#34246 - 01/19/10 11:42 PM
Re: Why do we like music and rhythm?
[Re: coelentrate]
|
ta2zz
veteran member
Registered: 08/28/07
Posts: 1413
Loc: Connecticut
|
What draws us to it? What is its purpose? Why did we evolve to be creators and users of it?
We humans are creatures born of rhythm into a world of sound. From our beginnings inside our mothers living with her heartbeat to the raindrops thrumming or tinkling depending on the amount of falling rain.
It really doesn't take a genius to figure out why we humans have and enjoy rhythm or that music started by us mimicking what we heard in nature.
Haven't we said this all before?
~T~
_________________________
We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams. ~Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#34365 - 01/22/10 12:15 AM
Re: Why do we like music and rhythm?
[Re: Baron dHolbach]
|
paolo sette
Temp Banned
member
Registered: 12/12/08
Posts: 237
Loc: IL, USA
|
This seemingly simple question spurred me to pause for some time, and think deeply. I listen to music on a daily basis as it assists with daily activities, and for the important times when a thoughtful decision is called for. It is a truism that is purely axiomatic in its origin. (It's the BOMB!) Right now I'm cycling tunes by the quintessential Police that we ALL are familar with. The Police and other renowned bands, past and present, have common threads amongst them. One is glaringly obvious, they ALL have an affinity for music. The underlying reasoning behind music and ALL of its glory is it has to do with an entirely personal experience. If you want to look at it as escapism or some other theory, go for it. It's completely up to you as to what, how, and why music came about in the first place; and, I am immensely confident that ALL the reasons you can cogitate about are definetely correct. Humans are not just merely autonomatons that produced lilting harmonious sounds 50 thousands years ago.
p.s.-Ever since you funneled the question as to where you can find goat meat in the food and drink section, I've been following you. 
_________________________
tathagata-svapratyatma-aryajnana-adhigama
666
[nig]-ge-na-da a-ba in-da-di nam-ti i-u-tu
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#34562 - 01/25/10 06:11 PM
Re: Why do we like music and rhythm?
[Re: ta2zz]
|
coelentrate
member
Registered: 07/07/08
Posts: 164
Loc: Dundee, Scotland
|
Haven't we said this all before?
I see what you mean, there's a recent post about this, right? I don't normally read that persons posts. Anyway, it doesn't quite answer my question. What you're saying is true enough, but it doesn't address what I'm trying to get at here.
What I'm really looking for is some insight into why this happens:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_and_the_brain
To what extent could this be replicated or manipulated, and to what end? Could we get the musical brain wave readings if we clenched Dan Dreads head in a vice and shook the table? If I speak in the rhythm of a calm heartbeat will it make Dan as calm as a baby in his mothers womb? Probably not, but how close does it get?
What effects does it have on the listener, short term and long term? I'm approaching this by looking at why we evolved this physiological response.
I really don't notice the sound of rhythm in nature, much. I'll give you the mother's heartbeat, but rain's not rhythmic. What else is there? the beach? So why did we evolve a response to that? Was there something we needed to do for our survival when we heard the beach, or heard mother's heartbeat speed up?
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
#34570 - 01/25/10 09:19 PM
Re: Why do we like music and rhythm?
[Re: coelentrate]
|
Michael A.Aquino
veteran member
Registered: 09/28/08
Posts: 1247
Loc: San Francisco, CA, USA
|
From my 2000 paper on Project Star Gate:
... The electrical energy in your brain occurs in waves measured according to cycles per second (CPS). 1-3 CPS = delta waves, characteristic of deep sleep. 4-7 CPS = theta waves, characteristic of high emotion, violence, and frustration. 8-12 CPS = alpha waves, characteristic of meditation, relaxation, and “searching for patterns”. 13-22 CPS = beta waves, characteristic of frontal brain activity, deliberate effort, and logical thought. We’ll come back to brain waves in a moment, but first a word about another principle: resonance. Resonance is a very interesting concept and deserves a precise definition: (1) a vibration of large amplitude in a mechanical or electrical system caused by a relatively small periodic stimulus of the same or nearly the same period as the natural vibration period of the system.
