Learning to play music makes you smarter

Sounds like you and I went to schools with similar band programs. :D


LOL, and then I went and became a band director... What my former students tell me they got away with is a heck of a lot worse than anything we ever did! And of course, the back of Bus One, the senior bus, was the coolest.
 
These studies illustrate why it's been a HUGE mistake for public schools to have cut down, or eliminated, their music education programs over the past few decades.

For what it's worth, this was my post number 8,888.
 
:agree: - I've said much the same thing for years.
Well, it's a theory used in Mark Katz's Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music (2004) and earlier in Michael Channan's Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music (1995). It's also cited repeatedly in David Byrne's How Music Works.

I tend to agree with the part of it that says that some performances became benchmarks, that listening to music changed from a social gathering to solitary self-satisfaction in a bedroom or with headphones (the horror!) and that it had a standardising effect on music: the turns, slurs, even pitches were less local or even individual. We can moan about technology's influence on music style (oh, the female vocalists that can impersonate a vocorder pitch shifter! and the vibrato you can drive through with a truck!) but on the other hand drummers have never been more steady than today, thanks to them practising to metronomes and click tracks.

I don't agree with the part that says that recording music made people less particants and more consumers of music. Basically because the portion of population playing music never was really that large. Yes, lots of households had pianos, but nowadays many households have a guitar and a recorder somewhere - it doesn't mean they were played regularly, or well. As for singing, radio and records opened up the repertoire for everyone. Listen to the radio for eight hours, and you have some 120 different songs!

I also don't agree with the argument that the quality went down. Yes, there is terrible music today, but there was terrible music then as well, even before the recording days. The oldies and classics are generally great music, but remember that they were filtered through time, because they were considered worth preserving and re-broadcasting over and over. There is also an element of taste and changing styles at work - sometimes it's just something to acquire. And it's personal as well. I get itchy whenever I hear something by The Doors, although I can't explain why I don't like it and most people consider their music classic and of high quality. Must be some youth trauma, I suppose.

You do have a point (confirmed by all the authors above) in that the music business has changed - basically it's very hard to make any money anymore from recorded music unless you are a very big name. And being a big name has little to do with musicality and alot with notority. But recording good music never was a guarantee for selling a lot of records, and living of modest record sales only was possible for a few decades between the 1950s and the 1990s.

Fascinating stuff! I do think that the influence of ukulele sales (third wave) is exaggerated. If you're musically inclined, you don't need to find a ukulele to help bring that out. The ukulele may find you. [eery theremin music, fades into the background]
 
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