Jenni Ajderian

     Far be it from me to blog about language or music, but while trying to trawl through reading for an essay about a spectrogram, I came across a remix by Rizzle Kicks where they do something pretty interesting with their sample track. In this case, Lily Allen's The Fear is cut so that the phrase "I don't care about clever, I don't care about funny" loses its last syllable.      The effect of the loss of the final '-nny', makes a non-word which the rappers employ in place of the word 'fuck'. By taking away this, they've essentially just taken away the release of the [n] stop, which we interpret as being a voiceless stop. Rizzle Kicks - Fuck Loadsa Dubstep (Lily Allen Mix)      Let me explain      What is said and what we hear are two different things. Advertisers (notably that awful Irn Bru ad) have used this to their advantage, which, in a lot of cases, involves us filling in the blanks for ourselves. In the case of...

(originally published by The Student )      Watch any western, any black-and-white adventure film, any rags-to-riches adaptation, and you'll realise we've seen this all before. The guy gets the girl, the evil tyrant falls and the True King rises, be it Middle Earth or the Mid-West. We've seen these scenes repeated across time and space, and we know how it goes. Without the speech, the scene still goes the same way. New film The Artist proves this, without saying a word. Aside from the picture-perfect cast and a dog which will reach cult celebrity status any day now, the film addresses the transition between '20s movies and '30s talkies, and a sparse use of sound which offers a challenge to the film-makers.      In one scene, uncharacteristically static, a pair of old friends meet and greet, swap stories, laugh- the details, irrelevant, are replaced by an emotive score and some close camera-work, all of which makes us feel no less connected to the...