Toshiyuki Anzai is a cab driver in central Tokyo whose love of jazz drove him to start a unique Jazz Taxi service. His 90-minute cruises pair cityscapes with the most fitting music. Anzai plays songs that match not only the view but his passengers’ moods — though he is partial to jazz, he sometimes throws Deep Purple and Wagner into the mix. The article is from 2009 but still worth reading …
This Royal Musical Association (RMA) Study Day seeks to engage with conflicting yet complementary dialogues regarding the possibility (or even non-possibility) of an ontology of music. In recent years there has been lively debate between diverse positions rooted in musicology and both continental and analytical philosophy; the purpose of this Study Day is to highlight these differences, whilst emphasising shared ground and suggesting ways forward. To this end, the Study Day – which is supported by the RMA Music and Philosophy Study Group – will provide a platform for postgraduate students to present their research and to discuss challenges posed to, and possibilities inherent in, commonly held assumptions regarding musical ontology from an array of interdisciplinary viewpoints.
Topics for consideration
– The question of musical meaning between musicological and analytical-philosophical traditions and contrasts therein
– New ontological proposals in the ontology of musical works
– ‘Early’ music as the root of modern ontologies
– Composers as the traditional arbiters of what constitutes a musical work
– The metaontology of music
– Video games and indeterminacy (and the challenges they pose)
– Historical and ethnographic perspectives
– Phenomenologies of music
– Popular music
– Insights from outside of the humanities: scientific, sociological etc.
In biological terms, melodious sounds help encourage the release of dopamine in the reward area of the brain, as would eating a delicacy, looking at something appealing or smelling a pleasant aroma. During a study involving information technology specialists, it was found that those who listen to music complete their tasks more quickly and come up with better ideas than those who don’t, because the music improves their mood. See the whole article here.
For people who are interested in sonic and visual immersion, this might be an interesting website to visit.
Make music
with people across the world by playing real instruments live in the Science Museum in London or in the virtual orchestra.
Finish researchers from the Aalto University in Helsinki recently recorded the sound of aurora borealis. Point of departure is that light produces sounds. Up until now, the sounds of Northern Lights have always been described as hissing, sighing, or crackling. However, here we can hear ‘clap sounds’, like the snapping of a whip.
For decades, critics, historians and even neuroscientists have been pondering the question of why so-called modern music seems to perplex the average listener. After all, adventurous artists in other fields have met with a very different reception. In Why do we hate modern classical music? Alex Ross assumes that the core problem is neither physiological nor sociological. Rather, modern composers have fallen victim to a long-smouldering indifference that is intimately linked to classical music’s idolatrous relationship with the past. What must fall away is the notion of classical music as a reliable conduit for consoling beauty – a kind of spa treatment for tired souls.
I agree with Ross that (classical) music is not (only) about beauty. However, I would take physiological and sociological explanations more serious: it seems like music affects us more than other arts do – at least on a different plateau. This might be a reason why we tend to react much more passionately when it concerns music.
Click here for a German essay on modern classical music and our cerebral functions.
Award-winning musician Christopher Cerf has composed music for the famous children’s television show Sesame Street for 40 years. During this time, he has written more than 200 songs intended to help children learn how to read and write.
But these innocent children’s songs were abused for inhumane purposes.
In 2003, it transpired that US intelligence services had tortured detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib with music from Sesame Street. Human rights researcher Thomas Keenan explains: “Prisoners were forced to put on headphones. They were attached to chairs, headphones were attached to their heads, and they were left alone just with the music for very long periods of time. Sometimes hours, even days on end, listening to repeated loud music.”
“The music was so loud,” says Moazzam Begg, a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram. “And it was probably some of the worst torture that they faced.”
Stunned by this abuse of his work, Cerf was motivated to find out more about how it could happen. “In Guantanamo they actually used music to break prisoners. So the idea that my music had a role in that is kind of outrageous,” he says. “This is fascinating to me both because of the horror of music being perverted to serve evil purposes if you like, but I’m also interested in how that’s done. What is it about music that would make it work for that purpose?”
Cerf embarks on a journey to learn just what it is that makes music such a powerful stimulant. In the process, he speaks to soldiers, psychologists and prisoners tortured with his music at Guantanamo Bay and finds out how the military has been employing music as a potent weapon for hundreds of years.
The resulting film, Songs of War, explores the relationship between music and violence.
About a week ago I had an interview with a journalist from Mare, the magazine of Leiden University. The interview is about a Minor Auditory Culture which I’ve developed and which will start in September 2012. The title ‘Draglines and Gloria Gaynor’ refers to sounds which are surrounding us in our daily lives and which get their specific meanings in specific contexts. (BTW, the interview is in Dutch.)
Thinking Sounds 