Everyone knows that young people, teenagers, like music, but what is it about young adulthood that especially attunes teenagers to song? I know that it’s a universal and timeless trait found in most, if not all cultures, the young horn dog with the lute, mandolin, guitar, but besides all that, boys and girls alike absorb song lyrics and have an intense interest in music and bands like they do at no other age. And naturally they go for the current music, and are nostalgic about the music of their youth for the rest of their lives. Why is this?
The Love of Song
- Thread starter Arne Saknussemm
- Start date
Yes. Isn't it lucky, an evolutionary choice, I suppose, that growing up and becoming sexually active channeled into culture rather than aggression? If things were a little different, instead of learning the guitar, young men would be wielding clubs, and the girls would be loving it. I guess...
Not at all. Just look at our past after the Civil war there was no radio but the young didn't pick up clubs, they went to work and did a honest days work without music. Music wasn't around until the radio for everyone to listen to which was invented around 1900 but even then the young didn't have much to listen to. Music was enjoyed after the second world war, 1944, by most people.
Come on now, Cosmic. People have been enjoying music from time out of mind. (Always liked that phrase, nice to get chance to use it)
This is connected to the personality firmware of the brain, which underly human nature. Human nature make all humans have things in common, with this programming inherent within the DNA and brain.
As an analogy, if you ever owed a kitten, even if they are the only animal in the house, they will run around and chase imaginary things. Their personality firmware is active and projects imaginary game prey onto their little world, to inspire activities that will benefit their develop. Chase games help with future hunting skills. When the kitten physically chases the imaginary and projected prey, they move their muscles and work their reflexes, thereby overlaying firmware programming with hardware generated data. This adds a deeper memory layer, onto the general firmware programming.
For example, we all can play air guitar, but not all can play real guitar Air guitar is more connected to our imagination, placing us on stage; element of the firmware. If we had to next play the real guitar, there are physical limits, which will overlay the ideal. If one is a natural musician, this differentiation is more conscious and innate, and one will work until the ideal is reach as close as possible; pick it up guitar without lessons.
Music is part of normal development, with the impulse to listen and learn music, the strongest for most in our teen years. Performed music is about hand-eye coordination and timing, with timing needed to coordinate the band. The fine tuning processing occurs within the cerebellum. The cerebellum is also the same place that dance and all forms of movement are fully processed to allow for coordinated timing.
The firmware of music appreciation is helping to develop the cerebellum, which in term, can be used as a template to emulate base patterns into the cerebral matter. In the far east Karate is used to help train the mind as one example. Rap music tends to train a more aggressive mind set. This is due to cerebellum patterns emulated into cerebral which then become the templates for thought storage.
If you consider primitive tribes music is often used before hunting or any activity needing concentration for will power. One might argue that the conscious mind was originally conjured using music and dance rituals.
As an analogy, if you ever owed a kitten, even if they are the only animal in the house, they will run around and chase imaginary things. Their personality firmware is active and projects imaginary game prey onto their little world, to inspire activities that will benefit their develop. Chase games help with future hunting skills. When the kitten physically chases the imaginary and projected prey, they move their muscles and work their reflexes, thereby overlaying firmware programming with hardware generated data. This adds a deeper memory layer, onto the general firmware programming.
For example, we all can play air guitar, but not all can play real guitar Air guitar is more connected to our imagination, placing us on stage; element of the firmware. If we had to next play the real guitar, there are physical limits, which will overlay the ideal. If one is a natural musician, this differentiation is more conscious and innate, and one will work until the ideal is reach as close as possible; pick it up guitar without lessons.
Music is part of normal development, with the impulse to listen and learn music, the strongest for most in our teen years. Performed music is about hand-eye coordination and timing, with timing needed to coordinate the band. The fine tuning processing occurs within the cerebellum. The cerebellum is also the same place that dance and all forms of movement are fully processed to allow for coordinated timing.
The firmware of music appreciation is helping to develop the cerebellum, which in term, can be used as a template to emulate base patterns into the cerebral matter. In the far east Karate is used to help train the mind as one example. Rap music tends to train a more aggressive mind set. This is due to cerebellum patterns emulated into cerebral which then become the templates for thought storage.
