Posts Tagged ‘Musician’
The Science Behind The Music: “I Know Nothing About Music”
September 21st, 2009
Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night"
Music is everywhere. It is used to evoke our emotions everyday, wherever you are. Advertisers use music to make a pair of jeans, a six-pack of beer, or a new car model seem more hip and cool than their competitors’. Filmmakers use music to tell us exactly how we should feel about scenes that might otherwise seem ambiguous, or to heighten our emotions at a certain dramatic point.
Music is always used to manipulate our emotions, and people enjoy it. We accept it and thrive with it. But people who still love music insist that they know nothing about it. Music theorists have a mysterious set of terms and rules that are as odd and complicated as some of the most intense studies of highly advanced mathematics.
In the eyes of a “nonmusician,” the tiny black spots and lines and squiggles of musical notation just may as well be notation of highly advanced mathematics. And yet, you don’t have to know how to read musical notation to know what kind of music you like.
Most of us have a practical knowledge of what we like. You may be a huge hip-hop fan, memorizing the lyrics, practicing in front of your mirror, driving and nodding your head to the beat of the music… but you may, in fact, know nothing (or very little) about musical notation.
I know that I like the artistic works of Vincent Van Gogh. I can often spot or even guess his paintings even before I’ve looked at the artist’s name because I like his style, but I could never paint such a beautiful masterpiece, knowing how to mix each colour on the pallet, use specific brushes, or conjure up such a imaginative scene in my mind and transfer it onto a canvas. Still, I appreciate Van Gogh as one of my favourite painters.
People become intimated by what they don’t know, and it’s a shame that many people are so intimidated by the jargon that musicians’ theorists, and cognitive scientists throw around.
An unnatural gap has developed between those who love music, and those who are discovering new things about how music works.
Music remains to be a mystery in many ways. If we all hear music the exact same way, how can we account for our widely different preferences in music? Why does someone prefer Limp Bizkit over the Beastie Boys, but another prefers the Beastie Boys over Limp Bizkit?
In the last few years, the human mind has been opened up as the field of neuroscience exploded with new approaches in psychology, new brain-imaging technologies, and drugs which are able to manipulate neurotransmitters.
Thanks to the continuous advancements in computer technology, we are coming to understand computational systems in the human brain like never before. Language is practically nailed into our brains, and consciousness itself is something that comes from observational physical systems.
Until now, no one has take all of this together and used it to comprehend humanity’s must beautiful and mysterious obsession: music. It is indeed, one of the deepest mysteries of human nature.
Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:
Look out for my fifth article on The Science Behind The Music. Here, we’ll start asking questions like, “Is listening to music the same as eating when you’re hungry, like satisfying an urge? Or is it like watching the sunset or going for a spa massage, triggering a sense of pleasure?” Look out for article number five!
Posted in The Science Behind The Music | 
Tags: Cognition, Cognitive, Emotion, Human Brain, Music, Musician, Nonmusician, Science, Theorist | 
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The Science Behind The Music: Human Curiousity
August 29th, 2009
Do you ever wonder WHY you love playing the piano so much? Listening to piano music? Or just music in general?
Since the beginning of time, human beings have been trying to understand the world by looking at past trends, historic events, and evidence that can be documented by our five common senses of hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, and feeling.
Over the last 200 years, human curiosity has revealed much about what, when, where, and why nature acts in a given scenario. This is called science. We now have hundreds different scientific theories about the compositions of matter, the make-up of biological DNA, the revolving planets in space, the behaviours of animals, and so on and so forth.
Although human beings have solved hundreds upon thousands of questions throughout the years, there is still one that has not been solved.
How does the human brain create thoughts, feelings, hopes, desires, love, and the experience of beauty?
Much of this is done through artistic creation: dance, visual art, literature, and music.
But what IS music?
Why do some combinations of sounds and harmonization create feelings and senses of bliss and beauty? Other combinations of sound such as someone running their fingers down a chalkboard makes most of us cringe and cover our ears.
In school, art and science are taught as two different subjects, and as we grow up, we see them as two completely different things. Art is indescribable, unjustifiable, different amongst different people’s tastes, and sometimes crazy. Science is uniform, evident, theoretical, and justifiable.
Art and science actually share more similarities than one may think. A musician’s studio and a scientist’s laboratory both have large numbers of projects happening at once, in certain stages of incompletion. Both require specialized equipment and materials and the end results are open to interpretation.
What artists and scientists have in common is the ability to live in a completely open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretation of the products of their work.
In essence, the work of both artists and scientists is the journey and pursuit of truth, even though both an artist and a scientist know that the nature of truth is contextual and can change, depending on one’s point of view. Today’s truth may become tomorrow’s miscalculation, mistake, or lie.
For the artist, the goal of their music or artistic creation is not to communicate literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that can keep moving and touching people even if societies, cultures, and contexts change over time.
And for the scientist, the goal of a scientific theory is to convey the truth as it stands today, to replace an old truth and accepting that someday, this theory may also be replaced by a new theory with advancements in science.
Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:
I’m not done with this topic yet, so don’t even think that I’m done here. This is going to be a very long series of articles kept in the category “The Science Behind The Music” located on my blog. Stay tuned for my next article to find out more.
Posted in The Science Behind The Music |
Tags: Art, Artist, Musician, Science, Scientist, Sound |
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