I’m bringing out the specials that I promised in issue #100, and it’s so enjoyable to curate them. Here’s the third music special that I’ve made - the previous ones are at #43 and #61, in case you want to give them a read. By the way, I’ve planned a spate of reading of music books, and these are what I’m going to read.

### 1. Meet the Hands (and the Man) that Bring Chance the Rapper to the Deaf

This was such a great read. Matt Maxey is alongside Chance the Rapper on most of his shows, and his job is to translate the rap music for deaf listeners in the audience. He himself is deaf, so now he’s called the “deaf Kanye West”.

“What’s amazing about Matt is he’s not only bilingual, he’s bicultural,” says Kurdi, 35. “At first he felt too deaf to be hearing and too hearing to be deaf. But now it’s a huge benefit; he’s able to, for example, talk to Chance, and there’s no lull in the conversation. He’s able to talk about different hip-hop artists. He’s able to talk about whatever basketball game. And then he can go into the deaf culture, and he can connect with all of them and sign.”

2. How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming

According to the data trackers at BuzzAngle Music, more than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music .
Wow? Yes; and this means that streaming companies have their interests vested only in the top tracks in each genre - each time you listen on Spotify or Apple Music (or any streaming platform), be mindful of where your money is going, of how much money is actually going to the artists for whom making ends meet is not so clear.

3. Too Much Music: A Failed Experiment In Dedicated Listening

This was such a fun read - the author Jason Toth listens to a lot of music, so much so that he claims that the quantity of music consumed is now hampering his ability to think about music critically. He then proceeds to go on to try an experiment, where he listened to only one week each week, and only if he owned a physical copy of the album. The challenge failed, but again, this is something to be mindful about. My personal view is that there’s always a fear of missing out on great content, but there’s always going to be good music to find, and this comforts me.

And then one day, a revelation: It occurred to me that it was no longer just difficult to hear all the music I’d amassed, but impossible . I mean literally, mathematically impossible: I calculated that if I lived another, say, 40 years, and spent every minute of those next 40 years — that’s no sleeping, no eating — listening to my collection of music, I would be dead before I could make it all the way through. That means there are records I own today that I will definitely never hear again . It was a sobering thought. Toward the end of David Foster Wallace’s 2001 short story “Good Old Neon,” the narrator recognizes the “state in which a man realizes that everything he sees will outlast him.” With one single calculation, made on a whim, I had placed myself in this very state.

4. A Primer on Weird Vinyl Design

Innovative vinyl designs - this was great! Records made of wood, ice, chocolate (!), dye-filled vinyls, everything. This, however was my favourite, an animation created by the rotation of the record.

5. A Dentist-Turned-Horticulturalist Made a Record Just for Plants

Sir JC Bose, in the early 1900s, performed experiments that proved that music affected the growth of plants. In 1970, George Milstein put out this record, which he said that your plants would have to listen to for 45 minutes a day.

6. The New Old-Time

Loved reading this account of being at the Annual Mount Airy Fiddlers Convention, a mismatched but near-perfect celebration of the American old-time folk music. I love this music, and I really loved reading about the stories here.

“I learned all my tunes from warm hands,” he said. He reached under his seat and produced a typed, five-page list of the tunes he knew. “There’s probably stories about all them tunes that I can, if I had the time to, tell, about where I learned ’em and who I learned ’em from.” He picked one at random, “Ragtime Annie,” and told a long, rambling tale about a jam session at a local fiddler’s house; how, halfway through, the fiddler’s son came stumbling in from the back room, drunk as a skunk and naked as a jaybird, wearing only a bedsheet he had thrown over his shoulder. The entire circle of musicians dissolved into laughter.

7. The Prehistory of Music

But when we get down to the way in which music itself functions from note to note, from measure to measure, from moment to moment, and the way we process music, it is fundamentally not about symbols. It’s about the relationship of indexes with one another. It is about what this tonal gesture, or this metrical moment, or this rhythmic gesture leads us to expect. It’s about a sign pointing toward something that might be in fact forthcoming. Or it might not be—we might be denied it, and that sense of expectation not fulfilled is hugely important in musicking. People like to talk about music as a language, but it’s not a language that works with symbols; it is a language that works in highly elaborated, hugely complex ways with indexes.

8. The Problem with Muzak

Great read about playlists, Spotify, and the music industry.

But Spotify’s worth is more ephemeral. Its value—what makes it addictive for listeners, a necessity for artists, and a worthwhile investment for venture capitalists—lies in its algorithmic music discovery “products” and its ability to make the entire music industry conform to the new standards it sets. This means one thing: playlists are king, and particularly the ones curated by Spotify itself. An unprecedented amount of data (“skip rates” and “completion rates” determine whether a song survives) and “human-machine technology” are deployed to quantify your tastes . This is what lies behind the “magic” of Spotify.
8.1
Speaking of playlists, I highly recommend my friend Bhavika’s playlist newsletter. It’s called Jukebox Mash, and she puts out playlists that are carefully curated, ordered and mercilessly perfected. You should give it a shot - my personal favorites are #15 (the Indian independent music scene in the 60s/70s) and #8 (Songs For A Monday After A Sunday). (Such deliciously tempting prompts, yes?)

9. The Rise of the Hologram Rock Star

_The holographic tour has arisen for two reasons. The first is technology. Rock-star holograms are based on an old carnival trick known as Pepper’s Ghost – named after John Henry Pepper, who demonstrated the effect in 1862 – in which an image is projected on to a piece of glass and then reflected to appear in a given area of the stage, where it seems to float in thin air.

The second reason is economic necessity. Over the past decade, record sales have plummeted. In the ten years to 2014, they dropped from £1.2bn to £700m in Britain. That has made the money generated by live performance more important to record companies – especially those with dead artists on their books, who won’t record new work._

10. Letter of Recommendation: Choir

I feel an additional pleasure, though, greater than flow, when I sing in a choir. It’s a mode of singing that strikes a balance between feeling necessary — each voice must participate to achieve the grand unified sound — and feeling invisible, absorbed into the choir, your voice no longer yours. I can work hard, listen hard and disappear, let the ocean of sound close over me. It is comforting to disappear into all that sound and to know that no one else will hear me, either. The performance feels like a secret.

11 , and### 12. The Serious Silliness of The Beatles’ ‘I Am the Walrus’ 50 Years Later and [A Hard Day’s Night:

Solving a Beatles mystery with mathematics](http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-11-05/a-hard-days-night-how-mathematics-revealed-beatles-secret/9093348)
Never complete without the Beatles, amirite?

That’s it. Phew, it’s been fun. Send back interesting stuff if you have any, and as always, I’d love to hear back from you about anything; just reply to this email.

Best,
Kat