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kushnerha

New Ways Into the Brain's 'Music Room' - The New York Times - 5 views

www.nytimes.com/...nto-the-brains-music-room.html

new york times music brain science research language

shared by kushnerha on 08 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago — 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux.
  • And though the survival value that music held for our ancestors may not be as immediately obvious as the power to recognize words, Dr. Rauschecker added, “music works as a group cohesive. Music-making with other people in your tribe is a very ancient, human thing to do.”
  • devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.
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  • “Why do we have music?” Dr. Kanwisher said in an interview. “Why do we enjoy it so much and want to dance when we hear it? How early in development can we see this sensitivity to music, and is it tunable with experience? These are the really cool first-order questions we can begin to address.”
  • Dr. McDermott said the new method could be used to computationally dissect any scans from a functional magnetic resonance imaging device, or F.M.R.I. — the trendy workhorse of contemporary neuroscience — and so may end up divulging other hidden gems of cortical specialization. As proof of principle, the researchers showed that their analytical protocol had detected a second neural pathway in the brain for which scientists already had evidence — this one tuned to the sounds of human speech.
  • Importantly, the M.I.T. team demonstrated that the speech and music circuits are in different parts of the brain’s sprawling auditory cortex, where all sound signals are interpreted, and that each is largely deaf to the other’s sonic cues, although there is some overlap when it comes to responding to songs with lyrics.
  • In fact, Dr. Rauschecker said, music sensitivity may be more fundamental to the human brain than is speech perception. “There are theories that music is older than speech or language,” he said. “Some even argue that speech evolved from music.”
  • , many researchers had long assumed that the human brain must be equipped with some sort of music room, a distinctive piece of cortical architecture dedicated to detecting and interpreting the dulcet signals of song. Yet for years, scientists failed to find any clear evidence of a music-specific domain through conventional brain-scanning technology
  • when previous neuroscientists failed to find any anatomically distinct music center in the brain, they came up with any number of rationales to explain the results.“The story was, oh, what’s special about music perception is how it recruits areas from all over the brain, how it draws on the motor system, speech circuitry, social understanding, and brings it all together,” she said. Some researchers dismissed music as “auditory cheesecake,” a pastime that co-opted other essential communicative urges. “This paper says, no, when you peer below the cruder level seen with some methodologies, you find very specific circuitry that responds to music over speech.”
  • The researchers wondered if the auditory system might be similarly organized to make sense of the soundscape through a categorical screen. If so, what would the salient categories be? What are the aural equivalents of a human face or a human leg — sounds or sound elements so essential the brain assigns a bit of gray matter to the task of detecting them?
  • Focusing on the brain’s auditory region — located, appropriately enough, in the temporal lobes right above the ears — the scientists analyzed voxels, or three-dimensional pixels, of the images mathematically to detect similar patterns of neuronal excitement or quietude.“The strength of our method is that it’s hypothesis-neutral,” Dr. McDermott said. “We just present a bunch of sounds and let the data do the talking.”
  • Matching sound clips to activation patterns, the researchers determined that four of the patterns were linked to general physical properties of sound, like pitch and frequency. The fifth traced the brain’s perception of speech, and for the sixth the data turned operatic, disclosing a neuronal hot spot in the major crevice, or sulcus, of the auditory cortex that attended to every music clip the researchers had played.
  • “The sound of a solo drummer, whistling, pop songs, rap, almost everything that has a musical quality to it, melodic or rhythmic, would activate it,” Dr. Norman-Haignere said. “That’s one reason the result surprised us. The signals of speech are so much more homogeneous.”
  • The researchers have yet to determine exactly which acoustic features of music stimulate its dedicated pathway. The relative constancy of a musical note’s pitch? Its harmonic overlays? Even saying what music is can be tricky.
demetriar

Spotify Wants Listeners to Break Down Music Barriers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...genres-dont-really-matter.html

spotify music knowledge genre categorization barriers social media radio exposure

