First impressions: I did not expect it to be so music oriented. I am a bit comforted by the fact that no one is a music major.

The second day was less of a lecture and more of a class discussion/analysis.

The readings were a bit confusing for me; they really jumped right to the point and assumed the reader had some background knowledge of the subject. The in-class discussion helped to clear up some of my confusion though. The argument was made that the millennial generation is responsible for the ‘death of music’ or more specifically the dynamic compression. I understood the point of using it to spark a discussion however I am very used to hearing that millennials are bad so it was exactly provocative. That being said I disagree; dynamic compression has been present since the 50’s and peaked in the 90’s and early 2000’s. That is the only style of music that millennials have been exposed to in media so there’s not much choice in what we consume. It is also almost exclusively older generations that are producing modern music.

The idea that music’s emotional content has been flattened in more recent years doesn’t seem too far off but there is also an expectation for new music to be put out at a fast pace. If you equate emotional content to quality then it can be argued that quality has been sacrificed for quantity.