Showing posts for January 2005
A singer or vocalist is a type of musician who sings, i.e. uses the voice as an instrument to make music.
In classical music and in opera, voices are treated just like musical instruments, thus special careers were developed out of each principal pitch.
Voices are commonly classified into: Female voices:
It's said to soothe the savage beast. It can make your newborn child smarter. Plus, if you play it, you can get cool haircuts and laid often.
Humans have been making music for thousands of years. But only recently has its effects on the human mind been studied in a scientific manner. Music makes us swoon, yearn, weep, laugh, gets us all lovey-dovey or can work us up into an aggressive, martial frenzy. But how?
That's what a group of scientists at McGill and the Université de Montréal are trying to find out, with a new joint institute called (drum roll please) the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS). The head researchers are Dr. Robert Zatorre of McGill's Montreal Neurological Institute and Dr. Isabelle Peretz of UdeM's Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Science. UdeM donated a fair amount of space to BRAMS, although it is not a new department affiliated with any one university.
In a phone interview, Zatorre speaks with the calm, level voice of a professional scientist. But kind of a hip one, name-dropping bands and subcultures with ease. Trained as a classical organist in his undergrad years, he says he "realized he would be a better scientist than a musician" but would incorporate music into his research - which he's been doing for over 20 years.
What makes studying the effects of music on the brain so interesting for researchers are the multitude of different avenues of research possible. "Advanced music touches on a lot of different things," Zatorre says. "What are the mechanisms in the brain that are affected by music? How does a performer sit down and play a piece of music for half an hour from memory? That's an amazing piece of cognition."
The BRAMS team relies on advanced technology to get an inside look at the mind of a musician or music listener. "We use MRI to look at the anatomy of the brain, which is the usual way to use an MRI, and to measure anatomical changes in the brain - MRIs are also used to find brain tumours," he says. "But in a more global way, if we do an MRI on someone who is trained musically, they'll have changes in the parts of the brain that control fingers, and it's possible to show enhancement in certain auditory parts. But in the majority of cases, we look for brain activity. The brain uses oxygen when it's active, so with our scanning protocols it can pick up changes in oxygen use. This way, we can see what parts of the brain are responsible for controlling different functions."
Because music affects not just the brain but also the rest of the body, the BRAMS scientists have also examined singing, toe-tapping, the "chills down the spine" effect, mood manipulation and the effect music has on physical pain. Dentists, for example, often pipe in music when fiddling around in a patient's mouth. "Is it merely for relaxation and distraction [for the patient], or does it actually reduce the pain threshold?" Zatorre asks. "It seems that it's related to endorphins and opiates that might be released in the brain, but that theory's still up for grabs."
They are also studying the innate musical knowledge of casual music fans. Zatorre says laypeople can identify discordant notes in a melody, for instance, because of prolonged exposure to music at an early age. But the music they are exposed to is generally Western - classical, jazz or rock/pop. Research has yet to branch out to study, say, classical Chinese music.
"We're stuck with Western music for now solely because the people involved in the study have knowledge of Western music," Zatorre says. "It's hard to find someone anywhere in the world who has not been exposed to Western music." It's so widely disseminated, he says, that even in the more remote parts of the world, people have probably heard some Western songs, which affects their overall musical knowledge. "What, then, is the influence of early exposure?" he asks.
Still, there is much, much more to learn about the human brain. "We try to cover the whole musical spectrum," he says. "Different styles of music have different components that are of interest. Why can a classical pianist play a 30-minute sonata from memory? That's not typical in pop, where musicians tend to learn chords. And if you want to study improvisation, you look at jazz. A classically-trained musician has no clue how to improvise."
And as for that theory about playing Mozart to babies? "Well, I think it's a good way to sell CDs," he says. "But I think that theory's way overblown."
The Thereminvox or Theremin is one of the earliest fully electronic musical instruments. Invented in 1919 by Russian Lev Sergeivitch Termen (later gallicized to Leon Theremin), the Thereminvox was an offshoot of government-sponsored research into proximity sensors. Consisting of a box with two radio antennas, the Theremin was unique in that it required no physical contact in order to produce music; instead, a performer could control both the pitch and volume of the sound simply by moving his or her hands in the air.
Based on the principle of heterodyning oscillators, the Thereminvox generates an audio signal by combining two different, but very high frequency radio signals. The capacitance of the human body close to the antennas causes pitch changes in the audio signal, in much the same way that a person moving about a room can affect television reception. By changing the position of the hands with regard to one antenna, a performer can control the pitch of the output signal. Similarly, the amplitude of the signal can be affected by altering the hand's proximity to the other antenna. A careful combination of movements can lead to surprisingly complex performances.
Leon Theremin's invention of the Thereminvox was followed closely by the outbreak of civil war in Russia. After rave reviews at Moscow electronics conferences, Theremin demonstrated the device to Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin personally. Lenin was so impressed with the device that he began taking lessons in playing it, commissioned 600 of the instruments for distribution throughout the Soviet Union, and sent Theremin on a trip around the world to demonstrate the latest Soviet technology and the invention of electronic music. After a lengthy tour of Europe, during which time he demonstrated his invention to packed houses, Theremin found his way to America, where he patented his invention in 1929. Subsequently, Theremin granted commercial production rights to RCA.
The Theremin was not an easy instrument to play. It required performers to remain absolutely still lest their body movements alter the pitch of the instrument, and maintaining pitch based on audio feedback alone proved difficult as well. Theremin's search for a virtuoso was answered by another Russian expatriate, Clara Reisenberg Rockmore (1911-1998), a talented violinist who saw great promise in Theremin's invention, particularly since her career as a violinist was cut short due to problems with her bowing arm. Rockmore came to be known as the definitive master of the Theremin, her precise fingering technique and her perfect pitch giving her extraordinary control over the difficult instrument. Other theremin virtuosos include Lucy Bigelow Rosen (1890-1968). Most of the strange-sounding theremin music in older science fiction movies was performed by Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman (1903-1967).
Although the RCA Thereminvox was not a commercial success, it fascinated audiences in America and abroad. Theremin continued his inventing, creating larger devices such as a platform-sized model intended to merge musical performance and dance. One day in 1938, Theremin was kidnapped from his New York apartment by Soviet agents, and forced to return to the USSR. Although rumors of his execution were widely circulated, Theremin was in fact put to work in a labor camp, where he designed the first "bug" (electronic listening device.)
The Theremin has enjoyed a renaissance from the 1950s to the present, being featured in films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, and Plan 9 From Outer Space, as well as popular music by The Bee Gees, Led Zeppelin, and (more recently), Portishead and The Flaming Lips. Danny Elfman made extensive use of the Theremin in the soundtrack to Tim Burton's spoof B-movie, Mars Attacks. Leon Theremin died in 1993, having seen his invention become popular all over the world. A distant relative of Theremin's, Lydia Kavina is today regarded as one of the masters of the instrument.
Although there are very few original RCA Theremins available, modern Theremins can be built from kits or blueprints, and even sport new features such as optical amplitude controls and MIDI converters.
Another electronic musical instrument, the Electro-Theremin, was used by The Beach Boys on Good Vibrations and I just wasn't made for these times, played by Paul Tanner. They used a modified device, constructed by Robert Moog, which is operated by mechanical controls, produces a musical tone similar in its timbre and portamento to that of the Theremin. This was played live by Mike Love.
The brain is a three-pound supercomputer. It is the command
and
control center running your life. It is involved in absolutely
everything you do. Your brain determines how you think, how you feel,
how you act, and how well you get along with other people. Your brain
even determines the kind of person you are. It determines how
thoughtful you are; how polite or how rude you are. It determines how
well you think on your feet, and it is involved with how well you do at
work and with your family. Your brain also influences your emotional
well being and how well you do with the opposite sex.
Your brain is more complicated than any computer we can imagine. Did
you know that you have one hundred billion nerve cells in your brain,
and every nerve cell has many connections to other nerve cells? In
fact, your brain has more connections in it than there are stars in the
universe! Optimizing your brain's function is essential to being the
best you can be, whether at work, in leisure, or in your relationships.
From my work as a clinical neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and brain-imaging expert, here are 7 ways to enhance the functioning of your own brain and enhance your life.