shared by demetriar on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Their cultural acumen is entirely the product of technology — in particular, being introduced to new artists through Spotify, the world’s largest subscription music-streaming service. According to executives at Spotify, my children offer a peek at the future of music consumption.
  • On average, the company said, the service exposes each of these listeners to one new artist every day. That is making listeners less beholden to music of certain styles and eras. Instead, many of us will try anything, just because we can easily sample it online.
  • Spotify is betting that fixed musical genres will fade away. In its new version rolling out to iPhone users, the company has expanded its effort to program for moods and activities rather than merely certain kinds of musical tastes.
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  • If Spotify is right about our increasing willingness to try new stuff — and critics who follow the pop charts said it may be — the trend could upend how we think about music.
  • Until recently, because of the narrowcasting ethos of terrestrial radio, music was fiercely segregated by genre. In an era less bound by those niches and instead dominated by an online free-for-all, we may discover new artists more quickly than in the past — though, on the other side of the coin, we may also develop less fierce attachments to certain artists, flitting, as my children do, between anything and everything. For better or worse, streaming services may turn us into cultural nomads.
  • By suggesting tracks based on my activities and parts of the day, I found the service exposed me to music out of my comfort zone.
  • Programmers for radio stations also look at these services to decide what to add to their rotations.
  • “These were all songs that were different from what radio was playing, and radio tends to be a homogeneous medium,” Mr. Molanphy said.
  • demetriar on 05 Jun 15
     
    How online music streaming sorts music into categories other than by typical music genres, allowing people to be exposed to more types of music. Why do we categorize music by genres? How has online music streaming effected our knowledge of music?
lenaurick

The scientific mystery of why humans love music - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...why-do-we-like-music

humans music psychology research science language culture

shared by lenaurick on 13 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • From an evolutionary perspective, it makes no sense whatsoever that music makes us feel emotions. Why would our ancestors have cared about music?
  • Why does something as abstract as music provoke such consistent emotions?
  • Studies have shown that when we listen to music, our brains release dopamine, which in turn makes us happy
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  • It's quite possible that our love of music was simply an accident. We originally evolved emotions to help us navigate dangerous worlds (fear) and social situations (joy). And somehow, the tones and beats of musical composition activate similar brain areas.
  • Music is a pattern. As we listen, we're constantly anticipating what melodies, harmonies, and rhythms may come next.
  • "Music engages the same [reward] system, even though it is not biologically necessary for survival," says Zatorre.
  • Presumably, we evolved to recognize patterns because it's an essential skill for survival. Does a rustling in the trees mean a dangerous animal is about to attack? Does the smell of smoke mean I should run, because a fire may be coming my way?
  • Nature Neuroscience, led by Zatorre, researchers found that dopamine release is strongest when a piece of music reaches an emotional peak and the listener feels "chills"— the spine-tingling sensation of excitement and awe.
  • That's why we typically don't like styles of music we're not familiar with. When we're unfamiliar with a style of music, we don't have a basis to predict its patterns
  • We learn through our cultures what sounds constitute music. The rest is random noise.
  • When we hear a piece of music, its rhythm latches onto us in a process called entrainment. If the music is fast-paced, our heartbeats and breathing patterns will accelerate to match the beat.
  • Another hypothesis is that music latches onto the regions of the brain attuned to speech — which convey all of our emotions.
  • "It makes sense that our brains are really good at picking up emotions in speech," the French Institute of Science's Aucouturier says. It's essential to understand if those around us are happy, sad, angry, or scared. Much of that information is contained in the tone of a person's speech. Higher-pitched voices sound happier. More warbled voices are scared.
  • Music may then be an exaggerated version of speech.
  • And because we tend to mirror the emotions we hear in others, if the music is mimicking happy speech, then the listener will become happy too.
Emilio Ergueta

Music in Philosophy | Issue 108 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

philosophynow.org/...Music_in_Philosophy

music TOK

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Today some universities have courses in the Philosophy of Music. They study such questions as: What is the definition of music? What makes us say that a particular set of sounds is music while another set of sounds is not? What is the relationship of music to the mind? How does music affect (a) our emotions, (b) our intellect? How can we evaluate the value of any given piece of music
  • There we can see what issues about music are being debated by the current academic establishment.
  • This is historical, describing what some individual philosophers have said about music. I could not find any website that gives an account of how significant philosophical ideas about music have developed over time. That time seems to me to end with Friedrich Nietzsche, who died in 1900. Since then, it seems to me, no great name in philosophy has given music a significant place in his philosophy – although there are of course many lesser philosophers who are not (relatively) household names who are referred to in the Encyclopedia.
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  • Pythagoras believed that “all things are number”: things come into existence when mathematical order is imposed on the formless stuff of the universe. He is believed to have come to this idea after discovering the importance of mathematics in music.
  • Musical order and beauty are similarly the result of order and harmony being carved out of cacophonous noise. Pythagoras also originated the idea of the heavenly ‘music of the spheres’, inaudible to us, made by the movement of the planets around the earth.
  • In his La Monadologie (Monadology, 1714), Gottfried Leibniz explained our response to art through subconscious perceptions (“les petites sensations”) of “the secret arithmetic” of intervals and other relationships in music and painting.
  • Immanuel Kant wrote a book on aesthetics, The Critique of Judgment (1790), in which he described aesthetic qualities as those which give us “disinterested pleasure”. They do this through their beauty, which Kant, as a classically-inclined thinker, saw in their harmony of form; or through their sublimity – meaning a perceived grandeur or power that does not threaten us.
  • Friedrich Schelling was the first of these transcendental idealists, and the first philosopher who thought that instrumental (as distinct from vocal) music was the purest and most disembodied of the arts, and enabled us not only to glimpse the Absolute – a word he coined, although Kant had talked about absolute truth being found in the Ding an Sich [‘the thing-in-itself’] – but during that experience, to see ourselves as an integral part of it. This idea would be taken much further still by:
sissij

