Music
My father didn't like music (or its cousin, dancing} very much. I never heard him sing or even comment on a song, and I never saw him dancing spontaneously, either alone or with my Mom. "Singing and dancing are for queers," he would say. I should add here that my Dad was not a happy man. He was a malignant alcoholic who died from drinking in his early fifties.
I dismissed his remarks as homophobic and misanthropic, and despite this—or maybe as a subconscious act of rebellion— I became a professional musician and now I work as a music therapist, among other things. As I learned more about the science and math of music and audiology, I realized that my father undoubtedly suffered from a condition called amusia, a mediacl/psychological disorder that manifests as a deficiency in processing pitch, musical memory, and recognition. Two main classifications of amusia exist: congenital amusia, which results from a music processing anomaly at birth, and acquired amusia, which occurs as a result of brain damage.
Dad didn't have any hearing loss. He was bright and had a great memory. But he didn't "get" music – he heard piano music as unpleasant percussive clanging. The part of his brain that processes music was haywire. He didn't hear pitch variation as normal people do, and he didn't feel or understand the patterns that make music melodic and rhythmic.
Amusia occurs in about 2-5% of the population—it’s hard to pin down a figure because there are degrees of dysfunction. (Sigmund Freud suffered from it. He claimed he didn't like music because he did not wish to be "emotionally moved by something he didn't understand rationally.”) Amusia is different from tone deafness, a non-scientific word. Most people who describe themselves as tone deaf simply lack the ability to sing notes accurately, which is largely an accident of genes. Although many people think they are musically impaired, almost all of us are musical to some degree. “Neurologically intact,” or normal, people are born musical. Babies often sing before they talk.
IS MUSIC MAGICAL?
Do you believe in magic?
Believe in the magic in a young girl's soul
Believe in the magic of rock n roll
Believe in the magic that can set you free (1965, John Sebastian, “Do You Believe in Magic”)
Many people think music is magic. The word music itself is kind of magical. It comes from the Greek “μουσική” or “mousike,” which means “art of the Muses.” In Greek mythology, the nine Muses were the goddesses who inspired literature, science, and the arts; they were the source of the knowledge embodied in the poetry, song-lyrics, and myths in the Greek culture.
Music picks us up when we are sad, excites people in times of crisis, and bonds us together, even though sharing headphones or singing "Happy Birthday" hardly seem necessary for continued existence or reproduction. People suffering from dementia remember songs even after they’ve forgotten the names of familiar people, places, and things. Stutterers don’t stutter when they sing.
After being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in early 2011, the late singer/guitarist Glen Campbell went out on his farewell tour, though his family, friends, and doctors were concerned that would forget his music as he had forgotten almost everything else. To their amazement, ”When they called his name, he played the music just like they practiced.”
DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE
Comedian/actor/musician Martin Mull once quipped that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." What is it about music that makes it so inscrutably, deliciously fun to talk about yet almost impossible to pin down in any kind of meaningful way?
We know that music has been a part of the human experience for a long time. A bone flute that could probably play a modern melody was unearthed from a site in France dating back at least 32,000 years.
And there is evidence that music may have evolved from "motherese," the singsong speech pattern that moms, dads and anyone who has ever tried to speak to a baby instinctively use to communicate with infants. This musical speech, using wide ranges of pitch and melody, is a part of every culture.
Some scientists conclude that music's influence may be a random event, arising from its ability to "liberate" brain systems built for other purposes such as speech, feelings and muscle movement. Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker believes that music is "auditory cheesecake," an empty-calorie treat that amuses the areas of the mind that evolved for more important functions.
THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
Todd Shea, a Washington, DC musician who now lives in Pakistan and runs a humanitarian organization called Comprehensive Disaster Relief Services (CDRS), has heard and played music all over the world. He reports, "Music affects people the in the same way in every country. Music, to me, is those moments of unspoken sonic wonder and communion and oneness with a fellow musician or musicians when we hit that groove or take the sound to a place of mystical magic, or the same between me and an appreciative audience or just alone in a room with my guitar. It's also the cry of a kitten, the laughing of children, it's those moments of precious sound and humanity which make everything else bearable and make life worth living. I have no doubt it is the universal language."
The notion that music is the universal language is demonstrated brilliantly in the 1977 movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” In the film, Earth scientists use a five-note musical phrase to communicate with aliens. This motif is woven through the film (the five tones that the space ship plays back and forth with the humans) resembles "hello" in musical format. It isn't even a real melody—it's more like a doorbell—Ding, dong, ding, ding dong. But it communicates vividly what words cannot.
Could we reasonably expect that all humanoids would react in a similar way to music? The answer might be yes.
New scientific evidence shows that music brings out predictable responses across cultures and among people of widely varying musical or cognitive abilities. Music unfailingly conveys certain emotions. What we feel when we hear a piece of music is probably close to what others, in different lands and possibly distant galaxies, are experiencing.
Amazingly, music seems to affect some animals, too, lending further evidence to the notion of music as an intergalactic/interspecies language. Some birds, for example, have a remarkable talent for dancing, studies published in Current Biology suggest. YouTube videos show, and researchers later confirmed, cockatoos with a near-perfect sense of rhythm, swaying their bodies, bobbing their heads and tapping their feet in time to a beat. The birds increased the speed of their dancing as the tempo increased, suggesting a sense of rhythm. One bird, Snowball, danced to "Everybody," by the Backstreet Boys. Previously, it was thought that only humans could boogie.
Music activates the same reward systems that are stimulated by food, sex, and addictive drugs. Like drugs, it's a potent emotional force, with the ability to both soothe us and excite us.
My Dad missed out on a big part of life. Perhaps if he'd listened to what the Lovin’ Spoonful was telling us about musical magic, he would have lived a little longer, and been a little happier.
#music #amusia #entertaiment #musicanddrugs #CDRS #dancingbirds #lifestyle #musicandmagic
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