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Science and music series
sara abdulla
Thursday, 05 June 2008 13:48 UTC
Nature’s weekly Essay series on Science and Music is exploring what the latest research has to say about music – what it is, why we make it, how we make it, why we listen to it and how it is changing. Experts working at the interface between science and music discuss how the latest developments in physics, psychology, materials science, information science, neuroscience and anthropology might give us new answers to these ancient questions. What do you think?
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Replies
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I am a performing classical musician and would like to contribute how I understand music to relate to the scientific mode of human thought . Music as a temporal art form acts on the mind in a dynamic way. It is the changes that illicit a nervous response in an organism. The media of music is waveform of air pressure, like all wave forms it has a vertical component (frequency) and a horizontal (time) component. In music this is harmony and rhythm. This is akin to the relation ship of time and space and it is this property of music that gives its powerful ability to evoke emotional response. It is interesting that each culture has developed a musical language that is very often unique. Equal tempered 12 note scales are a feature of western music. This frequency based device uses a restricted pallet of sounds to create a musical language. It is a subset of all possible palettes. Consider that in particularly Asiatic forms of music that the pallet has been created in a completely different way (consider Indian raga). Also the creation of Rock and roll as a combination of western frequency based tools with African time based tools.
To appreciate different musical structures involves mapping one musical language on to another. The simple fact that people with a western understanding of musical structures can, with effort and education, be fully appreciative of the beauty of other musical structures demonstrates the evolutionary importance of music. It is a way to solidify social cohesion. It is this property of music, its ability to shift the mind, create new neuronal pathways and communicate the unsayable that makes it such a powerful phenomena. -
Simply Listening To Music Affects One’s Musicality
“More and more labs are showing that people have the sensitivity for skills that we thought were only expert skills. It turns out that mere exposure makes an enormous contribution to how musical competence develops.”
See for more information Science Daily .
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