Music : is a reaction

Music : is a reaction

1. What is music
• what is noise
2. do we enjoy music we both love the same way ?
• across people
• Apparently Lord Chesterfield said that he would never trust anybody who doesn't love music.
• Apparently a famous journalist in TamilNadu once compared a popular rock star's music to dog's howling that will be produced if one were to tie and then beat it.
• The Psychology of Musical Preferences
• across species
• Why Do Chicks Like Music? Why Does Any One?
• "I have always had great difficulty in understanding the meaning of Shakespeare’s sonnets, yet I find the sound of them so beautiful! " -- Who knows a study of Religious Consciousness by Raymond Smullyan
• Fidelity is impacted by both transmitter and reciever
• music appreciation depends and differs on our biological receiver and processing ? 
• hierarchy of enjoying ?
• does understanding how difficult a piece of music is constructed, composed, created give greater enjoyment?
• "Kant was right! Art demands disinterest, a special brain state"- Norman Holland" -- Museumgoing in the Brain
• "Listening to music usually starts as a sensory experience. At this stage, one responds to the qualities of sound that induce the pleasant physical reactions that are genetically wired into our nervous system. We respond to certain chords that seem to have universal appeal, or to the plaintive cry of the flute, the rousing call of the trumpets. We are particularly sensitive to the rhythm of the drums or the bass, the beat on which rock music rests, and which some contend is supposed to remind the listener of the mother’s throbbing heart first heard in the womb. The next level of challenge music presents is the analogic mode of listening. In this stage, one develops the skill to evoke feelings and images based on the patterns of sound. The mournful saxophone passage recalls the sense of awe one has when watching storm clouds build up over the prairie; the Tchaikovsky piece makes one visualize a sleigh driving through a snow- bound forest, with its bells tinkling. Popular songs of course exploit the analogic mode to its fullest by cuing in the listener with lyrics that spellout what mood or what story the music is supposed to represent. The most complex stage of music listening is the analytic one. In this mode attention shifts to the structural elements of music, instead of the sensory or narrative ones. Listening skills at this level involve the ability to recognize the order underlying the work, and the means by which the harmony was achieved. They include the ability to evaluate critically the performance and the acoustics; to compare the piece with earlier and later pieces of the same composer, or with the work of other composers writing at the same time; and to compare the orchestra, conductor, or band with their own earlier and later performances, or with the interpretations of others. Analytic listeners often compare various versions of the same blues song, or sit down to listen with an agenda that might typically be: “Let’s see how von Karajan’s 1975 recording of the second movement of the Seventh Symphony differs from his 1963 recording,” or “I wonder if the brass section of the Chicago Symphony is really better than the Berlin brasses?” Having set such goals, a listener becomes an active experience that provides constant feedback (e.g., “von Karajan has slowed down,” “the Berlin brasses are sharper but less mellow”). As one develops analytic listening skills, the opportunities to enjoy music increase geometrically." -- "Flow, the psychology of optimal experience" by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi.
3. 1973-74 Charles Eliot Norton Lecture "The Unanswered Question" by  Leonard Bernstein
4. Music and emotion 
• "One's emotional response to a given work of art, whether visual or musical, is nto static and unchnaging. There is no way to know how you will respond, the next time you hear or see one of your favourite pieces. It may leave you unmoved, or it may thrill you to the bones. It depends on your mood, what has recently happened, what chances to strike you, and many other subtle intangibles. Ones' reaction can even change in the course of a few minutes." -- Metamagical Themas by douglas R Hofstader
• "How to explain the fact that Hitler was able to send millions of people to the gas chamber and would be moved to tears listening to music?" -- In the Beginning was Sound: 2006
• "it's the tension-and-release part of music that elicits an emotional response." -- Violating Expectations and Resolving Tensions: The Music of Emotions
5. Secret of music liked is perhaps in exposure, repetitive experience, immersion and  pattern searching.
• German Babies Cry Differently From French Babies, Research Shows
• "But a work of music is not simply a set of individual notes arranged in time. Music really begins when the separate pitches are melted into a pattern. This is a consequence of the brain's own limitations. Music is the pleasurable overflow of information. Whenever a noise exceeds our processing abilities—we can't decipher all the different sound waves hitting our hair cells—the mind surrenders. It stops trying to understand the individual notes and seeks instead to understand the relationships between the notes. The human auditory cortex pulls off this feat by using its short-term memory for sound (in the left posterior hemisphere) to uncover patterns at the larger level of the phrase, motif, and movement. This new approximation lets us extract order from all these notes haphazardly flying through space, and the brain is obsessed with order. We need our sensations to make sense.  It is this psychological instinct—this desperate neuronal search for a pattern, any pattern—that is the source of music. When we listen to a symphony, we hear a noise in motion, each note blurring into the next. The sound seems continuous. Of course, the physical reality is that each sound wave is really a separate thing, as discrete as the notes written in the score. But this isn't the way we experience the music. We continually abstract on our own inputs, inventing patterns in order to keep pace with the onrush of noise. And once the brain finds a pattern, it immediately starts to make predictions, imagining what notes will come next. It projects imaginary order into the future, transposing the melody we have just heard into the melody we expect. By listening for patterns, by interpreting every note in terms of expectations, we turn the scraps of sound into the ebb and flow of a symphony." --Proust was a Neuro scientist by Jonah Lehrer.