Protecting
the brain from injury, pollution, sleep deprivation, and stress is the
first step to optimizing its function. The brain is very soft, while
the skull is really hard. Inside the skull there are many sharp bony
ridges. Several brain areas are especially vulnerable to trauma,
especially the parts involved with memory, learning, and mood
stability. In order to be your best it is essential to protect your
brain from injury. Wear your seatbelt when you're in a car, and wear a
helmet when you ride a bicycle, motorcycle, or go snowboarding. Make
sure children wear helmets. My eleven-year-old knows that if she rides
her bicycle without a helmet she'll be grounded from it for a month.
One head injury can ruin a life. Along the same lines, do not let
children hit soccer balls with their heads. Soccer balls are heavy.
Repeatedly slamming a child's head against a soccer ball may cause
minor repetitive trauma to the brain. At this time there are not enough
studies to say heading soccer balls is safe. I encourage my children to
play golf, baseball, and tennis, rather than football, soccer, or
hockey.
Current brain imaging research has shown
that many chemicals are toxic to brain function. Alcohol, drugs of
abuse, nicotine, much caffeine, and many medications decrease blood
flow to the brain. When blood flow is decreased the brain cannot work
efficiently. In one study done at UCLA, cocaine addicts had 23% less
overall brain blood flow compared to a drug free control group. Those
cocaine addicts who smoked cigarettes had 45% less blood flow than the
control group. In a study I performed on chronic marijuana users, 85%
had less activity in their temporal lobes than the control group. The
temporal lobes are involved with memory and mood stability. Caffeine
constricts blood vessels and has been shown to decrease brain activity.
A little bit of caffeine probably doesn't hurt much. Unfortunately,
many people use excessive amounts, such as 6 to 10 cups of coffee, tea,
or sodas a day. It is hard to be your best when brain activity is
diminished. Stay away substances known to be toxic or those that
decrease brain activity.
In a similar way, sleep deprivation also decreases brain activity and
limits access to learning, memory, and concentration. A recent brain
imaging study showed that people who consistently slept less than 7
hours had overall less brain activity. Sleep problems are very common
in people who struggle with their thoughts and emotions. Getting enough
sleep everyday is essential to brain function.
Scientists have only recently discovered how stress negatively affects
brain function. Stress hormones have been shown in animals to be
directly toxic to memory centers. Brain cells can die with prolonged
stress. Managing stress effectively is essential to good brain function.
The
fuel you feed your brain has a profound effect on how it functions.
Lean protein, complex carbohydrates, and foods rich in omega 3 fatty
acids (large cold water fish, such as tuna and salmon, walnuts, Brazil
nuts, olive oil, and canola oil) are essential to brain function.
Unfortunately, the great American diet is filled with simple sugars and
simple carbohydrates, causing many people to feel emotional, sluggish,
spacey, and distracted.
What do you have for
breakfast? Do you even have breakfast? Today, many children, teens, and
adults start the day with either nothing at all or by loading up on
simple carbohydrates, such as sugar cereals, Pop Tarts, muffins,
bagels, waffles, pancakes, or donuts. In our fast paced society these
foods are simple to prepare for the family rushed in the morning, but
they cause brain fog and lower performance in many people. Start the
day with a healthy breakfast that includes protein, such as eggs, lean
meat, or dairy products.
Many people struggle with energy and mental clarity after lunch. I have
found that eliminating all simple carbohydrates at lunch (sugar, white
bread or other products made from white flour such as bagels and white
pasta, potatoes, and rice) can make a dramatic difference in energy and
focus in the afternoon. An additional benefit of skipping sugar and
simple carbohydrates at lunch is that most people do not feel hunger
until dinnertime. I also believe taking a 100% vitamin and mineral
supplement is important. Many people do not eat like they should on a
regular basis.
The thoughts that go through your mind, moment by moment, have
a
significant impact on how your brain works. Research by Mark George, MD
and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health demonstrated that
happy, hopeful thoughts had an overall calming effect on the brain,
while negative thoughts inflamed brain areas often involved with
depression and anxiety. Your thoughts matter.
I often teach my patients how to metaphorically kill the ANTs that
invade their minds. ANTs stand for Automatic Negative Thoughts. The
ANTs are automatic. They just happen. But they can ruin your whole day,
maybe even your life. For example, I once treated a college student who
was ready to drop out of school. He thought he was stupid because
didn't do well on tests. When his IQ (intelligence level) was tested,
however, we discovered that he had an IQ of 135 (in the superior
range). He just wasn't a good test taker. I have identified nine
different kinds of ANT species, or ways your thoughts can distort
incoming information to make you feel bad. Here are four ANT species:
Mind reading
--- predicting you know that another person is thinking
something negative about you without them telling you. I often tell my
patients that, "A negative look from someone else may mean nothing more
than he or she is constipated. You don't know. You can't read minds. I
have 25 years of training in human behavior and I still can't read
anyone's mind."
Fortune telling
-- predicting a bad outcome to a situation before it
has occurred. Your mind makes happen what it sees. Unconsciously,
predicting failure will often cause failure. For example, if you say,
"I know I will fail the test," then you will likely not study hard
enough and fail the test.
Always or never thinking
- this is where you think in words like
always, never, every time, or everyone. These thoughts are
overgeneralizations which can alter behavior. For example, I have a
friend who asked out an attractive woman. She turned him down. He told
himself that no one will ever go out with him again. This ANT prevented
him from asking out anyone else for over nine months.
Guilt beatings
-- being overrun by thoughts of "I should have done...
I'm bad because…. I must do better at… I have
to…). Guilt is powerful
at making us feel bad. It is a lousy motivator of behavior.
You do not have to believe every thought that goes through your head.
It's important to think about your thoughts to see if they help you or
they hurt you. Unfortunately, if you never challenge your thoughts you
just "believe them" as if they were true. ANTs can take over and infest
your brain. Develop an internal anteater to hunt down and devour the
negative thoughts that are ruining your life.
Once you learn about your thoughts, you can chose to think good
thoughts and feel good or you can choose to think bad thoughts and feel
lousy. You can train your thoughts to be positive and hopeful or you
can just allow them to be negative and upset you. That's right, it's up
to you! You can learn how to change your thoughts and optimize your
brain. One way to learn how to change your thoughts is to notice them
when they are negative and talk back to them. If you can correct
negative thoughts, you take away their power over you. When you think a
negative thought without challenging it, your mind believes it and your
brain reacts to it.
Your
brain is like a muscle. The more you use it, the more you can use it.
Every time you learn something new your brain makes a new connection.
Learning enhances blood flow and activity in the brain. If you go for
long periods without learning something new you start to lose some of
the connections in the brain and you begin to struggle more with memory
and learning.
Anatomist Marian Diamond, PhD, from
the University of California at Berkely studied aging in rats. Those
rats who were allowed an easy life without any new challenges or
learning had less brain weight than those rats who were challenged and
forced to learn new information in order to be fed. New learning
actually caused increased brain density and weight. Strive to learn
something new everyday, even if it is just for a short period of time.
Einstein said that if a person studies a subject for just 15 minutes a
day in a year he will be an expert, and in five years he may be a
national expert. Learning is good for your brain.
In
a series of studies by Winnifred B. Cutler, PhD and colleagues at the
University of Pennsylvania and later at Stanford University it was
found that regular sexual contact had an important impact on physical
and emotional well being of women. Sexual contact with a partner at
least once a week led to more fertile, regular menstrual cycles,
shorter menses, delayed menopause, increased estrogen levels, and
delayed aging. Brain imaging studies at UCLA have shown that decreased
estrogen levels are associated with overall decreased brain activity
and poor memory. Enhancing estrogen levels for women through regular
sexual activity enhances overall brain activity and improves memory.
In Dr. Cutler's study the occurrence of orgasm was not as important as
the fact that sex was with another person. Intimacy and emotional
bonding may be the most influential factors in the positive aspects of
sex. As a psychiatrist I have seen many people withhold sex as a way to
show hurt, anger, or disappointment. Dr. Cutler's research suggests
that this is self-defeating behavior. The more you withhold the worse
it may be for you. Appropriate sex is one of the keys to the brain's
fountain of youth.
