DON’T GIVE THEM SMARTPHONES, GIVE THEM GUITARS
Today's article came from A.C.M., and I have to blog about it because one of my "mantras" in recent years has been "own the culture" and its institutions. The article is clear enough; with the rise of the digital "culture" more and more young people are turning away from the arts and music:
‘Alpha generation’ will have fewer artists, musicians — and digital devices may be to blame
It begins with an interesting observation:
For most people of a certain age, their brains tend to see the “big picture” before settling in to focus on the details. Those growing up in the digital age however, are being rewired to see the world a whole lot differently. Researchers in Hungary say children who start using digital devices at a young age pay more attention to tiny details and less to the whole picture.
A team from Eötvös Loránd University finds growing up with a mobile device or tablet in your hand alters how the brain works. The phenomenon will likely lead to more scientists in the coming decades, but fewer artists and musicians. They add that teaching methods may even have to change.
...
“Use of mobile touch screen devices (MTSDs) in toddlers and preschoolers is markedly increasing and the age at which youth begin to use these devices is becoming lower. Compared to earlier eras, young children are exposed to different kinds of stimuli during a developmental phase characterized by exceptional neural and cognitive plasticity. The short and long-term consequences of such exposure are largely unknown.” (Boldface emphasis added)
What I find disturbing here is the loss of the ability to synthesize information, and to create from that synthesis. Not for nothing did the trivium and quadrivium not only include geometry and rhetoric, but also music. And I'm a firm believer in the value of music in education for a very simple reason: music teaches one to focus not only on details - the right notes, the right fingering or bowing or breath control, the pleasing phrasing, and so on - but also simultaneously on "the big picture", on synthesizing all of those things to create a harmonious and artistic whole. One question I get on a fairly regular basis from my readers is how am I able to synthesize so many details? Howsoever one may evaluate that - poor, indifferent, good or whatever - my answer has always been the same: I grew up playing and studying a musical instrument (in my case, the organ). Invariably I've found the same to be true, whether it's guitar, clarinet, viola, piano, Sousaphone, or whatever one plays: music hits that right balance of detail and synthesis orientation. Music is invariably contrapuntal; it requires one to think on more than one level at the same time. Some types of music do this better than others, but the principle is present throughout.
There's something else the arts do, and particularly music, and that's the "human focus": it is an art and a craft best learned from a teacher, or explored, with other humans in physical proximity, so that those details and creative syntheses can be discussed, pondering, weighed, and explored. The ad hoc teenage rock group getting together in a garage to play music or create their own songs are involved in something uniquely creative, and uniquely human: try this harmonic progression not that one; try this rhythm, not that one, and so on.
This interaction cannot be accomplished to the same degree on a smartphone. Music requires that all-too-missing component of our increasingly inhuman digital age; it requires "being there" through the long slogs of practice sessions until one reaches that magic moment when one is no longer "playing the notes" (the details) but "performing the music" (the synthesis). Bringing beauty into the world is not easy; it's a discipline, and a craft, and a tradition, whether one is talking about the tradition from Buxtehude and Bach to Mendelssohn, or the Beatles to David Bowie.
Or to put it country simple: don't give them a (useless) mask and an iphone, give them a guitar, or a sax, or a violin....
See you on the flip side...
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Hello Dr Farrell, thanks for your great article ! I like to ask some questions which I haven’t seen on the comment so far, to draw a more complex picture about art vs internet and smartphones:
1. How important is the mere fact of using our hands? Reading online we memorize less than with a book. We also memorize better when using handwriting. I was shocked to learn that at some places cursive handwriting is not teached in school anymore.
2. When online we are lost in endless informations, and it does not seem to be only because of being in front of a computer (once offline, we usually get some mental calm back). This might be one fundamental reason why we loose the capacity of synthesing our world view. But it seems to me also that radio and TV have similar dissociative effects. I would be very interested to know some references about that, including how audio-visual MSM news are fabricated in details, but its rhythm and texture seems toxic to me, compared for example to an interview on alternative media.
