They say that music can alter a child’s brain. There are few activities that connect all the senses. (ie) Your hand touches a chord (say an interval fifth - in music that is placing your fingers on a one and a five) You can see the chord, hear the chord and feel the chord. All you are missing is tasting and smelling, but the emotional response to it is better than Godiva chocolate or a fragrant rose. The physical distance of the interval stimulates the brain like no other activity mathmatically. It builds a mental bridge and has qualities to enhance and drive emotion as well.
Just to bollox this up a bit, sounds are just sounds, tones are just tones. What is music lies in the intervals between the sounds. If I produce a single pure sound, it isn’t music until I produce another sound, and it is the interval between the two sounds that makes music. That the mind finds the rythyms and pulses that forms music is fairly well documented. But the exact connections with human internal rythyms that exhibit emotional response isn’t very well understood, even though we know there is some sort of connection. Much of what is ‘music’ is culturally learned. A person raised in western culture has difficulty hearing the music in Chinese opera. It doesn’t sound ‘right’. The intervals and rythyms are off to the western ear. Make’s you wonder what a chinese child hears the first time he listens to thrash metal…
There is something about music though. It seems to cause mass behavior. That could be anything from toe tapping to jumping around. I have always wondered what is going on there. I think that it’s an incredible mystery.
Well, there is a mystery to the emotional and/or cultural response, but I was referring to the question: what other activity except music can you measure the distance with your ears, your touch, and see it with your eyes. Yes, the emotional part is a mystery… but the interval that’s seen, heard, and touched is unique, and nothing but music can bridge the gap like this mathmatically. For children, it develops spatial-temporal reasoning which is helpful in math and science. Didn’t work for me, but that is in another thread.
Isn’t measuring distance all relative? Why a light year or foot candle and not a sonatina or a instumental bridge in a song? What other artistic activities have these properties that you can think of?
Music is most closely related to our emotions. It can express our feelings better than words. Music never ceases to amaze me. For example, my left hand is a dud - it can’t do anything. Try watching me throw a ball left handed and you will crack up laughing at how awkward it looks. But when I play my bass my fingers move like lightning and their placement is precise.
That’s right. Also it combines singing, playing, dancing… in wider plan it can even unite rhymes, whispering (which is actually playing). Anyway, music is great combination of all senses acting together. It is art, it is talent, it is beauty- it’s nothing you can find at the other arts, here it’s concentrated at all.
Why is it that a person with no mathmatical ability (or so they say) can be talented in music? It is the same brain power and yet one seems so different than the other… math carries for many a fear where music, which clearly takes a left brain, feels so different to the one involved in it. A left brained musician is far from a right-brained one, but the right-brained musician has the gift, I feel. In other words, you can play the piano like a droning machine cranking it out, but that doesn’t make for beautiful music. It is the connection of both sides of the brain which makes a true artist.
Also, is anyone getting what I said earlier in the thread about the phenomenon of the interval’s connection to the brain.? Maybe i need to go back to my music forum, huh?
Hm…Mainly fingers are used in different arts - making pictures, sculptures. Which other activity can you practise, using your ears?
Anyway, math skills have no commonly with musical art. Even if it’s using the same part of the brain, it doesn’t surely mean that you can do them both together. Well, I play piano and I also don’t have problems with mathematics, but have friends mathematicians with musical problems and the opposite.
It became too complex, but I hope you got my idea.
Don’t forget Vivaldi’s 4 seasons… it’s pleasure for your heart and your mind… every part of the composition describes every singular season… it’s heavenly!
I am particularly fond of Rachmaninov. His compositions are quite dark, but to me very moving. I can get lost in the Rach. Concerto No. 2 Op. 18. I love to play it, but wish I had the orchestra behind me with the violins.
I don’t want to get away from the music too far, but the interval portion of this intrigues me. Consider other arts such as painting. An impressionist painting, why do we respond to splashes of color? How do we assemble them in such pleasing ways? What is it that makes one painting good and another bad? I’m guessing that pattern recognition, at a subliminal level, is responsible for music and other arts as well. This could explain why there is playing the piano technically, and making beautiful music.
I’m ecstatic you relate to the girl in me. Actually it is you who knows heart speak. I’m practical about it.
And I’m really sorry, for me music is visual, I can’t tell you what happens technically, only how my heart is moved. I guess it happens on an energy level which for most is difficult to acknowledge much less understand. Do you know about the water crystal experiment?
I couldn’t care less how it works only that it works. Like love, I have no idea what it is, only that I feel its resonance.
on the emotion bit… I think it is because we express ourselves with sound (crying, laughter, humming, groaning, raising voice when angry, etc…)… music sort of makes manipulatable art out of the primal scream… it owns it, it uses it, it explores it… and there is no primal scream which does not move the body… built up stress (eustress or distress) must be expressed…
don’t mean to be weird, but… music is to primal scream as painting is to a kid making a huge mess of spaghetti… as dancing is to throwing oneself on the floor, pounding and kicking or exploding with jello-ish wiggles of laughter… have you ever heard the laughter of a child? – if that is not music… sigh
I loved your thoughts on the primal scream. To me music is visceral, and mood elevating/altering. I can do a complete turn-around with my mood when I rehearse in my band. There are seven of us - and we blend like brothers and sister (I am the only woman) But I can’t believe what two hours of it does for me. Playing, singing, laughing… working. If I was never paid a dime, I wouldn’t care. It is my breath; my heart beat. But I can get this way from listening to music too – from Prince to Sting, to the Rach. It all moves me and gets my blood pressure goin. Life is one big heart-song to me.
How about the theme to “A Clockwork Orange?” When I hear that moody moog I feel like embracing darkness incarnate… or accepting all that bad shit in the world.
(I am the only woman) But I can’t believe what two hours of it does for me. Playing, singing, laughing… working. If I was never paid a dime, I wouldn’t care. It is my breath; my heart beat. But I can get this way from listening to music too – from Prince to Sting, to the Rach. It all moves me and gets my blood pressure goin. Life is one big heart-song to me.