If you consider primitive tribes music is often used before hunting or any activity needing concentration for will power. One might argue that the conscious mind was originally conjured using music and dance rituals.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Music, apparently, is processed in a brain center that is not the same as the speech center. People who work in nursing homes frequently report watching a resident, who can't talk and doesn't know his own children, sit down at the piano in the lounge and play perfect Gershwin, singing the lyrics.
I once had a friend who had a bad stammer, but he could sing just fine--in both English and French.
Music seems to be programmed into us, so it's not surprising that we would use that programming in our early years to fill our heads and our hearts with song.
The songs of children have incredible durability, transcending the generations and being passed down to new generations, often in a language which--due to war, politics and economics---the new generation doesn't even understand, and therefore sounds to us like "baby talk." I smiled when I discovered that today's "children's music" CDs often include songs by the Beatles. This means that people will be singing songs like "Yellow Submarine" 500 years from now.
There was no radio for thousands of years, but people had music.
They went to the saloon on Friday night and danced to the pianist. They went to church on Sunday morning and listened to the choir. Working in the fields, on the railroad, even marching in the military, they used the cadence of their efforts to coordinate songs.
"I don't know, but I been told
Eskimo pie is mighty cold.
Sound off one-two
Sound off three-four."
After the Civil War, the newly freed Afro-Americans were looking for ways to earn a living, and--since music apparently occupies a unique place in our psychology--the white people were happy to hire them to play at dances, or to simply toss coins at them for busking on street corners.
The invention of the amazingly versatile steel string guitar in the late 19th century caused a paradigm shift in popular music, and Sears Roebuck was happy to sell one by mail order to anyone who had two dollars. For the first time, a single performer could play very complete accompaniment for the songs he sang, with a wide range of tone and volume, plucking single strings or strumming entire chords. Since a single performer can more easily support himself by informal performances than a duo, much less a whole band, there was an explosion of music in the South. (Yes, it's not impossible to use a gut-string guitar in the same way, but it's much more difficult and even the best "classical" guitarists can't quite get the same range of tone and volume that a 13-year-old can get out of a $50 steel-string guitar.)
Of course one's instrument can't help but shape the style of one's music, and before long the guitar-centric Delta Blues was born--and musicologists like to say that Sears Roebuck was the midwife at that birth.
In the Electronic Era, it's easy to forget how people lived in earlier times. But they did, indeed, have music.
The oldest musical instrument that archeologists and anthropologists have found is a flute made from the tusk of a woolly mammoth. It was carved in Europe around 30,000 years ago in the Paleolithic Era (nomadic hunter-gatherers with no agricultural technology) and the holes are in the precise locations for the pentatonic scale. (The black keys on a piano comprise a pentatonic scale in the key of Db.)
So even with music then, if I understand you, humans still killed each other because music was around during the Civil War as you pointed out. So music then cannot stop people from killing each other.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Music can be bent to any purpose. Plenty of songs have had new lyrics quickly composed in order to spur the population to support a war. The Battle Hymn of the Republic ("Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord...") was originally a Christian spiritual to be sung around a campfire, then it was repurposed as "John Brown's Body," a cry for an end to slavery, before finally becoming a rallying cry for the Civil War.
Hardly the point. Let's please concentrate on the original question.
Wellwisher, you mean "own" a kitten, right. Interesting information, but it doesn't answer the 'why' of my query, at least not entirely. Please continue to consider it.
Fraggle: Fascinating post. How'd you get so smart?
Teenagers?
I'm no teenager but I still, and always have loved music.
My tastes vary from 50's rock n roll [Elvis, Buddy Holly, Johnny O'Keefe and Gerry Lee Lewis] to Neil Diamond and Abba, through to Nana Mouskouri, Sara Brightman and Andre Bocelli.
My bestest singer and bestest song of all time I have only recently discovered....Sung by a real dinky di Angel......
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e38wLEZsCuc&feature=kp
Teenagers! Humbug!
paddoman, could you please read, and, oh yeah, try to understand a post before commenting? thanks
All young people all over the planet have devoted a great deal of energy and time to singing and dancing with each other for as far back as anyone can tell one way or the other - certainly much farther back than the concept of "having a job" or "an honest days work" can be traced. There is credible evidence that some Celtic tunes predate any of the instruments they are played on now, that Tuvan throat singing predates any of the current religions of Asia, and even that music itself predates language in the human brain.