3. Then we have the question of electronic & rock music and the negative feedback about it. But its complexity and work on details has no limitation and forces the musicians to synthesize information as you mentionned. So is it just that we have to learn to use this new tool or is there a fundamental flaw in it beyond above mentionned? Following your remark that music is a kind of soft manipulation (a long forged intuition of my own), I wounder the critism about modern music from atonal to experimental noise as it expresses to my understanding much better the modern world. So I often have the impression that listeners of classical music dive into a illusionary world of order while we live in a world of chaos and disharmony. I also feel the illusion of frivolity listening to Jazz music. My experience is that people listening to disharmonic music do not lack of intelligence and deep understanding, it might even be the opposite…
Would you agree that the problem of “digital music” is a direct descendant of the problem of “equal temperament”?
For example, modern violinists almost always adjust their tuning to be in tune with the equally-tempered piano accompaniment, and we’re so used to that way of playing that old recordings by the likes of Fritz Kreisler and Bronislaw Huberman sound almost as if they’re out of tune. But it’s the piano that’s out of tune, not the violin!
And the samples of string and wind instruments used for “digital music” are equally-tempered, and therefore as necessarily out of tune as a Steinway piano.
Ergo, “digital music”‘s claim to be considered as music falls at the first fence, because it isn’t even capable of being in tune.
As evidence, here’s Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” sonata performed by Fritz Kreisler and Franz Rupp:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpbjwNIG5z0
And by Bronislaw Huberman and Siegfried Schultze:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a-H9tdVRRk
Compare them with the unmusical noise produced by Pinchas Zukerman and Marc Neikrug:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20Oi8YjHouk
The fact that the equally-tempered performance makes a Stradivarius violin sound squeaky and hysterical doesn’t surprise me.
I would… I’ve been trying to get people to understand the different tempering systems, “just”, Bach-Werkmeister, &c. Equal temperament as I recall was a problem for Dohnanyi with Beethoven. But anyway, I often rant about the deletrerious effects of “the carpentry” (or sometimes, “pianoism”) on keyboard music, and the mass production of the carpentry with equal temperament was part of that process in my opinion. But please don’t get started on the “A=440 Hz/Rochefailure conspiracy” as it’s taken me forever to get that out of people’s minds. My other problem is the loss of “warmth” in digital vs. vinyl in music, although I do think digital serves certain instruments like clavichord and harpsichord better.
Thank you Joseph, in my eyes this is one of the most important articles I have read of you so far. You say it all.
Keywords : « synthesizing all of those things to CREATE a HARMONIOUS (…) WHOLE », « the “human focus” », « no longer “playing the notes” (the details) but “performing the music” (the synthesis) », « Bringing BEAUTY into the world »…
You are talking straight about our normal Human « super powers ». That the pathocrats have been trying hard to cut us from, out of fear of being thoroughly defeated by us.
Beauty is Love. Beauty is made in Humanity. It is not a product of the vampire’s world. It is a creation of us, the so-called plebeians.
The vampires are not patricians, they are not a « breakaway civilization », they are wrecks, trying hard to drag us into their own Fall. Their so-called civilization is actually Ersatz. A “playing the notes” musician is not a real musician, like a « walking the steps » dancer is not a dancer, a « beautiful like the antique canons » painter is not a painter : they are prisoners in the vampires’ robots world.
We do not need to outnumber the vampires, we just need to OUTPOWER them.
And how ? In producing loads of beauty, continuously. Breathtaking beauty. A sacred, unalterable whole that is a fortress. So breathtaking that even the people with devices in their ears and purchases in their bags suddenly stop at its sight and enter another world and long for this world from the moment they have seen that it exists.
An interview of a neurologist describes the impact of beauty on our health (in french) :
PIERRE LEMARQUIS L’impact de la beauté sur la santé
https://www.neosante.eu/pierre-lemarquis-limpact-de-la-beaute-sur-la-sante/
He wrote a book called « Portrait du cerveau en artiste » (portrait of the brain as an artist).
