Grey Matters: Music and the Mind

[xh3rv]

A lecture that draws from cognitive psych / neuroscience / etc. and discusses music. Gets really interesting at 14:00 in or so. Particularly the claims about music being universal and exclusive to humans is pretty interesting, as well as why that may be.

[paulhart]

Thank you for the marvelous distraction, I got lost in the UCTelevision tapes for way longer than I would like to admit. I had seen the 40/40 lecture by Ramachandrin at UCSD which involves visual cortex aspects, but this one was great for the auditory elements. I had heard that parrots responded to rhythm so it was fun to see the tape. Great stuff...
Paul

[Ogg Vorbis]

That was great. So there seem to be parallels between music and language, at least on a "grammatical" level (but apparently not on a "semantic" level).

But I wonder about amusea. The people with this condition cannot distinguish between two different melodies. But what about rhythms? Can you play a snare, like eighth note, eighth note, quarter, quarter and then play the reverse and can they tell the difference?

How about timbres? Can they distinguish between patterns of french horns versus cats being tortured (or bagpipes)?

If so, it's not "amusea" it's just lack of discrimination between patterns of pitches.

[Nystul]

But what about rhythms? Can you play a snare, like eighth note, eighth note, quarter, quarter and then play the reverse and can they tell the difference?

If not, it would explain a lot about some of the drummers in my high school band days.