All about music

I recently started learning to play the guitar. Ok, now that you've taken a minute to stop laughing as to the possible reasons for my doing so, (ok insert more delay here) let me point out the reason for my fascination with this instrument. I've been told it's easier to learn the piano, by a good friend who does, but my fascination with the guitar goes back to the first time I heard "With or without you" by U2. Lyrics and good singing aside, this song amazed me because of the instrumental section towards the end, dominated by the guitar. Even this clip of how The Edge achieves his effects (courtesy, the same friend), hasn't quite deterred me yet. What my short learning experience with the guitar has taught me though, is that it is a hard instrument to master. Maybe I'm an inexperienced player, or my fingers are too fat, but finding the right placement without damping the other strings is still something that fails me.


Ok, after the long intro, let me get to the main point of my post. A while ago, I read up about how people appreciate music for a course on art & philosophy. I found an interesting study on how even though we focus on the notes we hear, the ones we don't often induce an emotional response. Which means that the inaudible frequencies affect our brain activity (see paper here), and from what I remember, it does affect our emotional response to the music. This is one reason I don't quite like mp3's, the way they achieve a small file size is by cutting off these very frequencies. Might be an interesting pitch for studios to make for CDs and DVDs and not focus on mp3s exclusively. Also while working on the same project, I got this idea of resonance with music. But since I've covered that in another post, I won't go into it.


Recently I read this new study on the link between music and rehab for people who have had strokes. They made this observation on how music activates different regions of the brain, and people who have lost the ability to use the left side of the brain, can still communicate using singing. It's an interesting point on how music seems to have this intricate contact with our brains, our minds. We all have had our moments where we've listened to certain music tracks to calm us down, pump us up, or even get over bad moments. Rhythm and musical notes seem to have this connection with our minds, and it seemingly goes beyond training. Babies are known to respond to music, more so to rhythm, and feel like dancing when they hear it (see here). This would suggest that whatever relationship we have with music, goes beyond training and might just be ingrained in our genes. No one quite understands why we have this attraction to rhythm, but I've personally found it easier to learn and do repetitive tasks when associated with a rhythm. It would seem our brains are tuned to certain rhythms which govern us, subconciously. It might even be interesting to see whether we can grasp something about our minds from this fact, though it's quite clearly a long shot. Maybe our preferences for different kinds of music, apart from reflecting on who we are, also says something about how our brains are wired. But till we know more, enjoy that rhythm.