There is a beautiful movie that talks about our will to « provoke » beauty, that is Love, in this world, whatever it takes, and to live within beauty and never ever backdown :
The Love Letter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsKyc8gJW1k
In his letters to Theo, Vincent van Gogh wrote all about his will to create beauty that heals, that makes the wounded Humans whole again. I’m lacking time to find an english quote. You cry and shine at the same time when you read him.
Yes yes and yes! We need to create a new world! It’s a beautiful life yet too many don’t see/feel it. We see a light which they cannot see. It’s who we are and why we are here.
Most beautifully put, Danse!! Thank You!! 😉
“Music is invariably contrapuntal; it requires one to think on more than one level at the same time. Some types of music do this better than others, but the principle is present throughout.”
Musician here. Amen.
Translation to English. Thank you Danes.
What if art could help each of us live better and longer? “Beauty will save the world”, wrote Dostoyevsky, supplemented by Sergei Bulgakov: “and art is an instrument of it” … It is not known if it will save the world, but it seems more and more likely that beauty will save us. If the philosophers were the first to foresee the impact of beauty and artistic creations on the course of our life, our emotions, our well-being and our health, they are today joined by the neurosciences which reveal to us, proof to the support, how our brain and, by extension, our body resonate with beauty. The neurologist Pierre Lemarquis¹, already author of the bestseller “Serenade for a musician brain”, devotes a luminous book to the crucial importance of beauty and harmony in our life, and tells us how they can help us to preserve or regain health. In this “Portrait of the brain as an artist”, he brings us into communion with the beauty of the world.
Interview by Carine Anselme
It’s a summer morning flirting with the vibrant light of the solstice. In this countryside where I live, I gathered at dawn a few moments of perfection … bursts of poppies in the blond wheat, the joyful beats of swallows in the azure of the sky, solar caress of the sweetness of the sea. ‘air. The senses awakened, my soul vibrated. The heart, in tune, filled with joy. Of life. The calm, open mind found itself in a good mood to work, to create. A thousand leagues from those sad mornings when, in a hurry, I swallow, on the corner of the desk, a coffee to boost my tired neurons. We can all attest to this: yes, the beauty of the world carries us. Yes, harmony makes our lives sing. Yes, music softens our mores. Yes, one can be transported, overwhelmed, metamorphosed by a work of art, a burst of moonlight, the harmonious curve of a neck… That’s good, because on this June morning, I have an appointment with a scientist like no other, who talks about beauty as he breathes. A brain specialist quick to find the right words to describe, with finesse, the impact of beauty on our mental or physical health. Which plunges us into the harmony of the world, evoking the therapeutic effect of the Little Night Music, Navajo paintings or even the wonders of nature. And who likes to quote the words of Sol, hero of the wonderful anticipation film Soleil Vert (Soylent Green, Richard Fleischer, 1973), in the process of dying out on a planet Earth “dried up” by an ecological catastrophe: ‘did not collect art, art brought me together, ”says the latter in the film as a testament, while admiring on a giant screen, with tears in his eyes, the world before, between fields undulating under the wind, cherry blossoms and mossy undergrowth, against a background of Pastoral Symphony… Yes, art brings us together! It plunges us back into the harmony of lost unity, just as it opens us to the infinite of possibilities. During this interview, Pierre Lemarquis awakens us to this beauty that makes us feel good … and it’s so good!
Here is an astonishing cocktail: a neurologist evoking, with poetry, the impact of beauty on our lives … Where does this taste for beauty come from?
I grew up in a bistro for Routiers, halfway between a church and the School of Fine Arts (Laughter). Altar boy, I was fascinated by the organist … So I played the organ between the ages of 15 and 25. It is this happy childhood, between organ, artists and openness to the world, to travel (thanks, among other things, to this world of truck drivers) that constitutes the initial imprint of my career.
Why, then, did you choose to go to neurology?
