“Voice”

1. The article proposes that any narrative communication can and should be looked at rhetorically, through the lens of the authors attempt to generate response from readers. It imagines “voice” as a synthesis of style (diction and syntax), tone (a speaker’s attitude toward an utterance) and values (ideological and ethical), and specifies that it is likely that these elements play different roles in different kinds of speech. When I use these findings, I would like to expand her definitions to be more broad, so that we can use these words as a basis for rhetorical conversation about music and speech of all types, including instrumental music

Gucci Gang

1. This song, made by rapper Lil Pump and produced by BigHead, was undoubtedly one of the biggest songs in the second half of 2017, and in the hip hop community was quite polarizing, due to its glorification of materialism and drug culture. However controversial it is, it an example of seminal expression in modern hip-hop, and it is popular, so I plan to use this as an example to test my model of rhetorical musical expression.

Genius video on Young Thugger

1. This video by the people behind the website Lyric Genius is an interesting look at what makes Young Thug, an artist known for slurring his words to the point many are not able to discern the specific meaning, as well as using many made up words as ad-libs. The video uses a linguistic point of view to attempt to explain why many people connect with Thug’s music even though they do not understand the lyrics. A linguist says that Young Thug’s speech is very emotional and informal, which makes it authentic, and that listeners can infer the attitude from his tone of voice. I think that this source is a great example of Style as more important the Values, which is different than we traditionally think about music, but it shows that music can utilize many different characteristics.

Why is Major Happy?

1. In this video, Bassist and Music Theorist Adam Neely asks the question: Why is major happy? The answer has a lot do to with “brightness”. Because wider intervals are percieved as “brighter”, the major chord’s large major third interval causes it so sound happy. However, he warns, brightness does not equal happiness. In fact, the major triad sounds happy because it has just the right amount of brightness. At the end of the video he demonstrates how context often determines how we percieve these sounds,by making minor chords sound happy and major chords sound sad. This is a great demonstration of how important large and small music contexts are to music, which is something I want to bring into my essay when we talk about expectationss vs reality in music.

Transforming Noise into Music

1. “Music is fundamentally the balance between predictability and variability” In this TED talk, UND student and electronic musician Jackson Jhin asks the question “What differentiates music from noise” and uses this context to explore what makes us enjoy music more than noise. He then goes on to imagine all music falling somewhere on a spectrum between predictability and variability. This talk drives at the heart of what I want to do with my rhetorical construct: combine it with the idea of antipaction, tension and release, to show how music is exciting. I want my rhetorical construct to be the lower-level basic for the type of tension/release, predictability/variability ideas that Jhin brings up.

Musician Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty

1. In this video, Musician Jacob Collier explains the concept of harmony in 5 levels of depth, from a elementary school kid to legendary jazz musician Harbie Hancock. In the video he explains harmony in a way less centered on music theory, which is how is traditionally presented, and more on a way that is easier to understand for the common person. To do this he references the idea of musical “home” and being varying distances away from it depending on the feeling of the music.

Experimental Vs Accessible

Rap Critic Reviews

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X2V4IMd9Tg

2. The Rap Critic is a music reviewer who mainly focuses on lyrical and rhetorical critics of modern hip -hop and rap songs. In his extensive reviews he has shown that he preferes lyricism over most other aspects of music, and is well known for becoming exhasperated at what he percieves to be the overuse of certain tropes in rap music. I think The Rap Critic fits well with what I want to do because he does a good job of of connecting Style(Diction and Syntax) to the ideas of the identity and artist behind them. Of Course most of the pieces of the puzzle connect to each other, and this is a great exampe of one of those.

Jacob Collier Music Theory Interview

1. In this interview, musical phenom Jacob Collier talks about a wide variety of topics, including many details about harmony and music theory, but also touches on more abstract topics like emotion vs information in music. I love thw way that Jacob talks about musical choices in terms of how they feel as opppsed to how they are traditionally thought to feel in traditional harmony

Analysis Of Dolphin Shoals Sax Solo

1. In this video, 8 Bit Music Theory analyses a solo by Kazuki Katsuta on the track “dolphin shoals” from the Mario Kart 8 soundtrack. In the video, he first breaks down the “interest curve” of the song, showing how different progressions use tension to create varying levels of interest at certain times. He then compares the solo to the form of the song, and shows how the soloist constructs the solo to match the interest curve of the song, which is similar to a “narrative” interest curve often seen in books. This is a great example of “Syntax” and is also a great example of the connection between analysis of written speech and of musical speech.”