Optimal
performance is best achieved when a "concert state" exists in the
brain. By "concert state" I mean "a relaxed body with a sharp, clear
mind," much as you would experience at an exhilarating symphony.
Achieving this state requires two simultaneous skills: deep relaxation
and focus.
Deep relaxation is easily achieved by
most people through diaphragmatic breathing exercises (learning how to
breathe with your belly). This is the most natural, efficient way to
breathe. Have you ever seen how a puppy or a baby breathes? They
breathe almost exclusively with their bellies. A quick way to learn
belly breathing is to lay on the floor and put a book on your belly. As
you breathe in make the book rise as you fill your lower lungs with
air. As you breathe out make the book fall as you use your belly to
exhale all the air out of your lungs. Take slow, deep breaths, less
than 7 a minute. One of my patients told me that it was impossible for
him to be anxious or mad when he breathed in this way.
Use music to help develop concentration skills. In a famous study at
the University of California at Irvine, students who listened to
Mozart's Sonata for 2 Pianos (k448) increased visual-spatial
intelligence by about 10 percent. Another recent study demonstrated
that students who play a musical instrument scored higher on average on
the SAT than children who did not play music. Music can either help or
hurt concentration. In a recent study from my clinic, we had 12
teenagers play the game Memory while they listened to different types
of music: rock, rap, classical, and no music. Rap was associated with
the worst performance. The rock group also scored poorly.
Interestingly, the group did slightly better with classical music than
no music at all.
Another technique for developing clear focus is the "One Page Miracle."
On one piece of paper write down the following headings:
Next to each heading write down what you want in each area.
For
example, under relationships, "I want to have a kind, loving, connected
relationship with my children." When you finish writing all of your
goals make multiple copies of it and prominently display it where you
can see it several times each day. Frequently ask yourself, "Is my
behavior getting me what I want?" This exercise helps to keep you
focused on the things that are most important in your life.
Work to develop a "concert state" by relaxing your body and developing
mental clarity.
Many people sabotage themselves by denying they have brain problems until significant damage has been done to their lives. Most psychiatrists feel that there is a significant brain component to depression, anxiety problems, attention deficit disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, substance abuse problems, and even violence. Unfortunately, the stigma associated with seeing a psychiatrist still prevents people from seeking help for obvious problems.
Clearly, the earlier people seek help for these problems the less negative impact they will have on their lives. If you struggle with any of these problems you are not alone. According to the National Institutes of Health 49% of Americans will have a psychiatric illness (depression, anxiety, ADD, OCD, substance abuse problems, etc.) at some point in their lives. Successful people have problems, they are smart enough to seek help. The earlier the better.
Your life can only improve with an optimized brain.
The cello (also violoncello or 'cello) is a stringed instrument, closely related to the violin. The cello is much larger than a violin, and unlike that instrument is played in an upright position between the legs of the seated musician, resting on a metal spike. The player draws their bow horizontally across the strings.
The cello plays notes on the bass clef, and has 4 strings tuned in fifths: C (the lowest), G, D and A (below middle C) - these are tuned exactly one octave below the viola. For the highest notes, the cello sometimes uses the tenor clef and occasionally the treble clef.
The name cello is an abbreviation of the Italian violoncello, which means 'little violone'. The violone is an obsolete instrument whose name literally means 'big viola'. It was similar to a modern double bass.
COLUMBUS, Ohio It's no secret that exercise improves mood, but new research suggests that working out to music may give exercisers a cognitive boost. Listening to music while exercising helped to increase scores on a verbal fluency test among cardiac rehabilitation patients.
"This is the first study to look at the combined effects of music and short-term exercise on mental performance," said Charles Emery, the study's lead author and a professor of psychology at Ohio State University.
"Evidence suggests that exercise improves the cognitive performance of people with coronary artery disease," Emery said. "And listening to music is thought to enhance brain power. We wanted to put the two results together."
Those results appear in a recent issue of the journal Heart & Lung.
The study included 33 men and women in the final weeks of a cardiac rehabilitation program. Most participants had undergone bypass surgery, angioplasty or cardiac catheterization.
Coronary artery disease may compromise cognitive ability, Emery said; that's why he and his colleagues chose cardiac rehabilitation patients for this study.
The researchers asked participants to complete a verbal fluency test before and after two separate sessions of exercising on a treadmill. The workouts were scheduled a week apart and lasted about 30 minutes. Participants listened to classical music Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" during one of the sessions.
"We used 'The Four Seasons' because of its moderate tempo and positive effects on medical patients in previous research," Emery said. "But given the range of music preferences among patients, it's especially important to evaluate the influence of other types of music on cognitive outcomes."
As a way to measure anxiety and depression, participants completed a 30-item checklist before and after exercise. The list included adjectives to describe the patient's current mood. The researchers also tested each person's verbal fluency before and after each exercise session by asking participants to generate lists of words in specific categories.
"This kind of task challenges the part of the brain that handles planning and abstract thought as well as a person's capacity for organized verbal processing," Emery said.
Participants reported feeling better emotionally and mentally after working out regardless of whether or not they listened to music. But the improvement in verbal fluency test performance after listening to music was more than double that of the non-music condition.
"Exercise seems to cause positive changes in the nervous system, and these changes may have a direct effect on cognitive ability," Emery said. "Listening to music may influence cognitive function through different pathways in the brain. The combination of music and exercise may stimulate and increase cognitive arousal while helping to organize cognitive output."
Emery conducted the study with Evana Hsiao and Scott Hill, both with Ohio State, and David Frid of Pfizer, Inc.
A grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute helped fund this research.
An accordion is a small portable free-reed wind instrument with a keyboard, the smallest representative of the organ family.
Sound is made by a thin metal ribbon, a reed, that is held at one end and free at the other, like a ruler on the edge of a table top. The reed is fitted inside a holder plate, air is drawn through the hole in the holder, the reed vibrates, producing sound.
The first free-reed instrument was the Chinese sheng (笙), which is mouth-blown. It is thought that a traveler to China in the 1800s brought this idea back to Europe.
The first modern accordion was a 10-button accordion, invented in 1829 by Damian, in Vienna, which had the 7 notes of a major scale, and consequently only played in one key [and its related keys]. These accordions are still played today and are called many things, Cajun accordions, melodeons, one-row, diatonic accordions, and so on. They are single-action instruments, where as a rule each button produces two different notes, one when pulling the bellows outwards, one when pushing it inwards. The notes are arranged much like on a harmonica.
The accordion was patented on January 14, 1854 by Anthony Faas.
The accordion consists of a bellows of many folds, to which is attached a keyboard with from 5 to 50 keys. The keys on being depressed, while the bellows are being worked, open valves admitting the wind to free reeds, consisting of narrow tongues of metal riveted some to the upper, some to the lower board of the bellows, having their free ends bent, some inwards, some outwards. Each key produces two notes, one from the inwardly bent reed when the bellows are compressed, the other from the outwardly bent reed by suction when the bellows are expanded. The pitch of the note is determined by the length and thickness of the reeds, reduction of the length tending to sharpen the note, while reduction of the thickness lowers it. The right hand plays the melody on the keyboard, while the left works the bellows and manipulates the two or three bass harmony keys, which sound the simple chords of the tonic and dominant.
Related instruments include the concertina and the melodeon.
The piano accordion was developed in Europe in the late 1800's and has become the most common type of accordion nowadays. Familiar to everyone who has ever seen Lawrence Welk, the right hand is laid out like a piano keyboard, so a piano player could play it, though the keys are smaller than on a piano. The left hand plays in a forest of up to 120 buttons which play bass notes and various chords. The instrument was named and popularized in the United States by Count Guido Deiro who was the first piano accordionist to perform in Vaudeville. He is credited with making the first recordings of the instrument in 1908, also with making the first radio broadcast of the accordion in 1921 and the first sound motion picture featuring the accordion, Vitaphone 1928.
The left hand layout usually features six rows, the second row buttons consist of the Bass and is ordered in quints, the first row buttons are one third up relative to the second row. The major chords are in the third row, the fourth row consists of the minor accords, the fifth row houses the seventh chord and finally the sixth row has the diminished seventh chords.
The layout can be roughly described by this ASCII Art:
... C G D A E B F# C# G# D# A# F C ...
... Ab Eb Bb F C G D A E B F# C# G# ...
... ab eb bb f c g d a e b f# c# g# ...
... abm ebm Bbm fm cm gm dm am em bm f#m c#m g#m ...
... ab7 eb7 Bb7 f7 c7 g7 d7 a7 e7 b7 f#7 c#7 g#7 ...
... abd7 ebd7 Bbd7 fd7 cd7 gd7 dd7 ad7 ed7 bd7 f#d7 c#d7 g#d7 ...
Depending on the price, size or origin of the instrument, some rows may miss completely or the layout is slightly changed. In most russian layouts the diminished seventh chord row is moved by one button, so that the diminished seventh C chord is where the diminished seventh F chord is in this ascii graphic, in order to achieve a better reachability with the forefinger.
Another type is the chromatic accordion. Usually these have buttons instead of piano keys, but they have the same 12-note Western scale as a piano accordion. The buttons are ordered chromatically in three rows, one row up/down means one halftone up/down, one button up/down in the same row means 3 halftones up/down. Larger chromatic accordions can have up to three auxiliary rows, with secondary buttons playing the same tones that already appeared in the first three rows. This layout makes transforming songs into other keys much easier than on the piano accordion. The chromatic accordion is definitely the choice for classical music, as a lot of more buttons than piano keys can be packed on the same space. Therefore artists can play intervals of up to two octaves using only one hand, this is especially important for pieces that include more than two voices. There are two different layout systems, the C layout and the B flat layout. If you turned a C layout keyboard on its head you would have a B flat layout and vice versa. The B flat layout is preferred for classical music, and is very common in Eastern Europe whereas the C layout is common in the western part, particularly in France.
Piano accordions and chromatic accordions are double-action instruments: each key or button plays the same note or chord, whether the bellows are being pulled out or pushed in.
Free bass, Bariton bass or Melody bass accordions, favored by classical accordionists, have a left-hand button board with individual bass notes over several octaves, rather than the single octave of bass notes and the preset chords provided by the traditional "stradella" left-hand button system and works exactly the same way the right hand on the chromatic accordion does. There are "converter" accordions offering both systems in one instrument.
Many folk cultures have their own flavor of the accordion, including the Russian bayan, Alpine helikon instruments, North Mexican conjunto accordion, Louisiana Cajun accordion, Irish 2 row b-c type instruments, etc. These can have either a unique note layout, a different sound, or all of the above.
Every season has its colors. I love driving in New England in the early autumn to appreciate the aesthetics of their foliage with my radio tuned to WCRB, a classical music station. The colorful sights against the background of classical music seems like watching a ballet performance all around me. How can it not cheer me?
Every plate of food has its colors. Many chefs prepare food not only to tease you with the aromas or please your taste buds when eating, but rather to make you conscious of the final presentation of colors on the plate that the various foods represent to the naked eye. How about those fancy desserts with colorful designs mixed on the plate? My favorite restaurant to catch eye candy in all their dishes reflected by stain glass windows is The Abby located in Atlanta. I just wish the lights inside were a little brighter.
Every school has its colors. School Bus Yellow. Red Brick Buildings. Blackboards— although there are electronic whiteboards too!
So does marketing have its colors. You may not realize the psychological impact colors have on our lives. I once played the role of George Washington in Stan Freeberg's 1776 satire where I sang off-key to Betsy Ross while she was creating the American flag: “Take note of the colors you choose...the best you could do I suppose.”
Below is a guide to help you pick out the right colors for your logos, ads, and literature to represent your company. At least you don't have to worry about representing a country.
YELLOW – Stimulating. Expansive. This bright color is frequently used when highlighting knowledge, displaying ideas, and supporting creativity. “School bus” yellow provides great eye-catching appeal to educators. Ads from FirstStudent generate high attention-getting scores!
ORANGE – Reflecting. Pleasant. This warm hue is often seen when a subject is explored in depth or a structure is created. District Administration recently published a customized supplement for Aramark Enterprises called Partners for Progress. “Carrot orange” was effectively used on the cover to symbolize the structure of the healthy choices menu available for schools from this food service division. It may also be used when the intent is to show a “search for solutions.” SolidWorks recently used the color orange quite successfully in their ad as a highlighter to mark classified ads in a newspaper.
RED – Activating. Dynamic. “Seeing red” is effectively used when defining measures, setting rules, and working with emotional topics. Stop sign red cannot be overlooked in Brother International’s recent ad to help promote a special education offer.
BLUE – Concentrating. Restful. This serene color is often utilized when presenting and explaining facts, giving information, and working as an individual unit. Think cool IBM Blue!
GREEN – Harmonizing. Hope. Green is a popular earth color that is great to profile science topics or themes! LeapFrog SchoolHouse uses the color green to grab the reader's attention and match their mascot at the same time.
WHITE – Orderly. Clarifying. Edison Schools has been running black-and-white ads with classic photography in four-color magazines to stand out from the clutter! Extra white space always seems to give an organized feel to a marketing piece. And just for fun…how about those black-and-white cow boxes from Gateway?
You can also use shapes to communicate information about your company’s objective for a particular promotion. Below is a guide using shapes and their effects:
RECTANGLE – This is a popular shape for cards used in visualized discussions (i.e., flash cards). It's also seen when the objective is to explain details.
OVAL – This shape is often used to show headings of clusters and for emotional statements, as in cartoon bubbles.
CIRCLE – This form is used to present ideas to substructure topics and to mark individual contributions. Try using circles next time rather than squares to highlight an educator testimonial with a picture and comments. You’ll be surprised at how effective it will be.
RHOMBUS – This quadrilateral shape is an effective way to illustrate structures and show interdependence between topics. It’s ideal for publishers to display teaching across the curriculum.
HEXAGON – This six-sided shape can illustrate variations of a topic by clustering them as a honeycomb to explain ideas or profile solutions.
A calliope is a musical instrument. It is played with a keyboard, and sends steam though whistles to make sound. Joseph Stoddard of Worcester, Massachusetts invented the calliope in 1855. The calliope is sometimes called the "steam organ" or "steam piano." It was often played on riverboats and in circuses.
Even the smaller calliopes give off a sound that can be heard for miles around. This has often led to complaints by the neighbors.
But the chances of hearing a calliope are slim because most of them disappeared with the fading away of the age of steam. As the internal combustion engine replaced steam boilers as a source of power it became difficult to find a steady, cheap supply of medium-pressure steam to power a calliope. Eventually the skills needed to tend or repair a steam boiler giving the required pressure also became less widespread. Only a few working caliopes have survived, and they are not used often.
Classic English and French composers influenced by their language.
Would Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance or Debussy's Clair de Lune have sounded the same if the composers had been born in different countries? Probably not, according to researchers who have found that the melodies composers write are influenced by the language they speak.
The team's analysis shows that fluctuations in pitch in music written by classic French composers vary much less than in British music. The difference mirrors the patterns of pitch found in the corresponding languages.
Musicologists and linguists have tried to connect cultures' speech with their music in the past but have only had luck with tonal languages, such as Chinese, which assign meaning to words based on their pitch.
The new work is the first to connect melody with non-tonal speech. Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues used advanced computer software to analyse recordings of people saying different sentences in British English and in French. The software measures the pitch of each vowel, then works out the size of the jump in pitch between one syllable and the next.
For example, in the word "finding", the second vowel typically registers about 4 semitones higher than the first.
The researchers carried out the same analysis on musical notes from pieces by English and French composers such as Edward Elgar and Claude Debussy. The researchers avoided modern composers, because they would probably have been exposed to a range of cultures and languages.
Whereas previous work has compared the range of different pitches in languages and their associated music, Patel and his colleagues looked at the size of the jumps from note to note.
"We looked at how variable the intervals between pitches were, not just how variable the pitches were," says Patel.
The intervals in French speech and music turned out to be considerably less variable than their English counterparts. In other words, classical concerts and café chatter may sound rather smoother in Paris than in London.
A carillon is a musical instrument composed of a range of bells controlled by a keyboard.