The invention of radio has had the effect of reducing the practice of singing in most people's lives, not increasing it. I can't recall the number, but I do remember being startled when I ran across a researched estimate of the number of songs the average person could sing in the 1700s and 1800s in the Western cultures the article investigated - dozens, it was.
The only human organization that does not incorporate and never has incorporated music in its normal coordinated operations, outside of (possibly) slave labor metal ore mining, is the modern Industrial Society factory/office setup.
As far as picking up clubs - we wish that music were an alternative, but apparently it's more of an enabler and organizer of that as well as all other coordinated human activity. The English banned the Scottish bagpipe for good reason, and the ban did not hold for reason equally good - both violent.
The role of music? There's at least one visible one, in common with many other biological organizations involving homeostatic circuitry: advance preparation or maintenance against incapacitating event. One breathes in order to keep one's blood oxygenated, for example, but the trigger and response should not involve oxygen shortage itself - that would mean failure to struggle for breath until one's ability to struggle had been crippled and one's time run short. So breathing circuitry and homeostasis-maintaining stimuli are set up apart from, and work in advance of, oxygen shortage or any other actual need for breath.
This is a general, common aspect of homeostatic self-organization - it runs on triggers that play little role in the critical functions of the organization itself. One can gain stability by avoiding feedback loops that impair or enhance function.
Human beings need to practice working cooperatively, get to know each other and establish common understandings of role and identity at a serious level, well in advance of and aside from the functions of mate choice or predator defense or food acquisition that tribal identity delivers. When the hyenas show up, or the healthy and reliable father must be chosen, the pack of friends should be there already, know and trust each other. What we need is something that in regard to immediate material necessity is useless - even costly, if Zahavian handicap is involved - but involves the kinds of cooperation and capability that necessity will demand, learned without too much risk of incurring crippling damage. Music and dancing fits.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
I was never exposed to religion.
Seriously, I began studying music at age 9, so I got off to a good start. I'm not so sure that I come across as "smart" in any other discipline--except linguistics, and that's only because I am apparently the only person here who has studied it to any great extent.I go back before rock'n'roll and enjoyed the tunes that were on the radio in the early 1950s--as well as the occasional classical music my parents put on--but I could never wrap my head around opera, even though they turned on the Met every Sunday.
When rock'n'roll came out I quickly warmed to it. But I prefer the music of the 70s and 80s: folk rock, progressive rock, heavy metal, new wave, rock-jazz fusion, "space music" (Tangerine Dream, etc.). Grunge is cool but I never developed a taste for rap.
Although I'm rather indiscriminate with female singers. Kitty Wells, Julie London, Patsy Cline, Janis Ian, the Supremes, Judy Collins, Fairport Convention, Heart, the Motels, Berlin, ABBA, Joan Osborne, Sarah McLachlan, Jann Arden, Over the Rhine, Lucie Silvas, Adele, Lissie, all these new Dutch "symphonic rock" bands with brooding, screaming sopranos...
Got tickets to see Renaissance this week, woo-hoo! It's just Annie Haslam with a whole new band, but they play the music right.
Sorry, the company servers block YouTube so I don't know who you're referring to. If I remember, I'll look this up at home tonight.
Tastes change with maturity. When I was a teenager, I abhored the music of my parents generation, the Dean Martins, Sinatra, Andrew Sisters etc and likewise abhored even more the Classical/Opera style music...and embraced the early days of rock n roll.
Gradually as I matured and got married, my tastes started to vary a lot more....
My music collection now [which is quite large] consists of some of that pre rock n roll era, plus C+W [the likes of Patsy Cine, Jim Reeves, Marty Robbins] and was also attracted towards light Classical and similar music.
But yeah, tastes in music is subjective I suppose.
Stuff that absolutely sends me into a frenzy is rap crap, and heavy metal type of noise....Uggg!
This kid won it, naturally? again, astonishing voice for one so young.
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q...&mid=FBA6078E5F4D721F881FFBA6078E5F4D721F881F
she's got stiff competition, but yes, she won.
she's got stiff competition, but yes, she won.
Last edited: