20th Century Music: An American Odyssey

Music has always been a center piece of every nation, but a nation of immigrants had to grow into its own musical identity. How can America take traditions spanning from Europe to Africa and emerge with its own distinct sound? The 20^th century became the era that American music came of age.

The sounds of Jazz, Blues, Country Western, Rock & Roll, Soul, R & B, Disco, and Hip Hop all emerged in the U.S. in the 20^th Century. From Louis Armstrong to Elvis Presley to Otis Redding to Ella Fitzgerald to Aretha Franklin to Alicia Keys to Jay-Z, American music gave birth to a nation of brilliant artists, evoking these new music styles to express the America identity.

Louis Armstrong represented Jazz better than most of his contemporaries. Making a name for himself in the 1920’s, he was known as an “inventive” trumpet player whose improvised solo work and distinct gravelling singing was highly influential in the early Jazz scene.

Elvis Presley defined Rock & Roll as young, wild, and confrontational towards social norms. Mixing Blues and Country influences, he was able to take blues and country tracks and make them hits. From Arthur Crudup’s “That’s Alright Mama” to Big Mamma Thorton’s “Hound Dog,” he refined Black Blues’ music into mainstream White Pop songs.

Alicia Augello Cook, more commonly known as Alicia Keys, is a contemporary R & B artist who combines her talents as an accomplished pianist and songwriter to craft music that complements contemporary Hip Hop sounds while infusing classical piano with R&B, soul, and jazz. She cites a diversity of many great R & B artists such as Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, and Donny Hathaway.

Jay Z defined success in rap music. He is one of the most successful music artists in America. Exposed to his parent’s collection of soul artist like Marvin Gaye, Jay Z created a sound that has been described as a mastery of flow. Whether slow or fast, he blends spoken word to verse to create a style that is made up of fast rhymes and vocal deliveries.

These are some examples of some of the artist who were influenced and influence American Music. All of them helped inspire what music should song like in the U.S. The 20^th Century became the defining moment for music in America. One can only imagine how this music will continue to evolve and change into the next century and beyond.

Please enjoy the playlist from the  U.S. in the 20^th Century @ https://soundcloud.com/treamwith/sets/the-20th-century-became-the

How to Improve Driver Safety with Your SmartPhone

Whether commuting or on a road trip, your phone is always there while you drive, ready to interrupt your concentration and encourage distracted driving risks. The overabundance of apps available to smart-phones and other hand-held device are a nest of colorful diversions. Now there is a trend in app design focused on the driver and providing the opposite to the common scenario so far.

However, there are apps available to transform your Smartphone into Car Mode.

Their purpose could be described as providing information with easy visual clarity and offering an interface that relies on a minimum amount of attention and effort from the user. Some of the key function for many of these kinds of apps are:

·        Voice control

·        Odometer/Speedometer/etc.

·        Weather

·        Music/Radio

·        Google Maps Integration

·        GPS Navigation

A key ingredient to ensure the quality of these apps is their layout design as displayed on your smart phone. One of the biggest mistakes many of these apps make is that they cram too much information on a single screen. Here’s a straightforward hint about finding a quality dashboard car mode app: if you can’t figure out quickly what’s displayed on the app’s screen, then it failed.

The point of these apps is to make things simple for you to glance at while you’re driving. If there is too much happening at once, what’s the point of using such an app in the first place?

Another important ingredient is interface enhancement. Usually, the enhancement is offered via two methods: voice activation and swipe controls/large buttons. Again, what can cause these apps to fail in their purpose is an over-abundance of information on any given screen. You cannot navigate through these apps if you cannot find what you’re looking for quickly. After all, you’re driving your car while doing all this!

Voice activation solves many of these issues, but many times these features don’t function correctly and become more work than using your smart-phone normally, It always important to do your research before deciding on one of these kinds of apps.

Overall, dashboard car mode apps are a great idea and may provide a resource to increase your driving safety, instead creating unsafe disruptions. 

AALINQ Car App: Three Music Players in One for The Driver

GROM’s new car app is designed to offer music safely for drivers. With it’s with large fonts and easy swipe controls, it is designed for drivers who need to focus on the road and less on the phone. This is one aspect of this new app. 

Another is it is designed to play music. Specifically, it is three music apps in one.

On its most basic level, AALinQ plays music on your phone. It does so in the most straightforward manner. AALinQ’s interface is designed for you as the driver. It’s quick and simple. It gets you to your music quickly as you navigate through traffic.

On another level, AALinQ synchs with your online account on Google Play. This service offered by Google allows you to upload all the music on your computer library (up to 50,000 songs!), then play that library from your phone (or computer). Instead of streaming music from some internet station, you can stream your music from Google Music’s internet site. You can have your music without loading it on your phone (or other hand-held device.) The best part is you may never know the difference between either option since they are both service offered from one app—AALinQ!

On a more deferent level, AALinQ offers TuneIn’s content through its platform. TuneIn is an app (and website) that offers around 100,000 live radio stations in 230 countries & territories and around 4 million podcasts. Through AALinQ, you can access all this content through the driver-safe and easy-to-use AALinQ platform. You can save a favorite station to listen to during your commute and, exclusively through AALinQ, you can record live broadcasts for repeat listening later. This extraordinary partnership between GROM and TuneIn offers AALinQ users a great source of radio variety and the ability to save content to be heard over and over again—like a DVR for internet radio.

Most music play apps are designed to do one thing well. AALinQ, in a sense, is also designed to do one thing well—offer a platform to listen to music safely on your phone as you drive. To do this and provide a variety of sources of music, AALinQ additionally will access music content on your phone or Google Play account, or radio stations through TuneIn.

AALinQ app offers all these resources not just for the variety of content, but also to listen to that content through a safe driver-designed interface.

Please visit AALinQ page at http://gromaudio.com/aalinq/index.html. Download available on Google Play