Carillons originated in the 15th century in Flanders, when bell-makers perfected their art to the point where bells could be cast with an exact tone. The greatest concentration of antique carillons is still found in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the northern regions of France and Germany, where they were commonly put in place by rich market towns as tokens of civic pride and status. They were most often housed in church towers, clock towers, or on municipal buildings, and the same holds true for those carillons that have been installed in other parts of the world since the art of casting precisely tuned bells was rediscovered in the late 19th century. In Germany, such a carillon is also called a glockenspiel.
Since each separate note is produced by an individual bell, a carillon's musical range is determined by the number of bells it has. With fewer than 23 (two octaves), the instrument is considered a chime, not a true carillon. Average instruments have ranges of around four anda half octaves (47 bells), while the largest specimens, with as many as 77, can span six octaves. In comparison, standard grand pianos can play 88 different notes.
Seated in a cabin beneath the bells, the carillonneur presses down, with a cupped hand or fist, on a series of baton-like keys arranged in the same pattern as a piano keyboard. The keys activate levers and wires that connect directly to the bells' clappers; thus, as with a piano, the carillonneur can vary the intensity of the note according to the force applied to the key. In addition to the manual keys, the heavier bells are also connected to a series of pedals, offering the carillonneur a choice of two ways of playing the lower notes.
Noted carillons can be found in the following locations:
In lovers' songs, military marches, weddings and funerals
— every occasion where a degree of emotion needs to be evoked
— music is an indispensable ingredient.
Yet the ability to enjoy music has long puzzled biologists because it
does nothing evident to help survival. Why, therefore, should evolution
have built into the human brain this soul-stirring source of pleasure?
Man's faculties for enjoying and producing music, Darwin wrote, "must
be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed."
Music is still a mystery, a tangle of culture and built-in skills that
researchers are trying to tease apart. No one really knows why music is
found in all cultures, why most known systems of music are based on the
octave, why some people have absolute pitch and whether the brain
handles music with special neural circuits or with ones developed for
other purposes. Recent research, however, has produced a number of
theories about the brain and music.
It could be that the brain perceives music with the same circuits it
uses to hear and analyze human speech, and that it thrills to its
cadences with centers designed to mediate other kinds of pleasure. Dr.
Anne Blood and Dr. Robert J. Zatorre, of the Montreal Neurological
Institute, recently took PET scans of musicians' brains while they
listened to self-selected pieces of music that gave them "chills" of
euphoria. The works included Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 and
Barber's Adagio for Strings. The music, the researchers reported,
activated similar neural systems of reward and emotion as those
stimulated by food, sex and addictive drugs.
If music depends on neural circuits developed for other reasons, then
it is just a happy accident, regardless of evolution, that people enjoy
it. This is the position taken by Dr. Steven Pinker, a psychologist at
Harvard University. Music, he writes in his 1997 book "How the Mind
Works," is "auditory cheesecake" — it just happens to tickle
several important parts of the brain in a highly pleasurable way, as
cheesecake tickles the palate. These include the language ability (with
which music overlaps in several ways); the auditory cortex; the system
that responds to the emotional signals in a human voice crying or
cooing; and the motor control system that injects rhythm into the
muscles when walking or dancing.
That music can activate all these powerful systems at once is the
reason it packs such a mental oomph, in Dr. Pinker's analysis. But
since each of these systems evolved for independent reasons, music
itself is no more an evolutionary adaptation than is the ability to
like dessert, which arises from intense stimulation of the taste buds
responsive to sweet and fatty substances.
But other evolutionary psychologists believe the faculty of enjoying
music is no accident. Darwin suggested that human ancestors, before
acquiring the power of speech, "endeavored to charm each other with
musical notes and rhythm." It is because of music's origin in
courtship, Darwin believed, that it is "firmly associated with some of
the strongest passions an animal is capable of feeling."
In his theory of sexual selection, Darwin proposed that traits found
attractive in courtship would enable their owners to get more genes
into the next generation. The upshot would be the emergence of
adornments that had no immediately obvious survival value in
themselves, like the peacock's tail or the troubadour's ballads.
Darwin's ideas about music have been extended by Dr. Geoffrey Miller,
an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico. Dr.
Miller notes their potency in pointing to the opportunities open to
popular musicians for transmitting their genes to the next generation.
The rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix, for instance, had "sexual liaisons
with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel long-term relationships
with at least two women, and fathered at least three children in the
United States, Germany, and Sweden. Under ancestral conditions before
birth control, he would have fathered many more," Dr. Miller writes.
Why on earth would nubile young women choose a rock star as a possible
father of their children instead of more literary and reflective
professionals such as, say, journalists? Dr. Miller sees music as an
excellent indicator of fitness in the Darwinian struggle for survival.
Since music draws on so many of the brain's faculties, it vouches for
the health of the organ as a whole. And since music in ancient cultures
seems often to have been linked with dancing, a good fitness indicator
for the rest of the body, anyone who could sing and dance well was
advertising the general excellence of their mental and physical genes
to a potential mate.
"Music evolved and continues to function as a courtship display, mostly
broadcast by young males to attract females," Dr. Miller writes in "The
Origins of Music," a collection of essays by him and others.
But other psychologists argue that Dr. Miller's courtship theory does
not do full justice to another important dimension of music, its role
in cementing social relationships and coordinating the activities of
large groups of people. Dr. Robin Dunbar, of Liverpool University, has
shown that monkeys spend a large amount of time grooming other members
of their social group, so much so that they would scarcely have time to
look for food if their 50-strong groups were to grow any larger.
Dr. Dunbar believes that the much larger human groups, of 150 members
or so, overcame the grooming barrier by developing a new kind of social
glue, namely language. Group singing, or chorusing, may have been an
intermediate step in this process, he suggests. He has preliminary
evidence that singing in church produces endorphins, a class of brain
hormone thought to be important in social bonding, he said in an e-mail
message.
Others, like Dr. Edward Hagen of Humboldt University in Berlin and Dr.
Gregory A. Bryant of the University of California at Santa Cruz,
believe the role of music in human evolutionary history was not to
create social cohesion but to signal it to rival groups. By putting ona better song-and-dance display, a group could show it had the
coordination to prevail in a scrap, and could thus avoid a fight
altogether, they write in an article available on the Web.
Male chimpanzees sometimes chorus in a call known as a pant-hoot,
though usually to attract females to a new source of fruit they have
found. For human ancestors, musical displays of this kind "may have
formed the evolutionary basis for the musical abilities of modern
humans," Dr. Hagen and Dr. Bryant write. The Pentagon's vigorous
support of military bands — $163 million in 1997 —
lends a certain resonance to this view.
The courting and social cohesion theories of music's origins assume
that there are structures in the human brain that have evolved
specifically to handle music. If no such structures exist, then Dr.
Pinker's theory or something like it is correct.
A leading clue that points to music-specific structures, yet is so far
not conclusive, is that many features of music are universal as well as
apparently innate, meaning present at birth. All societies have music,
all sing lullaby-like songs to their infants, and most produce tonal
music, or music composed in subsets of the 12-tone chromatic scale,
such as the diatonic or pentatonic scales. Some of the earliest known
musical instruments, crane bone flutes from the Jiahu site in China,
occupied from 7000 to 5700 B.C., produce a tonal scale.
Dr. Sandra Trehub, of the University of Toronto, has developed methods
of testing the musical preferences of infants as young as 2 to 6
months. She finds they prefer consonant sounds, like perfect fifths or
perfect fourths, over dissonant ones. A reasonable conclusion is that
"the rudiments of music listening are gifts of nature rather than
products of culture," she wrote in the July issue of Nature
Neuroscience.
But although certain basic features of music, such as the octave,
intervals with simple ratios like the perfect fifth, and tonality, seem
to be innate, they are probably not genetic adaptations for music, "but
rather appear to be side effects of general properties of the auditory
system," conclude two Cambridge scientists, Josh McDermott of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dr. Marc Hauser of Harvard,
in an unpublished article.
The human auditory system is probably tuned to perceive the most
important sounds in a person's surroundings, which are those of the
human voice. Three neuroscientists at Duke University, Dr. David A.