It also belongs to my biography. When I was 5, my mom suffered from tuberculosis and was in a sanatorium. She passed the diploma of medical secretary. Suddenly, in the family, the doctor was a bit of the “pinnacle”. I then quite naturally turned to medicine, attracted at first to psychiatry for the aspect of “openness to the world”, but I finally opted for neurology, favoring the concrete, pragmatic side. I have no regrets. Writing next to it opens up other fields of thought. I have always been driven by great curiosity; once I finished my studies, I continued by studying, among other things, Chinese medicine and sexology.
Neuroscience is now showing that beauty has a tangible effect on our brain and, therefore, on our body. But since the dawn of time, in many cultures, we have made this link between beauty and health …
Absolutely, but the West, rationalist, materialist, had lost sight of this notion. Whether among the Shipibos of the Amazon or the Tibetans, to name a few, this analogy between beauty and health is evident. Already for the Greek physician Galen, “health implies
Free short film, offered at Epoch Time’s site, about beauty and music, with spectacular scenery of the Italian alps and interviewing an artisan who crafts violins: https://www.inspiredoriginal.org/violino?wix-vod-video-id=d578d32829114942bef9d0d0ea3e7cf5&wix-vod-comp-id=comp-klfke54a1
As a longtime self-taught guitarist, I agree with what you’re saying.
I pity the kids born today.. our society has not yet learned to deal with either the internet or the regular exposure to personal computing, so these kids really are the guinea pigs.
I was texting with a friend both 67 and asked him why, with these barbaric lockdowns and deadening social isolation, could there be the emergence of a great rock band or two or several as in the 60’s? The attempt would seem to provide a needed morale booster as my domestic travel has convinced me of what we already know that the country sucks right now.
Isn’t it interesting that digital tech is turning us into a species incapable of connecting dots and seeing the bigger picture? Almost as if somebody didn’t want the common folk to be able to connect dots and see the bigger picture…
https://twitter.com/Argus911/status/1369031639490322434
ArgusLeader911
@Argus911
On International Women’s Day, the South Dakota Senate voted 20-15 to pass a bill that would prevent transgender girls and transgender women from playing in girls’ and women’s sporting events.
Fifteen voted for it…… in South Dakota? That’s scary.
Popular music isn’t really music anymore. Music is built digitally using samples from the instruments. For example, the drum line is not played by a drummer, but rather each drum, cymbal, etc. is recorded individually and the drum line in the built. I believe most ‘music’ has been built using the same drum samples for a couple decades now.
Todays young generation will learn to make music digitally. Want to create a country song. Easy… Just select samples of the I, IV, V chords in G, select a strumming pattern, and off you go. No need to spend thousands of hours actually learning to play a guitar like a human being.
Starting around the year 2000 popular music was ‘fixed’ by the recording engineer. Everything began to be tweaked to be exactly in time and in key. That is why music from the 1960s to the 1990s sounds human and music made in the 2000s and later does not. Personally I can not bare to listen to any popular music created after circa 2000.
I never learned to play a musical instrument but I have been drawing since I was a child. I still draw and sketch other people animals trees. I still read books as well. Musically my tastes in music were set by the music soundtracks of Flash Gordon serials classical music.
My opinion is that what Joseph is writing about here is indicative of how learned skills such as making a piece of wood with the dried stretched intestines of dead animals strung taught over, for example tunable machine heads- enable other skill sets that are important for purposes of living in a general sense. As well pre-requisite for development of other skills that require an ability to interpret non-digital, analogue information by abstract determination and interpretation. Such as engineering, plant breeding, environmental management or surgery. That is to say integrating the relevant portions/aspects of complex, continuous, contiguous,stratified and multiplexed information “sets” into a reasoned, targeted adaptive response using specific specialised tools ( like your hands) in conjunction with knowledge, transferable experience and technology to achieve a desired outcome.
Went to school with blokes that went on to medicine and go the gym to undertake weight training with their more senior consultant peers. The generation prior to me/us. The common remark you get out of surgeons about the quality (or lack thereof) of trainee surgeons sent to them is, for example “…come out of uni and haven’t got a f**king clue how to do anything.” Such as putting in stitches that don’t fall out prior to dissolving. Identifying a suitable maintenance medication with particular reference to environment and family history/situation for persons presenting at emergency with acute or chronic mental health issues until a psychiatrist is available. The above require tactile, social and empathetic skills. There is a reason applicants for medicine with hobbies such as bird watching, community service activities, playing musical instruments and team sports are preferred. Same goes for all those high end academic scholarships such as Rhodes and Churchill’s.
Simply can’t acquire the above kinetic skill sets from computers or smartphones.
+1 to the encouragement to be authors/creators in the media we consume.
Yes, music rewards our pleasure, yet also challenges us in its polyphonic, poly-rhythmic, and poly-other factors.
I’m going to venture way over my head here. My understanding of the emerging study of biology, genetics, and especially epi-genetics, is that an interaction, at the cell level, and lower, can be perceived as a resonance effect. Therefore, my body is a vast, interrelated set of symphonies. In my personal perceptions/experience, I usually dislike disharmony Yet, I might learn more readily and more profoundly from disharmony than from harmony.
Decades ago, I had a lesson in Hindustani music (ragas) from a recognized master singer. I sang a scale for him. It had a flatted 2nd. I sang it in the tonality of the Western tempered scale. However, Hindustani (north India) and Carnatic (southern India) music recognize several micro tones between “do” and “re” (and between other whole notes.) I tried again and he rejected it. He said, it is flat, flat, flat, the lowest “re.” He sang it. My hearing cognitively “popped,” and now I could hear it. After hearing it, I could sing it. I tuned my perception, my body, my being to his vocalization. I was able to resonate with him.
At risk of overworking the analogy, it seems that these weird times have handed us a new score in a new tonality, which is challenging to “get.” Most of our institutions persist in the old tonality and ruthlessly reject the new. I guess it is up to us to sit by the stream and sing along, whether that is a sylvan stream or a cosmic stream.
Yes, but is the new score a human score or an inhuman one?
Digital devices and ear buds. They certainly are convenient, but one would rather have a stereo (even quadraphonic) speaker arrangement for musical sound. The screens on those devices do have an effect on the optics, the visual sensory apparatus, too. This business of blame seems more sourced from those who teach to control with an agenda. In some cases with the goal of subverting the true past with a false past.
Playing an instrument such as an early lyre or even a simple Xylophone is great, too, and so is replicating it with a tunable quality that soothes the auditory responses, not offends. Now, if only each recipient of a phone or Xylophone was able to replicate that phone from raw materials to finished product with apps included. If only those recipients had a handle on sensation, perception, and the aging process from cradle to grave to recognize the subtlety’s aging includes by default.
Typos are bad enough without independent editorial functions pointing out mistakes. Thumb tapping on a dinky screen is even worse when rushed to comment with a limited character allotment on a message screen that needs to be detailed. There’s only so much of this lengthy, linear, and imprecise language one can maneuver without unintended errors cropping up much less offending one’s auditory sensory apparatus with an attempt at reciting verbatim vulgarisms from vulgarians from Vulgaria (if there were such a place).
Musical production through voice has an acoustic component that often gets taken for granted, if at all known in the first place. It is bone conduction.
The larynx (voice box), by way of fine muscle control of the vocal cords, generates vibrations in the form of sound waves using the medium of air that emulate words, song, and other variations. Those vibrations cause a neurologic feedback assisted with the mouth, jaw, and throat using tissue and, especially, bone that works with the auditory sensory apparatus which sends signals to the parts of the brain generally thought to be associated with recognizing sound, tones, voice, and words through voice generated word sounds. Even humming a tune, that’s been printed on manuscript, is a functional learning event with sound and acoustics. Learning the “Doh-Ra-Mi’s” is essential just as the “A-B-C’s” and “1-2-3’s,” which rumor has identified as under assault through some perverted rewrite for recite.
Sometimes referred to as a neurolinguistic phonetic and acoustic form of expression as it wraps together what are seemingly separate constructs into one motion of brain, body, molecules, and consciousness or essence of Being. It might be a little over the top to suggest psycho-acoustics in a blog that’s more about what seems a distortion alongside the learning process. Then again there are those components of sensation, sound perception, and the relationship of physical sounds to their perceptual features having a long-lasting effect that still is something of a mystery.
The sort of stuff that was toyed with back in the sixties and seventies. Only that early version was that of “neurolinguistic programming,” as it was called. In one’s humble opinion, some of those lab-coat-types got to attached to the programming portion, as in, how could they control the object of their experiment. The business of psycho-acoustics, as part of the word suggests, has a psychological aspect that sort of gets away from electrical engineers and their toys of experimentation. That’s not to say that they do not come up with some strange and interesting stuff from time to time.
Hermann von Helmholtz, a professor of anatomy and physiology, wrote on the sensations of tone while writing on music theory during the mid-1800’s. Back then it was easier to be something of a polytechnic in the arts and sciences.
Violins also have ear and bone conduction as part of their ensemble, sort of, when one considers how and where that musical instrument is kind of worn around the neck and ear and is emotionally played by a skilled violinist.
Development overall involves all our sensory abilities. Hearing comes early. Pitch is more important that we credit it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgFdics3uKo
How To Develop Perfect Pitch! Part 1
Rick Beato has learned how to intentionally give his kids perfect pitch. Or at least increase the odds of such success consciously.
https://www.amazon.com/Jim-Treleases-Read-Aloud-Handbook-Eighth/dp/0143133799/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=jim+trelease&qid=1615234786&sr=8-1
I still like reading as well.
I’ve read far too many books on how the digital brain is rewired differently from the analogue brain. My take away was: the analogue can; and, does go deep; whereas, the digital brain’s attention span is more prone to being, and becoming scatterbrained. Indeed, I have to counter balance my digital time w/book time[light and deep reading materials].
That growing up w/mobile tablets look to scatter one’s brains; give rise to an analogy of: Tablets of Destiny.
Unfortunately, music was not part of my growing up.
My music in growing up, was nature.
She was my teacher and inspiration.
And; it is heartbreaking today, to see her being slowly destroyed.
And, right alongside her;
is mankind’s own nature, being slowly destroyed.
And, this requires deep analyses and solutions.
Solutions “they” want are; needless to say, for the scatterbrained.
Very insightful blog. When trying to teach my nieces and nephews how to fish or make things I used to make and do as a child. Things that look simple from the outside but involve learning and mastering simple basic skills to be successful, I’m disappointed at how quickly they lose interest in the project they do in make believe and with the press of a few buttons on their tablets. It seems these devices are giving them extreme A.D.D.. And they are not learning basic physical skills and knowledge and have no staying power to see anything elaborately physical all the way through. But most parents are too busy with their own wants and needs to really pay much attention to their children’s developement. They are happy to to have their children waste their youth on these tablets rather than having to give them attention and do physical activities that were normal in my youth. Your real wealth and legacy in this world is your children, not money, drugs or trinkets. It’s shocking just how few get it.
You can really see the effects of this today in the construction industry of the US. Most construction workers are in their forties and up and we are finding it hard to find young people from the US to do this sort of work. They just don’t have any long term follow through with anything physical. That’s why it’s requiring more illegals from countries that were not raised on tablets to get things done in construction. Our youth more and more are destroying themselves with addiction because they don’t have real world skills and knowledge neccessary to be successful in the real world. These immigrant’s children are falling into the same trap our’s have so they will have the same problems.
Another thing. When I was a kid I ran all over the neighborhood and any nearby woods exploring and interacting with a dangerous world. Vicious dogs, poisonous snakes, weird adults, and street gangs and bullies. How many kids today do you see running the streets? Not many, because a lot of them are not allowed to, even in the safer suburbs because their parents are scared to let them out. A lot of today’s youth are not street wise and tough anymore and are either scared of their own shadow unneccessarily or worse ignorant of real dangers in the wrong parts of town or countryside. They think they are tough because of their video game knowledge but don’t have the basis skills to really deffend themselves. Luckily for them most thugs are similarly handicapped.