What's the Best Music to Listen to While Working? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...509948

Music brain science psychology research

shared by sissij on 11 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Worse yet is the possibility that the constant soundtrack is poisoning my writing, with the lyrics somehow weaving into and scrambling my thoughts before they ever hit the keyboard. I try to tune it out, but after all, I’m still, I’m still an animal!
  • It turns out the best thing to listen to, for most office workers, is nothing.
  • An early study called “Music—an aid to productivity,” appropriately found that music could be just that. But the study subjects in that experiment were doing rote factory work, examining metal parts on conveyor belts.
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  • The boost in productivity the researchers noticed happened because the music simply made the task less boring and kept the workers alert. This also helps explain later studies finding that music helped surgeons perform better.
  • When silence and music were put head to head in more cognitively complex tests, people did better in silence.
  • The more engaging the music is, the worse it is for concentration.
  • But lyric-free music is less distracting, and some of the people whose performance was improved may have come up with subconscious mental hacks to avoid getting sidetracked by music.
  • The reason this doesn’t work for most people, Levitin said, is most people can’t pay attention to very much at once. Lyrics can soak up precious attention, as can flashing lights or a really bad smell.
  • So, I asked Levitin, if listening to music while working is so bad, why do so many of us do it? Simple: We like it, and we can’t tell it’s messing us up.
  • sissij on 11 Dec 16
     
    It's surprising to see that not all music can improve our work quality. Many people always ask for some music while they are going their work, but they don't know that this could mess up their work and concentration. This reminds me of the attention blindness that we have. We are incapable of multi-tasking. The experiment mentioned in this article is also very interesting because it reflects how we interpret the result based on our favor. Even the conclusion we draw from the science evidences could be wrong. This is an example of the sound argument but invalid conclusion. --Sissi (12/10/2016)
Emily Freilich

How Brains See Music as Language - Adrienne LaFrance - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...283936

music language brain science

shared by Emily Freilich on 23 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • jazz improvisation in Manhattan, an experience that's a bit like overhearing a great conversation.
  • putting a musician in a functional MRI machine with a keyboard, and having him play a memorized piece of music and then a made-up piece of music as part of an improvisation with another musician in a control room.
  • The brains of jazz musicians who are engaged with other musicians in spontaneous improvisation show robust activation in the same brain areas traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax.
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  • . Though it's difficult to get to the point where you're comfortable enough with music as a language where you can speak freely."
  • "The answer to that probably lies more in figuring out what the nature of language is than what the nature of music is," said Mike Pope, a Baltimore-based pianist and bassist who participated in the study. "When you're talking about something, you're not thinking about how your mouth is moving and you're not thinking about how the words are spelled and you're not thinking about grammar. With music, it's the same thing."
  • During a spoken conversation, the brain is busy processing the structure and syntax of language, as well the semantics or meaning of the words. But Limb and his colleagues found that brain areas linked to meaning shut down during improvisational jazz interactions.
  • So if music is a language without set meaning, what does that tell us about the nature of music?
  • "Music communication, we know it means something to the listener, but that meaning can't really be described,
  • reason to suspect that the auditory brain may have been designed to hear music and speech is a happy byproduc
  • Ukraine's Government Disappears Overnight
tongoscar