(2) the intensification and enriching of a musical tone by supplementary vibration that is either sympathetically or mechanically induced. In the course of my research I examined the work of Dr. Nikola Tesla, one of recent history’s more charming “mad scientists” who rattled the cage of “recognized” science with, among other things, experiments in resonance. Biographer Margaret Cheney relates in Tesla: Man Out of Time: He attached an oscillator no larger than an alarm clock to a steel link 2’ long and 2” thick. “For a long time nothing happened, but at last the great steel link began to tremble, increased its trembling until it dilated and contracted like a beating heart, and finally broke.” Sledgehammers could not have done it, he told a reporter, crowbars could not have done it, but a fusillade of taps, no one of which would have harmed a baby, did it.
Pleased with this beginning, he put the little oscillator in his coat pocket. Finding a half-built steel building in the Wall Street district, 10 stories high with nothing up but the steelwork, he clamped the oscillator to one of the beams. “In a few minutes I could feel the beam trembling. Gradually the trembling increased in intensity and extended throughout the whole great mass of steel. Finally the structure began to creak and weave, and the steelworkers came to the ground panic-stricken, believing that there had been an earthquake. Before anything serious happened, I took off the oscillator, put it in my pocket, and went away. But if I had kept on 10 minutes more, I could have laid that building flat in the street. And with the same oscillator I could drop Brooklyn Bridge in less than an hour.” Now a little-known but interesting fact is that brain-waves are subject to the principle of resonance. Energy-waves reaching your brain through any medium - eyes, ears, or flesh - will tend to induce your brain-waves to cycle at the same wave-length. A common example of visual resonance is the seizures that some people experience when exposed to a light flickering at 10 CPS. The audio spectrum - being the range of sound vibrations which human hearing can consciously detect - is from 15 CPS (bass) to 20,000 CPS (treble). The infrasonic range - 10-15 CPS - is too low to be consciously detected but is nonetheless capable of inducing resonance in the brain. Below infrasound [and sometimes encompassing it] are Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) waves, which are powerful and durable enough to travel through the Earth for communication with submerged submarines. The relaxation which you paradoxically feel when listening to the deep, heavy throbbing of drums or bass guitars at rock concerts is the same as that felt by American Indians listening to the large dancing-drums accompanying their ceremonial campfires. Resonance is produced which inclines your brain-waves towards alpha, and if the rate of the beat seems particularly pleasing to you, I recommend that you take your pulse. My guess is that it will be close (somewhere around 70 CPM), which your system will find subconsciously soothing. [If you wish to calm a crying infant, rock its cradle at about that speed, or hold it to your breast so that it can hear the beating of your heart. Try it!] ...
Back in the 70s-80s I used to go on about this with Paul Kantner, and if you want to have some fun sometime, time the CPM of some of his compositions ... I won't say which ones. Then enjoy watching yourself get dialed up and down ...
When it works best, we become a great churning air machine, capable of moving people to the unknown, of making you cry, laugh, march in silly parades.
This is all the more amusing because back during the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s, the Jefferson Starship was one of the groups attacked for "back masking of Satanic messages" in their songs (of which they did nothing of the kind). I participated in one radio interview with Paul in which some Christian nut group was howling that the cover of Spitfire showed the Whore of Babylon astride the Beast of Revelation. Kantner, who's a China devotee, rolled his eyes and said, "Grace & my daughter's name is 'China', so it's a Chinese dragon together with a Chinese girl!"
So here were all the Christian bozos in the 1980s playing tapes and records backwards in church basements and going crazy if they thought they found "my sweet Satan" in "Stairway to Heaven", and all of it was BS and wouldn't have affected anyone's mind if they did hear it.
But no one ever twigged to brainwave resonance, and I sure as hell wasn't going to blow it. 
_________________________
Michael A. Aquino
[On Ignore: Dan_Dread, 6Satan6Archist6, Caladrius, MindFux]
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
#34583 - 01/26/10 01:06 AM
Re: Why do we like music and rhythm?
[Re: Michael A.Aquino]
|
Apion
stranger
Registered: 10/06/09
Posts: 18
|
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
Moderator: fakepropht, Nemesis, SkaffenAmtiskaw, Morgan, Mercury_Templar, Woland, Bacchae, Diavolo, Asmedious, Fist
|
|
