Why are we so responsive to MUSIC?

[wlminex]

Off-the wall . . . the primary vibration of the universe is an extremely high octave of B-flat (I read this somewhere). This vibration is modulated and shifted in all matter by a spectrum of quantum field influences. Relax and enjoy the orchestration, regardless of what makes the music!

[Trooper]

So reading the papers about this guy who shot up the Sikh temple, we run across an example:

apparently he was much involved in a musical scene or subgroup my newspaper calls "hate rock", which is sort of expected, - but an interview with a researcher into the subculture of white supremicism and neo-Nazis and "skinheads" so labeled had him observing in passing that concerts and musical events are not only the main organizing events of white supremicist culture, but these concerts and CD sales and so forth are likely the single most important source of money for these guys.

One might reasonably say that they are essentially bonding via the music, forming into a group or bonded tribe of some kind via the music, in advance of doing anything as a group or collectively resisting mishap and hostility. And this is natural among humans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_a...itical_warfare

One group who understood the role that music played in spreading their political message was the Nazis in Hitler's Germany. Clearly understanding the link between music and political warfare, propaganda minister Josef Goebbels once stated:

"Music affects the heart and emotions more than the intellect. Where then could the heart of a nation beat stronger than in the huge masses, in which the heart of a nation has found its true home?"

Hitler made use of music glorifying Germanic legends, such as the works of Richard Wagner. Wagner's operas employed imagery of knights, which Hitler then co-opted for images of himself

Music was used within the Hitler Youth organization as a way to indoctrinate the youth of Germany into the Nazi's ideology. As part of their activities, group singing was a way to educate the young members of the group. According to an internal memo, songs were seen as "posses[ing] the strongest community building power.

[Fraggle Rocker]

We continue to be a species that mostly protects the in-group and vilifies the out-group.

Indeed. But my point is that over the past twelve thousand years, since the Agricultural Revolution created the first food surplus the planet had ever seen and humans no longer had to regard strangers as hated and feared competitors for a scarce resource, we have slowly and steadily been increasing the size of the in-group. In the Paleolithic Era it was a few dozen extended-family members. In the Neolithic (stone age agriculture) it was a village of a couple of hundred people who knew each other but not necessarily well. At the dawn of civilization (literally "the building of cities") it increased by another order of magnitude, so people may have recognized each other but not been truly acquainted. The Bronze Age, the Iron Age... each successive Paradigm Shift added a zero to the size of the in-group, which was no longer just the city itself but a trading network of cities whose inhabitants accepted each other as members of the same overgrown "pack," which was now much closer to a "herd" of anonymous strangers. The Industrial Revolution took it far beyond that, resulting in "nations" of tens or hundreds of millions of people who may squabble among themselves over cultural differences but in a crisis band together in solidarity against other nations.

Today we have trans-national in-groups. Till the end of time, Americans will always be willing to die to protect England, and Mexicans feel the same way about the USA. Europeans were shooting each other at the beginning of the last century, now they're loaning each other money. This solidarity is a little slower to take root in other parts of the world, evidence that it's a phenomenon of the current in-progress Paradigm Shift, the Information Age. It takes hold where people form communities electronically, such as this one you and I belong to even though we don't know each other's names or physical locations.

I frequently cite a specific incident as evidence of this continuation of the expansion of the in-group, because it made me (and many Americans) cry. Our government has been telling us for 30 years that Iran is our enemy and Iranians are not to be trusted. Yet when Neda Aga Soltan was gunned down in the streets of Tehran by agents of a repressive government, onlookers transmitted real-time cellphone videos of the event throughout the world. Americans wept for Neda; she was our friend, our daughter, our sister, governments be damned! Country music singers, representatives of the most xenophobic portion of our population, wrote songs about her.

Yes, the day of a single global "in-group" is on the way. Just be patient.

We tend to anthropomorphize stuff like this, but who cares, it's way to crazy-funny to ignore. What struck me was the bird's apparent sense of pleasure. He's clearly anticipating the beat, by getting his claws to land dead on like that. No telling how any times he's heard it, and how he's actually processing sound with the images of people dancing. It's just uncanny. I also caught a bar where there was a break in the drum repetition and he did an eighth-note sequence that was dead on. That blew my mind, even though I realize the bird is probably doing playback in his head anyway.

Let's not forget that the psittacines (the parrot order: parrots, macaws, cockatoos, budgies, parakeets, lories, conures, etc.) are the most intelligent of all birds; the "primates" of class Aves. They have a lot in common with humans.

[NMSquirrel]

Music doesn't get anywhere unless it appeals to an emotion..

we won't listen to any music that doesn't make us feel something..

[Trooper]

I mentioned earlier in post #89, Patel’s research on species, other than humans, which have the capability to keep a beat. It was thought that only species capable of mimicking sound were also the only ones capable of keeping a beat, implying an evolutionary link between the two. The belief that rhythmic entrainment was linked to vocal mimicry was supported by two studies inspired by Snowball, the dancing cockatoo. But for first time, Peter Cook has trained a sea lion to dance, indicating that beat keeping may not be an adaptation of vocal mimicry after all.



"The fact is our sea lion has gotten really good at keeping the beat," said Peter Cook, who has led the study since publishing an abstract last year. "Our finding represents a cautionary note for an idea that was really starting to take hold in the field of comparative psychology." And Ronan has displayed somewhat more refined taste than Snowball, too — her favorite song is "Boogie Wonderland" by Earth, Wind & Fire.

[BiologyOfReligion]

Peter Cook has trained a sea lion to dance, indicating that beat keeping may not be an adaptation of vocal mimicry after all.

Very cool. It seems that people expect animals to like human music and rhythm as if animals should be like people. It's anthropomorphic and homocentric.

Alworth & Buerkle (FEB 2013 labanimal.com) reviewed studies of music's effects on animals and found, "The effects of music exposure are not the same for all music styles, animal species or situations, and playing music for captive species has the potential to increase stress or impair welfare," i.e. inconsistent results. The reason that animals like some music is probably because certain frequencies and beats approximate sounds the animals are attuned/adapted to, usually in relations between conspecifics. In other words, human music might be coincidentally similar to animal sounds.

[kmguru]

string theory...

[annikkaa]

Did you hear of BRECVEM model of emotional response to music? That might be interesting to you, it's the model by Patrick Juslin. Unfortunately I'm new here and can't send you a link, but you can just google it.

[annikkaa]

it's an april fools' joke, that sea lion.))))