Why Shen Yun's Music Resonates With Our Souls - 0 views

www.theepochtimes.com/es-with-our-souls_3195460.html

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Music has its beginning in sacred spaces. Whether in the East with the music of sages or in the West with our Gregorian chants, music has for centuries been used to convey a reverence for the heavens, express human emotion, and connect with the world around us.
  • With ancient China, the five tones of the pentatonic scale had direct relationships with the five elements in our physical world and the five major organs of our human bodies. Whether it be singing or playing tunes on a bamboo flute, music was meant to aid in the connection between heaven, earth, and humankind. 
  • While the task of combining two very different musical languages may be a Herculean one for arrangers, and playing the incredibly precise music a challenge for the musicians, the conductor, in a way, gets to reap the rewards with a powerful, versatile ensemble at her fingertips.
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  • Sometimes the story takes a turn and characters find themselves in a celestial palace, and the music has to be able to evoke a heavenly feeling, a sound so convincing you almost glimpse heaven. Sometimes the story calls for warriors on a battlefield, and the orchestra provides the strength and power and intensity of the battle. Sometimes the dance is an ethnic or folk dance, and the music takes on the sound of horses roaming the Mongolian grasslands, for example. 
  • “In ancient Chinese times, people also believed the ideas behind the music were more important than what’s on the surface … and that’s why I love Shen Yun music so much. It’s very inspiring and powerful—invigorating at the same time. It can be humorous, it can really cheer people up.”“It all ties into this mission to celebrate the best of humanity, both East and West, the values and the heroes from the past, or even today.”
Emily Horwitz

¿Por qué tosemos más en los conciertos de música clásica? - BBC Mundo - Noticias - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...os_concierto_clasica_gtg.shtml

coughing classical music

shared by Emily Horwitz on 01 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Todo está en silencio. Los instrumentos de cuerda, los de viento y percusión esperan la señal del director para empezar la pieza. Al otro lado está el público callado, tragando más espeso y conteniendo la tos. Hay alguien que no lo puede evitar y con el primer acorde empieza a toser. ¿Por qué siempre ocurre esto?
  • "Toda la estadística existente sugiere que la gente tose dos veces más durante los conciertos", le dijo Wagener a la BBC.
  • El especialista descubrió que la acción de toser no es completamente aleatoria. La pieza que se escucha también incita a toser más o menos.
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  • "Si se trata de conciertos más modernos, como por ejemplo música clásica del siglo XX, los movimientos más lentos y los silencios son interrumpidos con mayor frecuencia".
  • cuando alguien empieza a toser y contagia a los otros.
  • "Creo que muchas personas cuando van a conciertos clásicos se dan cuenta que el nivel de ruido es mucho menor que la música a la que están acostumbradas a oir a través de sus auriculares o conciertos de música pop", agregó la pianista.
  • ese silencio en los conciertos acústicos es reconfortante, para otros puede originar inconformidad que se manifiesta en la acción de toser.
  • Andreas Wagener se mostró parcialmente de acuerdo con la teoría de Tomes, pues "cuando alguien va a un concierto (de música clásica) sabe que debe permanecer en silencio".
  • "Es una cuestión de etiqueta, saben que no deben hablar o caminar, hacer ruido o toser, pero la gente sigue tosiendo en exceso".
  • con la tos no se puede saber si es deliberado o involuntario.
  • "Creo que a veces la gente no esta consciente de como suena para el concertista. Es un factor muy distractor".
  • Emily Horwitz on 01 Feb 13
     
    I realize that this article is in Spanish, so those who don't understand the language will likely be confused, but I thought that it was very interesting, and related to TOK. Essentially, the article talked about a study that Andreas Wagener, a German scientist did, in which it was discovered that people cough twice as much at classical music concerts than otherwise. Wagener also found that the amount of coughing was not random; rather, it was dependent on the style, tempo, etc. of the music being played. The slow, more modern pieces often elicited more coughs. Additionally, Wagener found that, similar to how we think about yawning, coughing is contagious; one cough can cause an avalanche of other coughs. The article also noted the possibility that some of the coughing going on during a classical music concert may not be the typical, involuntary, reflexive cough, but a deliberate cough of social interaction. In terms of TOK, I thought that this article was most interesting in that, when put into a situation in which we may be uncomfortable (often with silence), we cough more. I related this to my own experiences at Friends, during MFW, when people often seem to cough out of a need for interaction. It would be interesting to see if Wagener could work with some geneticists and biologists to discover if a connection between slow classical music and more coughing is purely biological, or if it stems from another causation of human behavior.
abby deardorff

Musical Training Optimizes Brain Function | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...ining-optimizes-brain-function

brain psychology

shared by abby deardorff on 18 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Three Brain Benefits of Musical Training:
  • musical training can have a huge impact on the developing brain
  • systematic training actually helped improve brain areas related to music improvisation.
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  • training before the age of 7 years results in changes in white-matter connectivity that may serve as a solid scaffolding upon which ongoing experience can maintain a well-connected brain infrastructure into adulthood.
  • musical training improves the function and connectivity of different brain regions. Musical training increases brain volume and strengthens communication between brain areas. Playing an instrument changes how the brain interprets and integrates a wide range of sensory information, especially for those who start before age 7.
  • Musicians have an enhanced ability to integrate sensory information from hearing, touch, and sight.The age at which musical training begins affects brain anatomy as an adult; beginning training before the age of seven has the greatest impact.Brain circuits involved in musical improvisation are shaped by systematic training, leading to less reliance on working memory and more extensive connectivity within the brain.
tongoscar

How High Energy Music Can Make Your Workout More Effective - 0 views

www.healthline.com/...po-music-may-help-your-workout

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • A new study from Italy found that listening to high tempo music during exercise can distract you and make your workouts seem less challenging, ultimately making them more beneficial.
  • Researchers found that those who listened to the high tempo music while working out experienced the highest heart rates and also perceived their workout as less difficult.
  • Previous research has also shown that music has a profound impact on the mind and body.
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  • To understand how music affects people’s workouts, researchers from Italy evaluated 19 women who participated in endurance activities, such as walking, jogging, or biking, and high-intensity workouts, such as weightlifting or using a leg press.
  • “I think we have put such a negative perception to exercise, as another to-do to be thin, lose weight, burn calories,” said Sharon Zarabi, a fitness trainer and registered dietitian with Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. “If we took away the emphasis from ‘dieting and weight loss,’ we may actually enjoy it for all its other benefits, including lowering blood pressure, improving sleep, enhancing digestion, reducing stress, [and] lowering blood sugars.”
  • A new study from Italy found that listening to high tempo music during exercise can distract you and make your workouts seem less challenging, ultimately making them more beneficial. Music has been shown to have profound effects on the mind and body: It lifts our mood, increases our heart rate, and makes us want to groove. For those who struggle with completing a workout, music may be a powerful tool.
tongoscar

How music affects your mental health and mood | Cult MTL - 0 views

cultmtl.com/...ffects-your-mood-mental-health

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Music can help your mental health, or hurt it
  • It’s hard when your emotions overwhelm you. Sometimes, we feel down, and it’s okay to have those emotions. If you’re feeling intensely depressed, listening to music can help. Some musicians have lyrics about great topics like Tori Amos and talk about deep issues in their songs.
  • Everyone reacts differently to music. What some people enjoy others may not like to listen to, or find stressful.
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  • Did you know that there’s such a thing as music therapy? Music can help you process emotions, work through trauma, and understand how you think and feel. Sometimes it’s hard to process feelings, especially if they are complicated or overwhelming. Part of listening to music is staying in the moment.
tongoscar

Impact of Music, Music Lyrics, and Music Videos on Children and Youth | American Academ... - 0 views

pediatrics.aappublications.org/...1488

shared by tongoscar on 19 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Music plays an important role in the socialization of children and adolescents.
  • The effect that popular music has on children's and adolescents' behavior and emotions is of paramount concern.
  • Music provides entertainment and distraction from problems and serves as a way to relieve tension and boredom.
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  • Music also can provide a background for romance and serve as the basis for establishing relationships in diverse settings.
  • Adolescents' choice of music and their reactions to and interpretations of it vary with age, culture, and ethnicity.
Javier E

Teens who choose music over books are more likely to be depressed - 0 views

www.eurekalert.org/...uops-twc040411.php

reading adolescent research music depression

shared by Javier E on 09 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • young people who were exposed to the most music, compared to those who listened to music the least, were 8.3 times more likely to be depressed. However, compared to those with the least time exposed to books, those who read books the most were one-tenth as likely to be depressed. The other media exposures were not significantly associated with depression
  • Richard Monari on 11 Apr 11
     
    That's remarkable. Is it ever clarified if the trend is between depression and the content of the music or depression and the act of listening to music itself? I wonder if they include any information concerning the genres of music that are being listened to by these teens.
demetriar

Brain Processes Music Much Like Spoken Language, New Study Shows - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...c-like-language_n_4831975.html

science brain science language perception music

shared by demetriar on 14 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • "The areas of the brain related to language ramped way up when the musical behavior was spontaneous between the two musicians,"
  • "During the improvised exchanges, the parts of the brain that interpret the meaning of language — semantics — were completely deactivated,"
  • This could suggest there is a fundamental difference between how the brain processes meaning for music and language.
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  • "Until now, studies of how the brain processes auditory communication between two individuals have been done only in the context of spoken language," Limb said in a statement. "But looking at jazz lets us investigate the neurological basis of interactive, musical communication as it occurs outside of spoken language."
Javier E

