new song, just carrying the traces and the tiny bits of sonic residue that were literally removed from the original file of Tom's Diner. In a way they were literally silenced. As one of our elements assigned, we would be getting, Exactly. That previous lectures. We were thinking about not just what is silence, but what has been silenced through the digital process. There is also this silencing. So, yeah. Let's listen to it. Okay. Within the different academic fields like Semiotics but also Anthropology, there has been a lot of interesting work done around what some people call Think Theory, but specifically also Circulation Theory, right? The idea of how, not just ideas circulated but how objects circulate, and how that creates meaning. So, we have this idea that we wanted to talk about Distributional Aesthetics, right? So, it does have to do with circulation. But what is a Distributional Aesthetics? Yeah. For me, it's the notion that how your music travels if you're an artist, or how you receive, how you first discovered music, how you enjoy it. That all shapes the social meaning of any given song or piece of music. The difference between a vinyl record heard in a gigantic club with a thousand people versus streaming to your cellphone versus whatever it happens to be. All of those layers of mediation changed the meaning of the sounds you're receiving. So, one of my favorite examples of this is something that Kanye West did a few years ago with a track called New Slaves. So, it's a single for his upcoming album. He said, "Well. Okay, we're living in the Selfie era. We're living in the Instagram era. I'm going to project this song, the video for this song at 66 different locations all across the world." So, you couldn't buy it. There's no online version. But what you have with this projection was thousands of fans all over the world taking cell phone videos, capturing audio, and you got this wonderfully distributed to the cacophony of sounds that was all about New Slaves which was Kanye West track against consumerism. So, he said, "I'm going to put something unbuyable at least for a few months into the world and distribute it in such a way that how the people come to the track will reinforce the core themes of the song. Just like within this idea of blurring art in everyday life which keeps coming up in our MOOC series, there's also the idea of social movements and democratization, right? So, is there, would you say a democratizing kind of strand within this Distributional Aesthetics? Or is it really mostly a formal approach, Yes. To how we think about sounds? Yeah. I think it's democratizing insofar as it puts the onus on the listener. It gives the listener responsibility. Say like, you can listen ethically. Your choices on how you consume or how you interact with this music really makes a difference not only for the livelihood of the musicians but for the sort of greater cultural sphere that is music and its enjoyment and its discussion.
