Music To My Ears? Assignment #2

As a musician, whenever I need some advice or troubleshooting with a problem I’m having, I consult the plethora of forums that are available on the web. Probably the most useful is FutureProducers.com. On this site there are the typical forums with threads where users can post questions, answers, comments or anything else they feel like contributing. There is also an option to send somebody a private message, or ‘PM’; this is the feature that I chose to utilize for this assignment.

I am one half of the local hip-hop group TynovA & Kwest. After completing our first full-length album, we chose to invest in a new microphone. The mic we had before was decent and got the job done, but we decided to upgrade. I had recently been having a little trouble configuring the new mic’s settings to our liking, so I decided I should navigate the FutureProducers forum in search of answers. This turned out to be the perfect chance to do my research for this assignment, while possibly solving my problem at the same time.

I decided to search the forum looking for another person who had used the same microphone, and my quest turned out to be successful. This user had talked about the microphone in the past, so I figured he might be able to help me. I had never spoken to him before, but his user name and location gave something away to me; I realized I knew who this person was - to a certain extent. In the past I had heard some material from a relatively well known hip-hop group from Milwaukee. Their music sounded really good, and I deduced that this user happened to be a member of said group. I never disclosed to him that I was aware of this, thus insuring that he wouldn’t alter his personality or responses.

When I first initiated the conversation, I told him of my dilemma and asked if he had any advice or if he could help in any way. His response was thorough and extremely helpful. He was courteous and polite and relayed his past experiences to me. He also gave me tips on how to maximize the microphone’s performance, going into great detail about some of the technical points. He was very open and very helpful. I probably could have ended the conversation there, but I decided to ask him some more advice. I picked his brain about the mastering process and we talked a little bit about our experiences with making our first albums. Overall he was extremely thorough and provided me with a abundance of information, while asking nothing in return.

I would categorize the interaction that took place under the Social Identity Deindividuation Theory. While my ‘friend’ and I seemed to get along very well and had a lot in common, this could easily have been the result of having minimal cues. The musical context of our discussion is what most likely attracted his interest to help me and with little other information about me, led him to go in-depth and to be very helpful. We met through this common interest, and with no negative cues to be received, we developed a possibly exaggerated sense of similarity.

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