Beyond the practical experiences and impressions being held for ages from ancient times, the scientific observations and surveys indicate that psychopathological symptoms, especially those belonging to the bipolar mood disorder (bipolar I and II), major depression and cyclothymia categories occur more frequently among writers, poets, visual artists and composers, compared to the rates in the general population. Self-reports of writers and artists describe symptoms in their intensively creative periods which are reminiscent and characteristic of hypomanic states. Further, cognitive styles of hypomania (e.g. overinclusive thinking, richness of associations) and originality-prone creativity share many common as indicated by several authors.
Among the eminent artists showing most probably manic-depressive or cyclothymic symptoms were: E. Dickinson, E. Hemingway, N. Gogol, A. Strindberg, V. Woolf, Lord Byron (G. Gordon), J. W. Goethe, V. van Gogh, F. Goya, G. Donizetti, G. F. Händel, O. Klemperer, G. Mahler, R. Schumann, and H. Wolf. Based on biographies and other studies, brief descriptions are given in the present article on the personality character of Gogol; Strindberg, Van Gogh, Händel, Klemperer, Mahler, and Schumann.
Further example is the enigmatic silence and withdrawal from opera composing of Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868), which is still a matter of various theories and explanations. Until his life of 37 years he composed 39 operas and lived almost another 40 years without composing any new one. Biographies show that severe depressive sufferings played a role in that withdrawal and silence, while in his juvenile years most probably hypomanic personality traits contributed to the extreme achievements and very fast composing techniques. Analysing the available biographies of Rossini and the character of music he composed (e.g. opera buffa, Rossini crescendo) strongly suggests the medical diagnosis of a bipolar affective illness.
Comparing to the general population, bipolar mood disorder is highly overrepresented among writers and artists. The cognitive and other psychological features of artistic creativity resemble many aspects of the hypomanic symptomatology. It may be concluded that bipolar mood traits might contribute to highly creative achievements in the field of art. At the same time, considering the risks, the need of an increased medical care is required.
Although the audio program Auto-Tune is best known for the singing-through-a-fan, robotic vocal style that has dominated pop radio in recent years with stars like Lady Gaga, T-Pain and countless others, Auto-Tune is in fact widely used in the studio and at concerts to make artists’ sound pitch-perfect.
“Quite frankly, [use of Auto-Tune] happens on almost all vocal performances you hear on the radio,” said Marco Alpert, vice president of marketing for Antares Audio Technologies, the company that holds the trademark and patent for Auto-Tune.
The beauty of Auto-Tune, Alpert said, is that instead of an artist having to sing take after take, struggling to get through a song flawlessly, Auto-Tune can clean up small goofs. (…)
Auto-Tune’s invention sprung from a quite unrelated field: prospecting for oil underground using sound waves. Andy Hildebrand, a geophysicist who worked with Exxon, came up with a technique called autocorrelation to interpret these waves. During the 1990s, Hildebrand founded the company that later became Antares, and he applied his tools to voices.
The recording industry pounced on the technology, and the first song credited (or bemoaned) for introducing Auto-Tune to the masses was Cher’s 1998 hit “Believe.”
Although a success with audio engineers, Auto-Tune remained largely out of sight until 2003 when rhythm and blues crooner T-Pain discovered its voice-altering effects.
It made me wonder if genius can be defined by the degree to which something intellectual can be felt as a physical experience.
For example, most people feel something when they listen to music. But I suspect gifted musicians feel it in an entirely different way than I do. I could never memorize all the notes in a song because for me it would be an exercise in rote memorization. For someone gifted in music, memorizing a song is easier because such a person would remember how each part felt. Feelings create memories more easily than intellectual experiences. The stronger the feeling, the easier the memory.
For jazz fans, nothing could be more tantalizing than the excerpts made available by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem of newly discovered recordings from the 1930s and ’40s. Nearly 1,000 discs containing performances by masters like Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Billie Holiday and the long-neglected Herschel Evans suddenly re-emerged when the son of the audio engineer, William Savory, sold them to the museum.
The museum is doing its best to clean up and digitize the recordings. But because of the way copyright laws work, excerpts may be all that fans can hear for some time. The museum paid for the discs, but cannot distribute the music until it has found a way to compensate the estates of the musicians, many of which may be very difficult to track down after all these decades. Hawkins’s saxophone solo on “Body and Soul” may be reason enough for Congress to revisit this issue and free historical documents from excessive legal fetters.
Copyright laws are designed to ensure that authors and performers receive compensation for their labors without fear of theft and to encourage them to continue their work. The laws are not intended to provide income for generations of an author’s heirs, particularly at the cost of keeping works of art out of the public’s reach.
The Savory collection, like other sound recordings made before 1972, is covered by a patchwork of state copyright and piracy laws that in some cases allow copyrights to remain until the year 2067.
“The problem is all inside your head”, she said to me. The answer is easy if you take it logically. (…) She said it grieves me so to see you in such pain, I wish there was something I could do to make you smile again. I said I appreciate that. (…) She said why don’t we both just sleep on it tonight, and I believe in the morning you’ll begin to see the light. And then she kissed me and I realized she probably was right.