Schwartz, Dr. Catherine Q. Howe and Dr. Dale Purves, say that on the
basis of this cue they may have solved the longstanding mysteries of
the structure of the chromatic scale and the reason why some harmonies
are more pleasing than others.
Though every human voice, and maybe each utterance, is different, a
certain commonality emerges when many different voices are analyzed.
The human vocal tract shapes the vibrations of the vocal cords into a
set of harmonics that are more intense at some frequencies than others
relative to the fundamental note. The principal peaks of intensity
occur at the fifth and the octave, with lesser peaks at other intervals
that correspond to most of the 12 tones of the chromatic scale, the
Duke researchers say in an article published last month in the Journal
of Neuroscience. Almost identical spectra were produced by speakers of
English, Mandarin, Persian and Tamil.
The Duke researchers believe the auditory system judges sounds to be
pleasant the closer they approximate to this generalized power spectrum
of the human voice. "A musical tone combination whose power is
concentrated at the same places as a human speech sound will sound more
familiar and more natural," Dr. Schwartz said.
Some people are unable to appreciate music, raising the question of
whether some music-specific faculty has been damaged. People who are
tone deaf also fail to hear pitch changes in the human voice, so this
deficit does not seem specific to music. Some patients have music
agnosia, an inability to recognize familiar melodies, even ones to
which they know the lyrics. But the brain has to store memories about
music somewhere, and the music agnosia patients could have incurred
memory damage that just happened to hit the music archive, Mr.
McDermott, of M.I.T., said.
"Any innate biases on music must derive from something in the brain,
but at present there is little evidence for neural circuitry dedicated
to music," Mr. McDermott and Dr. Hauser conclude.
Dr. Zatorre, of the Montreal institute, takes a similar view. The brain
has evolved faculties for perceiving sounds, organizing events in time
and maintaining memory stores, he said. "Once you've got all that
hardware in place, it can be used for a lot of different purposes. But
I don't think it follows that music was selected for."
Whether music is cheesecake, courtship or cohesion, its mystery remains
unbreached.
A celesta (pronounced se-lest-a or cheh-lest-a) is a keyboard musical instrument that looks similar to a regular piano. Unlike the piano the notes are not made by striking strings, but by striking metal bars. When keys on the celesta are pressed, hammers inside strike steel metal plates suspended over wooden resonators. A pedal can be used to dampen or sustain the sound.
The plates in a celesta are similar to the metal plates on a glockenspiel. The sounds of the celesta and glockenspiel are quite similar but the celesta has a softer timbre. It is this soft quality sound that helped name the instrument "Celesta". Celeste means "heavenly" in French.
As it makes it sound by striking metal plates, it is treated as part of the percussion section in an orchestra. This is even though it is most often played by a pianist and the music is written on two bracketed staves.
In 1889 the celesta was invented by the Parisian harmonium builder Auguste Mustel. 29 years before (1860), Mustel's father, Victor Mustel, had developed the forerunner of the celesta, the typophone or the dulcitone. This was where tuning-forks were struck instead of metal plates. As the sound produced was not very loud, this was never used in an orchestral situation. Auguste Mustel adapted his fathers works to use metal plates and give it the louder sound required for it to be used in an orchestra.
One of the best known uses of a celesta is in the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy from Tchaikovsky's ballet, The Nutcracker.
Scientists are trying to understand why music - a pleasurable but seemingly unnecessary part of life - is universal in all human societies, ancient and modern.
Archaeologists have found evidence of musical activity dating back at least 50,000 years. Even babies as well as some animals, such as birds, whales and monkeys, have a built-in sense of tone and rhythm, according to a set of six papers on the origin and function of music in the July edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience.
"Every culture we've ever looked at has music of some sort," Marc Hauser, a neuroscientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and author of the leading paper, said in a telephone interview. "But why that is so is a puzzle."
Researchers expect their music studies - aided by the latest techniques of genetics and brain imaging - to shed new light on the way brains work and help people suffering from brain damage or disease.
Music also offers scientists another way to explore the unsolved mysteries of human consciousness. It can help explain how the brain processes external signals - in this case sound waves - that lead people to perform actions such as toe tapping, dancing and singing.
"Music provides a panoramic window through which we can examine the neural organization of complex behaviors that are at the core of human nature," wrote Petr Janata, a brain scientist at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H.
Isabelle Peretz, a psychology professor at the University of Montreal, reported that the human brain has a special "module," or network of cells, for music, separate from but overlapping with the areas that handle language. The module has distinct subsystems for melody and for rhythm.
The music module is not a little organ like a gland, Peretz said, but "a mental information processing system" composed of circuits of cells scattered through the brain that are specialized for processing music.
A major riddle is why humans developed the capacity to enjoy and perform music - from humming to composing a symphony - since these activities seem to have little or no practical value.
Scientists think most human skills, such as language and walking on two legs, evolved because they gave their possessors an advantage over rival creatures.
"Because of its lack of obvious utility, music is typically viewed by scientists as an interesting but evolutionarily irrelevant artifact," said Sandra Trehub, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto.
Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, wrote in 1871: "As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed."
Experts have proposed various explanations for the universality of music.
Darwin suggested it evolved in our animal ancestors as a sexual system, designed to attract mates. "In this view, animal song became part of courtship, and then part of human nature," Hauser said.
Others observe that music creates social cohesion, strengthening group bonds against outsiders. School pep songs or military marches are obvious applications.
Many assert that the most important function of music is to regulate or influence emotions. "Some sequences of notes are happy, some are sad," said Hauser. "Music affects our emotional response."
It isn't clear which of these theories about the origin of music is correct. "We really can't distinguish between these hypotheses," Hauser acknowledged. "Everything is open to debate."
Researchers are particularly interested in studies comparing the musical abilities of adults with those of human babies and animals. For example, experiments with very young infants showed that they react differently to harmonious and discordant chords, demonstrating that a sense for music is inherited.
According to Trehub, 4-month-old infants are content to listen to unfamiliar folk melodies, but show signs of distress - fussing, squirming, turning away - when dissonant notes are introduced into the melody.
"Toddlers commonly invent songs before they can reproduce conventional songs," she noted. "Similarly, school-age children create songs and chants, such as `eenie-meenie-miney-mo,' that share a number of features across cultures, including repetition, rhythmic patterning, rhyme and alliteration."
Even monkeys apparently sense the concept of a musical octave - notes separated by five or seven grades of pitch.
According to Anthony Wright, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, rhesus monkeys, like humans, tended to judge a tape-recorded song, such as "Old McDonald Had a Farm," to be the same when it was shifted up or down by one or two octaves.
But when the melody was transposed by a half-octave, thereby changing its key, the monkeys no longer recognized the tune, a fact they showed by failing to turn their heads toward the speaker.
Comparisons between music and language offer fresh insights into brain function.
Hauser pointed out that music resembles language in that most people in all cultures instinctively know whether a sentence in their language is grammatical or not. Similarly, almost everyone can tell whether certain patterns of sound are music or mere noise, even if these sounds have never been heard before.
"There are other stimuli that nearly everyone recognizes as unmusical, such as a `sour' note in a melody," he said.
"For too long, the neuroscience of language has been studied in isolation," wrote Aniruddh Patel, a scholar at The Neuroscience Institute in San Diego. "Music is now stepping into this breach, and via comparative analysis with language, providing a more complete and coherent picture of the mind than can be achieved by studying either domain alone."
The Claviharp (also called the Clavier-Harp, Claviharpe or Keyed harp) is a very very rare instrument that is not mentioned in most documentation. It was played at some point on time by Juan Hidalgo, the famous Spanish harpist and composer of the 17th century. The earliest date that this instrument is mentioned is in 1609 in a list of harp repair expenses that ended in the late 1660s. Many references seem to indicate a gut-strung keyboard instrument, similar to other instruments known at the time in Germany and Italy. This appears to have been an instrument used for particular types of occasions, especially the Holy Week services, when a particular sound was desired to express certain emotions or musical ideas.
New research suggests that we like music that sounds just like us.
Music is one of the human species's relatively few universal abilities. Without formal training, any individual, from Stone Age tribesman to suburban teenager, has the ability to recognize music and, in some fashion, to make it.
