Vpr Classical Timeline

Simply type “study music” into a google search and you’ll get about three billion results; from videos and tracks of original pieces that use alpha waves to help you focus to long playlists of classical music for study and concentration. There are entire genres and branches of the music industry devoted to providing music as a backdrop to other activities. Do they work? Yes, yes they do. As Rebecca West of the Music Institute of Chicago stated, “Rhythm, melody and tempo are tools used to target non-musical behaviors, to catapult change throughout the body. A change in rhythm can trigger a reaction in the brain.”

German philosopher Immanuel Kant called music “The Quickening Art.” Oliver Sacks uses this quote often when explaining how music can jump-start the human brain. Music employs so many different parts of the mind at once. It can trigger responses that may have seemed dormant or even lost forever. Sometimes, the effect of music on the mind can even appear miraculous. I’ve seen it, firsthand.

For the past few months we’ve been exploring the way that music affects us physically, emotionally, socially and neurologically. Along the way we’ve hinted at how these concepts and studies have been translated into therapies designed to address particular needs of patients. Music therapy has become a well-established health profession dedicated to the use of musical invention to address the wellness of individuals.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice! Aristotle wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

We all know that listening to music is enjoyable, pleasurable, emotional… in short, it feels good. Why though? Why do we react to music this way?

The act of making music, actively participating in the creation of organized sound, has beneficial side effects, emotionally, socially and physically.

Our ability to hear patterns, recognize words and focus our auditory perception is thanks, in large part, to a very specific region of the brain, the superior temporal gyrus. It’s located just behind and above each ear. It’s the site of our auditory association cortex, in other words it’s the place that helps us understand language, speech and music.

Synesthesia means “sensing together” and it describes the phenomenon of one our senses triggering another; such as sound and color. This isn’t something farfetched; we come across this idea every single day. The English language is filled with synesthetic idioms. Loud colors, frozen silence, bitter cold, sharp cheese, feeling blue and seeing red are just a few examples. We understand these figures of speech instantaneously without realizing that on the surface, they’re rather odd mixtures of our five senses.

In our last episode we talked about beat induction and rhythmic entrainment, this is what causes us to pick up the beat around us and tap our feet, even if we aren’t consciously doing it. I mentioned at the very end that there are cutting edge music therapy techniques that use entrainment as a means to treat neuro-biological disorders. The idea is to use outside auditory stimulus, drones, drumming and the like, to change the mental state of the listener.

We’ve all been there, driving down the street listening to music while moving our fingers to the rhythm, sitting in a concert hall tapping our toes to the music, working out in the gym making our reps or steps match the background beat around us. I’ve caught myself falling into step with random music coming out of a shop or coffee house just by simply walking past. We call this rhythmic entrainment, the tendency to sync up with the beat around us.

Chopin’s birthday is celebrated on the 1st of March and J.S. Bach’s on either the 21st or the 31st, depending on which calendar you use. That’s a long story for another episode. We’ve spent this entire month exploring the music and lives of these two composers. All of this has come together around a concert that VPR Classical hosted last month called “The Alchemy of Genius.”

We are continuing to celebrate the life and music of J.S. Bach and Chopin, listening to excerpts from a recent concert I hosted with pianist Paul Orgel in VPR’s Stetson Studio One while also featuring highlights from an interview I had with pianist and Chopin scholar Marjan Kiepura. On our website, VPR.org/classical, you can listen to all of Paul Orgel’s performances from “The Alchemy of Genius” pairing Nocturnes by Chopin with excerpts from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book II.

We’re spending the next few episodes celebrating the life and music of J.S. Bach and Chopin. In this episode we’ll look at Chopin specifically and we’ll also have some help… Marjan: My name is Marjan Kiepura. I’m a pianist. James: That’s a bit of an understatement. Marjan is a celebrated virtuoso and a noted Chopin scholar…

We celebrate Chopin’s birthday on the first day of March and J.S. Bach’s on the last. So, on Timeline we’ll be spending this month exploring the life and music of these two influential composers. In February, I had the pleasure of hosting a concert at Vermont Public Radio’s Stetson Studio One with pianist Paul Orgel. Paul was presenting an evening of musical pairings, putting together selections from J.S Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier Book II and Chopin’s Nocturnes. I was honored to be a part of the evening, giving some insights into the composers and their music. Here are some highlights I wanted to share with you.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart loved birds. His letters to family and friends mention several pet canaries he had during the course of his life, but the most famous bird Mozart ever owned was his beloved starling. The story goes that Mozart frequented a pet store in Vienna and became enamored with a particular European starling. These birds have an uncanny ability to mimic vocal sounds and presumably Mozart taught the bird to recite the opening melody of the third movement of his Piano Concerto no. 17 in G major. Mozart purchased the bird on May 27, 1784. We know this because he marked it in an expense book, along with a transcription of the bird’s version of Mozart’s melody – which had a couple of mistakes. The mistakes didn’t matter to Mozart. In the book, after the transcription, Mozart wrote the words, “That was beautiful!”

Listening to music is an emotional experience, unique to each individual. I think we’ve all had a moment when a song, a piece, a singer, a band, an orchestra has touched our hearts, moved us in some way. We also realize that it’s not the same for everyone; different music speaks to different people. We can try to describe the way the music makes us feel but I wonder if it’s even possible to really know how music effects someone else.

In the past couple of episodes we’ve looked at quite a few audio experiments (or illusions, if you will), exploring the limitations and wonderful abilities of our ears and mind. I’ve been joined by some friends from VPR, Brendan Kinney, Leslie Blount and Joe Tymecki. They volunteered to take part in these experiments and share their experiences with us.

Our ears and minds are amazing. Not only can they hear and experience the world around us, they are also filling in the gaps in our perception. We don’t even realize all the ways that our hearing is constructing the world around us, helping keep us safe and understand our surroundings.

We are wired to respond to sound, in a thousandth of a second. With that kind of visceral, automatic response, we sometimes get it wrong. I’ve been looking at the research of perceptual and cognitive psychologist Diana Deutsch. She has spent her career exploring and assembling audio illusions and curiosities. We’ll look at a few of them together and ask “can you trust your ears?” I posed that question to a few of my colleagues at VPR. They volunteered to experience a few audio experiments with me.

Have you ever had a song that you just couldn’t get out of your head? You’re not alone. 98% of people have reportedly experienced this phenomenon. Scientists call it Involuntary Musical Imagery but the more catchy title is "earworm."