Whenever a person is going through a situation in their life, or is in a particular setting; if they listen to a certain piece of music a few times, this piece will then be connected to that atmosphere. When they decide to listen to that piece again, they will remember the particular setting they were in. This experience is the most powerful one. The ability to backtrack to a moment in your life through music is something that is really quite beautiful. This is why certain pieces are associated with certain events.
“When we love a piece of music, it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times in our lives. Your brain on music is all about, as Francis Crick said, connections.” What is music? Many of us have distinctive definitions of this complex term because it plays a unique role in each of our lives. Daniel J. Levitin, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music, looks at music from a neuropsychological perspective. How music affects us is connected through our brains neurochemistry, our mental associations with the music, our culture, and our spirit, which are all mentioned in this scientific journey.
The song Now in Our Lives is more relaxed and romantic compared to his other quick, strong be-bop songs. The majority of the song consists of low, sluggish melodies. However, there are many parts throughout the song that have many fast notes played. There are quite a few changes in rhythm throughout the piece which stimulates the piece. There’s a nice piano, bass and drum accompaniment that help to establish the laid-back feel of the music.
R.A.P., or rhythm and poetry, gives the impression that it far more complex than just singing about fantasy materialistic things. “Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response.” I believe that Outkast’s progression of lyrical content and musical talent demonstrates just that. When listening to an Outkast song, it is not uncommon to find myself pressing the rewind button or searching for the actual lyrics to attempt to sing along. One of the most impressive parts of Outkast is their ability to “flow” or manipulate words to rhyme in different schemes and speeds. Outkast consists of two rappers Andre Benjamin and Antwan Patton.
The music was generally fast and the sound was very brassy to me. The purpose of the songs they were playing seem to be expressing a mood to me, as if the audience should be very awake and alert. It was not calming at all but I'm not sure it was supposed to be! I would say that the overall unifying principle of the entire concert is the range in melody. The choir put a spin on the way I ever looked at lyrics but the melody that they created was both high and low, they just stayed in harmony even when they weren't all singing at one and it was guys vs girls.
The tempo was then adagio. I didn’t really enjoy this movement because of this. The music sounded great, but I just got a little bored and was waiting for the tempo to liven up again. Even though the tempo was slower in this movement the pitch of the instruments were much higher at times. The third movement was just as exciting as the first.
The third piece “Evalidate” was a fixed media. The author of this piece said in the concert, that it was the dream of many composers. It had different type of sounds. Some of the beats were very long but loud. It kept the same rhythm for the whole piece.
Adding it all together, it felt like each sound worked together to get this awesome combination of sounds. Most of their songs sounded homophonic, but obviously, the song Amazing Grace was monophonic. I wasn’t sure if Ovambo Summit was monophonic because there were some vocals but those weren’t played throughout the song. Also, many of their songs seemed to switch from monophony to homophony to polyphony during different sections. A lot of the songs had a fast rhythm but there were a few slow ones such as Lover’s leap, especially during the steel drum solo that made me feel peaceful and like I could float off into dreams.
A huge part of music producing is being open to music, different genres, and the different people that will be working with. Any producer that is able to handle a lot of different people and music genres will be extremely successful. At this point, it is important to get the experience needed for this
It reaches two to twelve percent of total music listening times (Sloboda, 2010; Herbert, 2011a). However, it remains to be a special, often highly gratifying moment sought for and returned to again and again by at least some music listeners. Indeed, absorbing musical experiences are, according to many, precisely what music is all about; what people are sometimes explicitly looking for when going to a concert, live event or listening when being alone, and to which time and again is returned to in order to re-experience it. These types of ‘heightened’ states are the ones which can offer insight into how the mind operates at its finest. It is therefore vital to understand such musical experiences, insofar as this would be possible, as it potentially explains why we are motivated to engage with music.