Why this should be so is a mystery. After all, music isn't necessary for getting through the day, and if it aids in reproduction, it does so only in highly indirect ways. Language, by contrast, is also everywhere -- but for reasons that are more obvious. With language, you and the members of your tribe can organize a migration across Africa, build reed boats and cross the seas, and communicate at night even when you can't see each other. Modern culture, in all its technological extravagance, springs directly from the human talent for manipulating symbols and syntax.
Scientists have always been intrigued by the connection between music and language. Yet over the years, words and melody have acquireda vastly different status in the lab and the seminar room. While language has long been considered essential to unlocking the mechanisms of human intelligence, music is generally treated as an evolutionary frippery -- mere "auditory cheesecake," as the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it.
But thanks to a decade-long wave of neuroscience research, that tune is changing. A flurry of recent publications suggests that language and music may equally be able to tell us who we are and where we're from -- not just emotionally, but biologically. In July, the journal Nature Neuroscience devoted a special issue to the topic. And in an article in the August 6 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, David Schwartz, Catherine Howe, and Dale Purves of Duke University argued that the sounds of music and the sounds of language are intricately connected.
To grasp the originality of this idea, it's necessary to realize two things about how music has traditionally been understood. First, musicologists have long emphasized that while each culture stamps a special identity onto its music, music itself has some universal qualities. For example, in virtually all cultures sound is divided into some or all of the 12 intervals that make up the chromatic scale -- that is, the scale represented by the keys on a piano. For centuries, observers have attributed this preference for certain combinations of tones to the mathematical properties of sound itself.
Some 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras was the first to note a direct relationship between the harmoniousness of a tone combination and the physical dimensions of the object that produced it. For example, a plucked string will always play an octave lower than a similar string half its size, and a fifth lower than a similar string two-thirds its length. This link between simple ratios and harmony has influenced music theory ever since.
This music-is-math idea is often accompanied by the notion that music, formally speaking at least, exists apart from the world in which it was created. Writing recently in The New York Review of Books, pianist and critic Charles Rosen discussed the long-standing notion that while painting and sculpture reproduce at least some aspects of the natural world, and writing describes thoughts and feelings we are all familiar with, music is entirely abstracted from the world in which we live.
Neither idea is right, according to David Schwartz and colleagues. Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular -- which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage. Says Schwartz, "The explanation of music, like the explanation of any product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, not in numbers per se."
Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analyzed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only on the raw sound, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning and sliced sentences into random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 brief segments of speech, they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the building blocks of music are to be found in speech.
Far from being abstract, music presents a strange analog to the patterns created by the sounds of speech. "Music, like the visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world," says Schwartz. "It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the visual environment." In music we hear the echo of our basic sound-making instrument -- the vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras's mathematical equations: We like the sounds that are familiar to us -- specifically, we like sounds that remind us of us.
This brings up some chicken-or-egg evolutionary questions. It may be that music imitates speech directly, the researchers say, in which case it would seem that language evolved first. It's also conceivable that music came first and language is in effect an imitation of song -- that in everyday speech we hit the musical notes we especially like. Alternately, it may be that music imitates the general products of the human sound-making system, which just happens to be mostly speech. "We can't know this," says Schwartz. "What we do know is that they both come from the same system, and it is this that shapes our preferences."
Schwartz's study also casts light on the long-running question of whether animals understand or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of "music" in the natural world -- birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronized chimpanzee hooting -- previous studies have found that many laboratory animals don't show a great affinity for the human variety of music making.
Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don't create or perceive music the way we do. The fact that laboratory monkeys can show recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory system, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability. As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognize their own tunes -- a narrow repertoire -- but don't generate novel melodies like we do. There are no avian Mozarts.
But what's been played to the animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve preferences for sound as we do -- based upon the soundscape in which they live -- then their "music" would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way our scales derive from human utterances, a cat's idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and meows. To demonstrate that animals don't appreciate sounds the way we do, we'd need evidence that they don't respond to "music" constructed from their own sound environment.
No matter how the connection between language and music is parsed, what is apparent is that our sense of music, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our biology and in our brains as language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Trehub at the University of Toronto, who also published a paper in the Nature Neuroscience special issue.
For babies, music and speech are on a continuum. Mothers use musical speech to "regulate infants' emotional states," Trehub says. Regardless of what language they speak, the voice all mothers use with babies is the same: "something between speech and song." This kind of communication "puts the baby in a trance-like state, which may proceed to sleep or extended periods of rapture."So if the babies of the world could understand the latest research on language and music, they probably wouldn't be very surprised. The upshot, says Trehub, is that music may be even more of a necessity than we realize.
A clavichord is a small, very quiet, European keyboard musical instrument. The keys are simple levers; when one is pressed, a small brass 'tangent' strikes the string above. The note is sustained as long as the tangent is in contact with the string. The volume of the note can be changed by striking harder or softer, and the pitch can also be varied by varying the force of the tangent against the string, which is known as bebung, and can be used to give a form of vibrato.
Since the string vibrates from the bridge only as far as the tangent, multiple keys with multiple tangents can be assigned to the same string (like a monochord). This is called a fretted clavichord. This technique simplifies the construction since less strings are required, but it limits the abilities of the instrument, since only one note can be played at a time on each string. As a result there are rarely more than two notes assigned to each string. They are usually chosen so that notes which are rarely heard together (such as C and C#) are on the one string.
Almost any music written for harpsichord, piano, or organ can be played on the clavichord, however, it is too quiet to use in any ensemble. J. S. Bach's son Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach was a great proponent of the instrument.
There are advantages to buying a used music instrument. For one, you can find a good quality instrument at a lower price than buying a new one. On the other hand, there are also some risks involved when buying a used instrument. One downside is you don't get any warranties, unless the used instrument is fairly new.
When buying a used musical instrument there are three things you should keep in mind:
1. Who and Where
A good factor to determine an instruments' condition is to know who previously owned it. If you're buying it from a garage sale, then you might be able to meet the owner and ask him why he's selling it, how long he used it, etc. If you're buyng it from an online shop, make sure they have a good customer satisfaction rating or better, a return policy. If you're buying it from a music store, ask the salesperson if it's possible to know the name of its' previous owner, how long it's been in the store, etc.
2.Overall Condition
If possible, ask someone who knows a lot about music instruments to accompany you. Maybe you have a friend who plays the instrument you want to learn or a music teacher in your area who's willng to help you. They can help assess whether the instrument is in good condition by playing it and listening to how it sounds and how it feels while they're playing it.
3. Value for your Money
Make sure that the money you're paying for the used instrument is worth it. Research first how much the instrument costs if it's brand new, go to different shops, compare prices, compare the condition of the used instruments and assess whether it is truly a good deal.
A harpsichord is the general term for a family of European keyboard instruments which generate sound by plucking (rather than striking, as in a piano) a string. It is thought to have originated when a keyboard was affixed to the end of a psaltery, providing a mechanical means to pluck the strings.
The action is fairly similar between all harpsichords:
The keylever is a simple pivot which rocks on a pin passing through a hole drilled through it.
The jack is a thin rectangular piece of wood which sits upright on the end of the keylever, held in place by the guides - upper and lower - which are two long pieces of wood with holes through with the jacks can pass.
In the jack, a plectrum juts out almost horizontally, (normally the plectrum is angled upwards a tiny amount) and passes just under the string. Historically, plectra were normally made of crow quill, or leather, though most modern harpsichords use a plastic (delrin or celcon) instead.
When the front of the key is pressed, the back is lifted up, the jack is raised, and the plectrum plucks the string.
Upon lowering the key, the jack falls back down under its own weight, and the plectrum pivots backwards to allow it past the string. This is made possible by having the plectrum held in a tongue which is attached witha hinge and a spring to the body of the jack.
At the top of the jack, a damper of felt sticks out and keeps the string from vibrating when the key is not depressed.
While the terms used to denote various members of the family are relatively standardized today, in the harpsichord's heyday, this was not the case.