50 Ways to Leave Your Lover is a 1975 hit song by Paul Simon, from his album Still Crazy After All These Years. It became number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 on February 7, 1976, and remained there for three weeks.
Written after Simon’s divorce from first wife Peggy Harper, the song is a mistress’s humorous advice to a husband on ways to end a relationship. Studio drummer Steve Gadd created the unique drum beat that became the hook and color for the song consisting of an almost military beat. The song was recorded in a small New York City studio on Broadway.
If you’re having trouble getting a date, French researchers suggest that picking the right soundtrack could improve the odds. Women were more prepared to give their number to an ‘average’ young man after listening to romantic background music, according to research that appears today in the journal Psychology of Music, published by SAGE.
There’s plenty of research indicating that the media affects our behaviour. Violent video games or music with aggressive lyrics increase the likelihood of aggressive behaviour, thoughts and feelings – but do romantic songs have any effect? This question prompted researchers Nicolas Guéguen and Céline Jacob from the Université de Bretagne-Sud along with Lubomir Lamy from Université de Paris-Sud to test the power of romantic lyrics on 18-20 year old single females. And it turns out that at least one romantic love song did make a difference.
“While I remained at Paris, near you, my father,” said Fleur-de-Marie, “I was so happy, oh! so completely happy, that those delicious days would not be too well paid for by years of suffering. You see I have at least known what happiness is.”
“During some days, perhaps?”
“Yes, but what pure and unmingled felicity! Love surrounded me then, as ever, with the tenderest care. I gave myself up without fear to the emotions of gratitude and affection which every moment raised my heart to you. The future dazzled me: a father to adore, a second mother to love doubly.
An earworm is a song going around in your head that you can’t get rid of. Some claim that earworms are like a cognitive itch, we scratch them by repeating the tune over and over in our heads.
In new research, Beaman & Williams (2010) asked 103 participants aged 15-57 all about their earworm experiences. Here’s what they found:
• Many earworms were pop songs, although adverts and TV/film themes and video game tunes were also mentioned.
• One-third generally experienced the chorus or refrain over and over again, but almost half said that it varied.
• 10% of participants reported that earworms stopped them doing other things.
• Contrary to popular belief those with musical training were no more likely to experience earworms. (…)
For most of us earworms are relatively untroubling. And if you are tempted to moan then just be thankful you’re not the 21-year-old described in a case report by Praharaj et al. (2009). This man had had music from Hindi films going around in his head against his will for between 2 and 45 minutes at a time, up to 35 times a day, for five years. Unfortunately even powerful drugs couldn’t stop the music.
It sometimes feel like our minds are not on the same team as us. I want to go to sleep, but it wants to keep me awake rerunning events from my childhood. I want to forget the lyrics from that stupid 80s pop song but it wants to repeat them over and over again ad nauseam. (…)
Perpetual thoughts of food drive people to obesity, persistent negative thoughts cue depression and traumatic events push back into consciousness to be relived over and over again. (…)
Although it makes perfect intuitive sense to try and suppress unwanted thoughts, unfortunately the very process we use to do this contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more we try and push intrusive thoughts down, the more they pop back up, stronger than ever.
Emily Haines, lead singer of the Canadian band Metric, sings on “Help, I’m Alive,” the hit single from last year’s Fantasies. It’s not so much a rhetorical question as it is a brave reclamation of self-purpose: it’s Haines flipping the bird at the imagined glass ceilings and self-doubt she condemned on previous records. Any why shouldn’t she? Even in a fractured musical climate that doesn’t invite or invent figureheads like it once did, Emily Haines has recently been elevated to the role of indie pop’s cool big sister. At a recent sold-out show at New York City’s Terminal 5, she prowled the stage with the devastating cool of a feline predator. (…)
NIKA: What about the Lady Gaga effect?
HAINES: I can honestly say it makes me laugh and I really don’t care. It has nothing to with music. I mean, it’s fascinating. Show up wearing Kermit the Frog, why not? It’s fun and she has a good time. It has nothing to do with the world that I live in.
Ever since ancient times, scholars have puzzled over the reasons that some musical note combinations sound so sweet while others are just downright dreadful. The Greeks believed that simple ratios in the string lengths of musical instruments were the key, maintaining that the precise mathematical relationships endowed certain chords with a special, even divine, quality. Twentieth-century composers, on the other hand, have leaned toward the notion that musical tastes are really all in what you are used to hearing.
Now, researchers reporting online on May 20th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, think they may have gotten closer to the truth by studying the preferences of more than 250 college students from Minnesota to a variety of musical and nonmusical sounds. (…)
The researchers’ results show that musical chords sound good or bad mostly depending on whether the notes being played produce frequencies that are harmonically related or not. Beating didn’t turn out to be as important. Surprisingly, the preference for harmonic frequencies was stronger in people with experience playing musical instruments. In other words, learning plays a role—perhaps even a primary one, McDermott argues.