The Science of Snobbery: How We're Duped Into Thinking Fancy Things Are Better - The At... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...279571

psychology judgment intuition bias unconscious expertise perception

shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Expert judges and amateurs alike claim to judge classical musicians based on sound. But Tsay’s research suggests that the original judges, despite their experience and expertise, judged the competition (which they heard and watched live) based on visual information, just as amateurs do.
  • just like with classical music, we do not appraise wine in the way that we expect. 
  • Priceonomics revisited this seemingly damning research: the lack of correlation between wine enjoyment and price in blind tastings, the oenology students tricked by red food dye into describing a white wine like a red, a distribution of medals at tastings equivalent to what one would expect from pure chance, the grand crus described like cheap wines and vice-versa when the bottles are switched.
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  • Taste does not simply equal your taste buds. It draws on information from all our senses as well as context. As a result, food is susceptible to the same trickery as wine. Adding yellow food dye to vanilla pudding leads people to experience a lemony taste. Diners eating in the dark at a chic concept restaurant confuse veal for tuna. Branding, packaging, and price tags are equally important to enjoyment. Cheap fish is routinely passed off as its pricier cousins at seafood and sushi restaurants. 
  • Just like with wine and classical music, we often judge food based on very different criteria than what we claim. The result is that our perceptions are easily skewed in ways we don’t anticipate. 
  • What does it mean for wine that presentation so easily trumps the quality imbued by being grown on premium Napa land or years of fruitful aging? Is it comforting that the same phenomenon is found in food and classical music, or is it a strike against the authenticity of our enjoyment of them as well? How common must these manipulations be until we concede that the influence of the price tag of a bottle of wine or the visual appearance of a pianist is not a trick but actually part of the quality?
  • To answer these questions, we need to investigate the underlying mechanism that leads us to judge wine, food, and music by criteria other than what we claim to value. And that mechanism seems to be the quick, intuitive judgments our minds unconsciously make
  • this unknowability also makes it easy to be led astray when our intuition makes a mistake. We may often be able to count on the price tag or packaging of food and wine for accurate information about quality. But as we believe that we’re judging based on just the product, we fail to recognize when presentation manipulates our snap judgments.
  • Participants were just as effective when watching 6 second video clips and when comparing their ratings to ratings of teacher effectiveness as measured by actual student test performance. 
  • The power of intuitive first impressions has been demonstrated in a variety of other contexts. One experiment found that people predicted the outcome of political elections remarkably well based on silent 10 second video clips of debates - significantly outperforming political pundits and predictions made based on economic indicators.
  • In a real world case, a number of art experts successfully identified a 6th century Greek statue as a fraud. Although the statue had survived a 14 month investigation by a respected museum that included the probings of a geologist, they instantly recognized something was off. They just couldn’t explain how they knew.
  • Cases like this represent the canon behind the idea of the “adaptive unconscious,” a concept made famous by journalist Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. The basic idea is that we constantly, quickly, and unconsciously do the equivalent of judging a book by its cover. After all, a cover provides a lot of relevant information in a world in which we don’t have time to read every page.
  • Gladwell describes the adaptive unconscious as “a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.”
  • In a famous experiment, psychologist Nalini Ambady provided participants in an academic study with 30 second silent video clips of a college professor teaching a class and asked them to rate the effectiveness of the professor.
  • In follow up experiments, Chia-Jung Tsay found that those judging musicians’ auditions based on visual cues were not giving preference to attractive performers. Rather, they seemed to look for visual signs of relevant characteristics like passion, creativity, and uniqueness. Seeing signs of passion is valuable information. But in differentiating between elite performers, it gives an edge to someone who looks passionate over someone whose play is passionate
  • Outside of these more eccentric examples, it’s our reliance on quick judgments, and ignorance of their workings, that cause people to act on ugly, unconscious biases
  • It’s also why - from a business perspective - packaging and presentation is just as important as the good or service on offer. Why marketing is just as important as product. 
  • Gladwell ends Blink optimistically. By paying closer attention to our powers of rapid cognition, he argues, we can avoid its pitfalls and harness its powers. We can blindly audition musicians behind a screen, look at a piece of art devoid of other context, and pay particular attention to possible unconscious bias in our performance reports.
  • But Gladwell’s success in demonstrating how the many calculations our adaptive unconscious performs without our awareness undermines his hopeful message of consciously harnessing its power.
  • As a former world-class tennis player and coach of over 50 years, Braden is a perfect example of the ideas behind thin slicing. But if he can’t figure out what his unconscious is up to when he recognizes double faults, why should anyone else expect to be up to the task?
  • flawed judgment in fields like medicine and investing has more serious consequences. The fact that expertise is so tricky leads psychologist Daniel Kahneman to assert that most experts should seek the assistance of statistics and algorithms in making decisions.
  • In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes our two modes of thought: System 1, like the adaptive unconscious, is our “fast, instinctive, and emotional” intuition. System 2 is our “slower, more deliberative, and more logical” conscious thought. Kahneman believes that we often leave decisions up to System 1 and generally place far “too much confidence in human judgment” due to the pitfalls of our intuition described above.
  • Not every judgment will be made in a field that is stable and regular enough for an algorithm to help us make judgments or predictions. But in those cases, he notes, “Hundreds of studies have shown that wherever we have sufficient information to build a model, it will perform better than most people.”
  • Experts can avoid the pitfalls of intuition more easily than laypeople. But they need help too, especially as our collective confidence in expertise leads us to overconfidence in their judgments. 
  • This article has referred to the influence of price tags and context on products and experiences like wine and classical music concerts as tricks that skew our perception. But maybe we should consider them a real, actual part of the quality.
  • Losing ourselves in a universe of relativism, however, will lead us to miss out on anything new or unique. Take the example of the song “Hey Ya!” by Outkast. When the music industry heard it, they felt sure it would be a hit. When it premiered on the radio, however, listeners changed the channel. The song sounded too dissimilar from songs people liked, so they responded negatively. 
  • It took time for people to get familiar with the song and realize that they enjoyed it. Eventually “Hey Ya!” became the hit of the summer.
  • Many boorish people talking about the ethereal qualities of great wine probably can't even identify cork taint because their impressions are dominated by the price tag and the wine label. But the classic defense of wine - that you need to study it to appreciate it - is also vindicated. The open question - which is both editorial and empiric - is what it means for the industry that constant vigilance and substantial study is needed to dependably appreciate wine for the product quality alone. But the questions is relevant to the enjoyment of many other products and experiences that we enjoy in life.
  • Maybe the most important conclusion is to not only recognize the fallibility of our judgments and impressions, but to recognize when it matters, and when it doesn’t
johnsonel7

