The music moves us, but how? (2018) | Hacker News Reader

The music moves us, but how? (2018)

knowablemagazine.org

68 pointsohjeez11 comments

"We have no idea, but here are some areas that light up in an fMRI machine when you listen!"

/thread

I feel like this kind of "research" is the bulk of neuroscience papers that I see these days. Or they're at least the ones that get shared the most because they claim to explain things that haven't been explained yet.

That is just explaining the mechanism, but not delving into the reasons.

An experiment would be to compare 2 pairs of people, one with similar tastes, and the other with opposite tastes in music, and measure their performance in cooperative tasks not involving music.

Levitin also points out in "This Is Your Brain on Music" that

Only relatively recently in our culture [...] did a distinction arise that cut society in two, forming separate classes of music performers and music listeners. Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated.

[...]

A couple of generations ago, before television, many families would sit around and play music together for entertainment. Nowadays there is a great emphasis on technique and skill, and whether a musician is "good enough" to play for others. Music making has become a somewhat reserved activity in our culture, and the rest of us listen.

I didn't really realize this until reading this passage. I am lucky enough to have learned piano at an early age, and have picked up other instruments along the way. Even so, I was hesitant to sing around others until I took a leap and joined a choir in college, and got in enough practice to gain the confidence to sing more.

Music is an incredibly important part of my life, and it makes me a little sad to see how often people are too embarrassed of their own ability to participate.

Here's Tony Royster, jr doing some crazy things going in front of or behind the beat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh8PATuI_NU

And here is a musical performance that actually makes many people cry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8KrpwqxE4g

What I find interesting is that in some cultures people dance together (e.g. as couples or as a group), but in Western culture people mostly prefer to dance alone. And often people even zone out, focusing only on the music and ignoring other people.

That’s a very recent phenomenon even in the West. Solo dancing as a widespread cultural phenomenon was basically born in the 50s, in conjunction with rock’n’roll.

Is that because the music is cool and varied enough that it's now fun to just dance alone, but it wouldn't have been fun with older music?

Or because, with 1000 kinds of music today, nobody can figure out how to dance together to a given song?

Or did people dance alone all the time in the old days, but nobody recorded it?

It's fundamentally funnier to dance with another, but is inherently harder because it require social skills.

There are likely many reasons, among them the fact that the invention of recorded sound made listening to music something you could do alone in the first place, and the general trend of individualization in the Western society in the 1900s.

When it comes to partner dancing, there exist modern social dances that can be danced to a wide variety of pop music, mostly descendants of the original 30s/40s swing dances like Lindy Hop and Jitterbug, and even moreso than those predecessors, emphasize improvisation and nontraditional lead–follow dynamics. West Coast Swing is probably the most popular example while by no means mainstream; partner dances simply aren’t that fashionable even if there has been a resurgence of some sort in the past decades. (Coincidentally, I happen to be currently in Budapest, at one of Europe’s largest annual WCS events!)

Of course, there’s the fundamental fact that solo dancing requires next to no skill, while acquiring even basic partner dancing skills requires one to take a class, or at the very least ”learn by doing” in an appropriate environment.

I think it's mostly because of drum machines. Real drums have complex sounds, and take a long time to fully decay. Synthetic drums strip the sound down to its most important elements, and cut it off sooner so the sounds don't layer over each other so much. This makes the rhythm clearer and stronger feeling. I've never heard real drums anywhere near as danceable as a TR-808:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:808patterns_01.ogg

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