It’s sad that us middle aged men and older men rule the streets because we have real skills. In our day and age this was not the case. Even younger women feel more comfortable and safer with us than guys their own age who don’t know how to be real men.
Old Man River started out, as Manneken Pis. Then it escalated downstream, musically. That is rock-and-roll.
Roger I concur one hundred percent, and I’m probably 20 years older than you. I lived on the ragged edge myself in addition to looking after four younger brothers. Sisters were working or in school. I think that helped me get through some sticky situations in Asia where I served for a couple of years. I explored all the woods nearby and in a small town that takes about 10 seconds to get to the woods. lol
European upbringing is different. Brats get one meal a day, and three times beating.
Brats shouldn’t get any gifts at all. They should earn their keeping. Reward is transaction.
This is how I was brought up, and I turned out very well, as top of the class!
I’ve got Medusa’s head as trophy.
😉
“But most parents are too busy with their own wants and needs to really pay much attention to their children’s developement.”
>They are too busy with their own escape strategies trying to cope with a world no Human can cope with.
They are happy to to have their children waste their youth on these tablets rather than having to give them attention and do physical activities that were normal in my youth. ”
>They are not happy. They are trying hard not to feel the pain.
Someone I know recently received a Ph D at LSU to add to her MFA in Music Composition. Her friend is the Director of the program who graduated in the same undergraduate class at University of California Long Beach in the late 70’s. Her program and thesis was designed and based on using the computer keyboard to provide musical access to children who could not afford private music lessons nor the cost of an instrument. She took old children’s musical scores and transferred to corresponding letters on a keyboard. Different musical instruments can be selected and several people can play together
qwerty music?
Yep. I guess if one gains proficiency “touch typing”’would enable a performance.
I have always loved Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. The harmony is perfect. It is a deeply and most profoundly spiritual piece. I fear most scientists loathe it!
Have worked through survival issues in outside, martial arts tests, endurance trials at work,……. hardships of all sorts while humming and sounding that song in my mind. It always settles everything beautifully. Focus comes. Pace. Beauty. It all comes. Like a mantra.
The same detailed scientists who claim covering your face in deference to SATAN is backed by measurable data. This system is over. Get ready for THE COLLAPSE.
Playing music is the perfect brain exercise…keeping the balance of rational disciplined thinking while allowing maximum emotional engagement in the expression.
Music IS the wordless language of emotion.
It’s a theory of mine, based on other studies that map areas of the brain that are active when playing, but i believe that it (playing music) does, somehow, thin, or make transparent the corpus callosum so that both sides of your brain communicate much easier and more harmoniously…..leading to a more holistic,( dare I say Cosmic?) balanced mind.
But hey, what do i know, “I’m just a lonely boy…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08ts6hekHlc
GD, out.
PS: If you’re gonna get you kid a guitar, ante up and buy local. There’s lots of craftsman out there, and even kits…(now there’s a teaching experience for your little genius…learn to build it, AND play it)
I agree 100% , I love to play music
Learning how to play a guitar takes your whole concentration and takes you away to a different dimension. Time flies by and the world is a better place for an hour or two. I just got a used acoustical guitar for Christmas, it’s like having a new friend.
Music and being out in nature should be required for children everywhere to learn and experience their true potential.
Love that song. Neil’s stuff is good fun to play on my Martin.
Oops, that’s to Guitar Dave’s post.
I’m so happy I grew up slightly before the whole video game explosion, truth is I probably would have loved it. Instead I learned an instrument (guitar) and read books, things I still do forty years later. I feel very lucky.
Ironic that I have repeatedly seen video game skills improved in musicians.
All music is a waterfall (Ea), and the Old Norse pantheon, Aesir, is actually Ea-s-ir.
Odin came paddling, through the Russian rivers (Ea), to Scandinavia, from the Caspian Sea.
That is the region, where the ten tribes were last seen, brought there, by the Assyrians.
In Old English, Ea is a reminiscence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakten_p%C3%A5_Odin