fascinating
have you heard of radiolab? it's a show from wnyc that is absolutely brilliant. with each show, i feel like my life has changed, literally. i just listened to a show about music that you HAVE to listen to (you can listen online or download the podcasts). there are a few stories, each about how music affects us physiologically and psychoemotionally, like how when listeners first heard stravinsky's rite of spring, their ears had never heard anything remotely like it and the response was a literal riot at the concert hall. why? because our neurons compensate for jarring sounds/intervals by trying to "make them right" (make them less dissonant) and in doing so, release dopamine, which is a chemical that, though it imparts a sense of pleasure, is also responsible for schizophrenia in larger amounts. so that audience had a collective (temporarily) schizophrenic reaction, but subsequent audiences - even those who heard the piece less than a year later - had been conditioned to those types of sounds (and were prepared for what they'd hear) and could then hear them as ordered and even pleasant. no rebelling neurons!
another story is about this woman who specializes in the psychology of music who discovered that people who speak tone languages (mandarin, vietnamese), where one word can have different meanings by slightly altering its pronunciation, would say the same words, no matter when they said them (days apart, weeks apart) at the exact same pitches, always. then she found that in these cultures, about 74% of people have perfect pitch, most likely because of their language and how it's spoken. and it brings up questions about how much more we're capable of via cultural exposure. because this perfect pitch, or even relative pitch, is culturally-based, and not a genetic fluke, like we think it to be (in this country, only one out of every 10,000 has perfect pitch).
i think it's a must for all musicians and non-musicians alike*.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21
*then again, i'm speaking to myself here. [chirp chirp chirp]
another story is about this woman who specializes in the psychology of music who discovered that people who speak tone languages (mandarin, vietnamese), where one word can have different meanings by slightly altering its pronunciation, would say the same words, no matter when they said them (days apart, weeks apart) at the exact same pitches, always. then she found that in these cultures, about 74% of people have perfect pitch, most likely because of their language and how it's spoken. and it brings up questions about how much more we're capable of via cultural exposure. because this perfect pitch, or even relative pitch, is culturally-based, and not a genetic fluke, like we think it to be (in this country, only one out of every 10,000 has perfect pitch).
i think it's a must for all musicians and non-musicians alike*.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21
*then again, i'm speaking to myself here. [chirp chirp chirp]