In modern usage, a harpsichord can mean all the members of the family, or more specifically, the grand-piano-shaped member, with a vaguely triangular case accommodating long bass strings at the left and short treble strings at the right; characteristically, the profile is more elongated than that of a modern piano, with a sharper curve to the bentside. A harpsichord can have from one to three, and occasionally even more, strings per note. Often one is at four-foot pitch, an octave higher than the normal eight-foot pitch. Single manuals, or keyboards are common, especially in Italian harpichords, though many other countries tended to produce double-manuals.
The virginal is a smaller and simpler rectangular form of the harpsichord, with only one string per note running parallel to the keyboard on the long side of the case. Often the word was rendered with a suffix: virginals. The origin of the word is obscure but it is usually linked to the fact that the instrument was frequently played by young women. Note that the word "virginal" in Elizabethan times was often used to designate any kind of harpsichord; thus the masterworks of William Byrd and his contempories were often played on full-size Italian style harpsichords, and not just on the virginals as we call it today.
Finally, a harpsichord with the strings set at an angle to the keyboard (usually of about 30 degrees) is called a spinet. In such an instrument, the strings are too close to fit the jacks between them in the normal way; instead, the strings are arranged in pairs, the jacks are placed in the large gaps between pairs, and they face in opposite directions, plucking the strings adjacent to the gap.
Unsurprisingly, for an instrument that was produced in large numbers for over three centuries, there is a great deal of variation between harpsichords. In addition to the varied forms that the instrument can take, and the different dispositions, or registrations, that can be fitted to a harpsichord, as mentioned above, the range can vary greatly. Generally, earlier harpsichords have smaller ranges, and later ones larger, though there are frequent exceptions. In general, the largest harpsichords have a range of just over five octaves, and the smallest have under four. Usually, the shortest keyboards were given extended range using the method of the "short octave".
The origin of the harpsichord is lost in the Middle Ages. The earliest written references to it date from the 1300's, and it is possible that harpsichord was indeed invented in that century. This was a time in which advances in clockwork and other forms of machinery were being made, and thus a likely time for the invention of those mechanical aspects that distinguish a harpsichord from a psaltery.
The earliest harpsichords still preserved come from Italy, the oldest specimen being dated 1521. However, the early Italian instruments can shed no light on the origin of the harpsichord, as they represent an already well-refined form of the instrument. The Italian harpsichord makers made single-manual instruments with a very light construction and relatively little string tension. This design persisted with little alteration among Italian makers for centuries. The Italian instruments are considered pleasing but unspectacular in their tone, and serve well for accompanying singers or other instruments.
A revolution in harpsichord construction took place in Flanders some time around 1580 with the work of Hans Ruckers and his descendants. The Ruckers harpsichord used longer strings, greater string tension, and a heavier case, as well as a very slender and responsive spruce soundboard. This combination produced a more powerful and noble tone than the Italian harpsichord, and served as the basis for subsequent harpsichord building in most other nations. The Flemish makers also innovated the two-manual harpsichord, which was initially used merely to permit easy transposition (at the interval of a fourth), rather then to increase the expressive range of the instrument.
The Flemish instrument received further development in 18th-century France, notably with the work of the Blanchet family and their successor Pascal Taskin. These French instruments imitated the construction of the Flemish ones, but they were extended in their range, from about four to about five octaves. In addition, two-manual French instruments used their manuals to vary the combination of stops being used (i.e., strings being plucked), rather than for transposition. The 18th century French harpsichord is often considered one of the pinnacles of harpsichord design, and it is widely adopted as a model for the construction of modern instruments.
A striking aspect of the 18th century French tradition was its near-fetishlike obsession with the Ruckers harpsichords. In a process called "grande ravalement", many of the surviving Ruckers instruments were torn apart and reassembled, with new soundboard material and case construction adding an octave to their range. It is considered likely that many of the harpsichords claimed at the time to be Ruckers restorations are fraudulent. From a contemporary point of view, these may be considered benevolent frauds, since they are superb instruments in their own right.
In England, two immigrant makers, Jacob Kirckman (from Germany) and Burkat Shudi (from Switzerland) achieved eminence with harpsichords noted for their powerful tone and exquisite veneered cases. The sound of Kirckman and Shudi harpsichords has impressed many listeners, but the feeling that it overpowers the music has led to very few modern instruments being modeled on them. The Shudi firm was passed on to Shudi's son-in-law John Broadwood, who adapted it to the manufacture of the piano and became a leading creative force in the development of that instrument.
The German harpsichord makers roughly followed the French model, but with a special interest in achieving a variety of sonorities, perhaps because some of the most eminent German builders were also builders of organs. Some German harpsichords included a choir of two-foot strings (that is, strings pitched two octaves above the primary set). A few even included a 16-foot stop, pitched an octave below the main 8-foot choirs. One still-preserved German harpsichord even has three manuals to control all the many combinations of strings that were available. The 2-foot and 16-foot stops of the German harpsichord are not particularly in favor among harpsichordists today, who tend to prefer the French type of instrument.
At the peak of its development, the harpsichord lost favor to the piano. The piano quickly evolved away from its harpsichord-like origins, and as a result the knowledge of how to build good harpsichords died out for over a century.
In the early twentieth century, an awakening interest in authentic performance led to the revival of the harpsichord. This included crude "modernizations" of antique instruments, as well as the construction of harpsichords resembling modern concert grand pianos. These instruments sounded surprisingly weak for their size, because their frames and soundboards were too heavy to properly match the thin and lightly-tensioned strings of the harpsichord. Builders typically included a 16-foot stop in these instruments to bolster the sound, even though in historical times the 16-foot had played only a minor role.
Ultimately, it was realized that to make fine modern harpsichords it would be necessary to learn the methods followed by the old builders. Two important pioneers in the process of rediscovery were the builder-scholars Frank Hubbard and William Dowd, who took apart and inspected many old instruments and consulted the written material on harpsichords from the historical period. Today, harpsichords that are founded on the rediscovered principles of the old makers are built in workshops around the world. The workshops often also construct kits, which are assembled into final form by amateur enthusiasts.
The first music written specifically for solo harpsichord came to be published around the middle of the sixteenth century. Well into the eighteenth century, the harpsichord was considered to have advantages and disadvantages with respect to the piano. Besides solo works, the harpsichord is also well-suited to accompaniment in the basso continuo style (a function it maintained in opera even into the nineteenth century).
Through the 19th century, the harpsichord was ignored by composers, the piano having supplanted it. In the 20th century, however, with increasing interest in early music and composers on the lookout for new sounds, pieces began to be written for it once more. Concertos for the instrument were written by Francis Poulenc (the Concert champore), Manuel de Falla and, later, Henryk Garecki. Bohuslav Martinu wrote both a concerto and a sonata for it, and Elliott Carter's Double Concerto is for harpsichord, piano and two chamber orchestras. Gyargy Ligeti has written a small number of solo works for the instrument (including "Continuum").
Musicians who play the harpsichord are known as harpsichordists.
You can tell a lot from a persons body language. In the right conditions, you can tell if someone is sad, shy, angry, tired, bored or even interested.
Some body language is automatic, and nearly impossible to control. If something is very funny, it is hard to stop at least a smile from crossing your face. Other body language is easy to control if you are aware of it. Try to be aware of the following examples of body language when you are on your next date.
Eye contact. Make sure that you are not avoiding eye contact. Try to look people in the eyes when you are greeting, listening or talking to them.
Speak clearly. If you are tired or a bit shy, you can start to mumble. Try to think what you are going to say and then say it clearly.
Relax. Try to avoid drumming your fingers, excessively scratching, fiddling with items in your pocket and always looking around the room. This makes you look like you are not enjoying yourself.
Posture. Stand tall and proud. If you do not feel confident about yourself and what you are saying, why should anyone else?
Use your hands. Hands and gestures are a great tool to help you explain yourself and communicate. Evasive or secretive people do not tend to show their hands as much.
Maintain non-defensive body language. Actions like folding your arms across your chest when the room is not cold, and having your body facing towards a door can be seen as defensive body language. Try to avoid this.
Keep your hands away from your face. Resting your head on your hands makes you look bored and rubbing your nose, ears, eyes, neck or head has been shown to indicate doubt.
Use facial expressions. Try to vary your facial expressions a bit to make her aware that you are listening to her. Also be careful you do not stop blinking when you gaze into her eyes.