Musicians Using AI to Create Otherwise Impossible New Songs | Time.com - 0 views

time.com/...ai-music

art artificial intelligence Technology

shared by johnsonel7 on 09 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • n November, the musician Grimes made a bold prediction. “I feel like we’re in the end of art, human art,” she said on Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast. “Once there’s actually AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), they’re gonna be so much better at making art than us.”
  • Artificial intelligence has already upended many blue collar jobs across various industries; the possibility that music, a deeply personal and subjective form, could also be optimized was enough to cause widespread alarm.
  • While obstacles like copyright complications and other hurdles have yet to be worked out, musicians working with AI hope that the technology will become a democratizing force and an essential part of everyday musical creation.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Stavitsky realized that while people are increasingly plugging into headphones to get them through the day, “there’s no playlist or song that can adapt to the context of whatever’s happening around you," he says. His app takes several real-time factors into account — including the weather, the listener's heart rate, physical activity rate, and circadian rhythms — in generating gentle music that’s designed to help people sleep, study or relax.
  • “AI forced us to come up against patterns that have no relationship to comfort. It gave us the skills to break out of our own habits,” she says. The project resulted in the first Grammy nomination of YACHT’s two-decade career, for best immersive audio album.
  • . “There’s something freeing about not having to make every single microdecision, but rather, creating an ecosystem where things tend to happen, but never in the order you were imagining them,” she says. “It opens up a world of possibilities.” She says that she has a few new music projects coming this year using Bronze’s technology.
tongoscar

Berklee College Of Music Sets Up Camp In Abu Dhabi - 0 views

academiamag.com/usic-sets-up-camp-in-abu-dhabi

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Berklee arrives in Abu Dhabi with a bang. The island city will be having its very own international music college very soon. An agreement has been signed with the Boston based Berklee College of music.
  • Berklee is a renowned college of contemporary music, a school many music enthusists wish to get in to. As per reports, the agreement between the well-known institute, and Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism, the arts’ regulatory body of emirates. Berklee Abu Dhabi will be established on Saadiyat Island.
  • The school will be located in the the UAE Pavilion building in the Saadiyat Culture District, next to Manaarat Al Saadiyat and span 3,900 square metres. The space will include a performance space, a recording studio, practice rooms, ensemble rooms and a tech lab.
Javier E

Forever Young? For Bob Dylan, In Some Ways, Yes. - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...24hajdu.html

adolescence music taste culture

shared by Javier E on 24 May 11 - No Cached
  • Fourteen is a formative age, especially for people growing up in social contexts framed by pop culture. You’re in the ninth grade, confronting the tyrannies of sex and adulthood, struggling to figure out what kind of adult you’d like to be, and you turn to the cultural products most important in your day as sources of cool — the capital of young life.
  • “Fourteen is a sort of magic age for the development of musical tastes,”
  • “Pubertal growth hormones make everything we’re experiencing, including music, seem very important. We’re just reaching a point in our cognitive development when we’re developing our own tastes. And musical tastes become a badge of identity.”
  • Richard Monari on 24 May 11
     
    I had never really considered how formative and pivotal these early years of our lives are. I also find it quite interesting that the media and our general environment can play such a role in our development, sometimes inspiring adolescents to find their passions so early in life. Makes you think about the effects our current genres of popular music are having on our ninth graders (Oh dear lord, I don't even want to think about it).
anonymous

How Engaging With Art Affects the Human Brain | American Association for the Advancemen... - 0 views

www.aaas.org/...gaging-art-affects-human-brain

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Today, the neurological mechanisms underlying these responses are the subject of fascination to artists, curators and scientists alike.
  • "Once you circle these little things and come to the end of this little project, you'll be invited to compare where you came out against what the results of this experiment were and are," Vikan said. "What you'll find in this show is that there is an amazing convergence. The people that came to the museum liked and disliked the same categories of shapes as the people in the lab as the people in the fMRIs."
  • "Art accesses some of the most advanced processes of human intuitive analysis and expressivity and a key form of aesthetic appreciation is through embodied cognition, the ability to project oneself as an agent in the depicted scene,
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Embodied cognition is "the sense of drawing you in and making you really feel the quality of the paintings,"
  • The Birth of Venus" because it makes them feel as though they are floating in with Venus on the seashell. Similarly, viewers can feel the flinging of the paint on the canvas when appreciating a drip painting by Jackson Pollock.
  • Mirror neurons, cells in the brain that respond similarly when observing and performing an action, are responsible for embodied cognition
  • Most research on the effects of music education has been done on populations that are privileged enough to afford private music instruction so Kraus is studying music instruction in group settings
  • "But observing the action requires the information to flow inward from the image you're seeing into the control centers. So that bidirectional flow is what's captured in this concept of mirror neurons and it gives the extra vividness to this aesthetics of art appreciation
  • Artists are known to be better observers and exhibit better memory than non-artists. In an effort to see what happens in the brain when an individual is drawing and whether drawing can increase the brain's plasticity
  • While congenitally blind people usually don't have activation in the visual area of the brain, in brain scans done after the subjects were taught to draw from memory,
  • Hearing speech in noise is one area in which musicians are uniquely skilled. In standardized tests, musicians across the lifespan were much better than the general public at listening to sentences and repeating them back as the level of background noise increased, Kraus said.
  • Performing an action requires the information to flow out from the control centers to the limbs,
  • Musicians are also known for their ability to keep rhythm, a skill that is correlated with reading ability and how precisely the brain responds to sound. After one year, students who participated in the group music instruction were faster and more accurate at keeping a beat than students in the control group, Kraus said.
  • "To sum things up, we are what we do and our past shapes our present," Kraus said. "Auditory biology is not frozen in time. It's a moving target. And music education really does seem to enhance communication by strengthening language skills."
  • "When you're doing art, your brain is running full speed,"
  • "It's hitting on all eight cylinders. So if you can figure out what's happening to the brain on art,
sissij

A Beginners Guide To Parkinson's Law: How To Do More Stuff By Giving Yourself... - 1 views

impossiblehq.com/parkinsons-law

Parkinson's law psychology brain science

shared by sissij on 18 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
  • You had all week to finalize a proposal, but waited to do it until 4:30pm on the Friday.
  • He found that even a series of simple tasks increased in complexity to fill up the time allotted to it. As the length of time allocated to a task became shorter, the task became simpler and easier to solve.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Interestingly enough, I worked more but got less done. On top of that, I was stressed all the time.
  • I was an addict, not to work, but to thinking that I was working.
  • Specificity and restrictions create freedom and nourish creativity. Add them to your arsenal of tools as you become an uber productive and efficient creator.
  • I’ve referred to this in the past as “shoot first, aim later” or “jump … and then figure it out on the way down.” Pick a big goal, commit to it, and you’ll probably find that you’re able to figure out a way to achieve it.
  • sissij on 18 Nov 16
     
    I found this law very interesting. It also reminds me of the TedTalk we had during advisory on procrastination. Being busy and being busy and efficient is completely different. I have a personally experience that agree on this law. Last week, my days were completely filled with cross-country practice, musical rehearsal, and school work, so everyday I sleep around eleven o'clock. This week, I suddenly have a lot more time as the cross-country season ends and the musical is over, but I still go to bed at eleven o'clock and fill my time still not enough for me. I was busy this week but obviously, my efficiency is much lower than last week. --Sissi (11/18/2016)
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