Another Calvino moment

[enzokrew]

"Musical training appears to have the effect of shifting some music processing from the right (imagistic) hemisphere to the left (logical) hemisphere, as musicians learn to talk about -and perhaps think about- music using linguistic terms."-Daniel J. Levitin, 2006, p.125

Comments

[asleep_in_arms]

As someone with some musical training and definitely someone who talks about music and can think music in linguistic terms.....I don't feel overly mechanical about it. I enjoy the way I think about it but I can say that music is probably a very different thing for me than it is for you. I think music education or at least deeper understanding of music and how it works and what it is......will change what you want to listen to, at least to a degree. I still enjoy some silly fun stuff that is garbage musically......but definitely much less of it than used to be the norm for me. I am very happy where I have ended up (and with where I am going) in my musical world....however, I can totally understand the perspective you were proposing.

[enzokrew]

haha, the opponent voice in my post was what I imagined you would counter.

[asleep_in_arms]

I am by no means an opponent, lol. I support either way. I just happen to feel that I am able to speak from the opposite side of the coin.

[enzokrew]

I meant in more in the way that the counters were from an imagined conversation with you.

[princesofswords]

To start, I absolutely love that you quoted Music on the Brain. And I've gone through that exact thought process, and the result is that I'm probably going to spend some of my life studying music cognition. I was a music major once upon a time, but I saw very quickly that I had no desire to deconstruct music in the way my professors wanted me to

[enzokrew]

I never thought that it would be an immediate shift in thought processes, but currently the experience of music has the effect of removing words from my mind, and I think if I start to learn to label things it would create a new kind of noise in my head that distracts me from the wordless feeling of falling into music as I sit at my desk with my headphones on, or as it propels me through the streets when I'm walking, or drives me to dance and think about little else but moving. I hate to think of things having a pure form, but in many ways I cannot avoid using the term to describe this interaction with music I have in these occasions even though I know that this is unlikely to be the only "pure" form music could take in someone.

[princesofswords]

That's an interesting, yet very familiar way to put it. In that regard, I see what you're saying, but I don't think it would add an extra kind of noise until that kind of analysis becomes automatic, which takes a LONG time. Think of it like the stroop task - you have a response to a stimulus that is automatic (in this case, hearing the music) and then when you're asked to do identify an additional aspect of the stimulus (in this case, identifying musical components) the automatic response gets in the way of the instructed response. There are tricks to getting around that mechanism, but you have to intentionally focus on them. It would take a huge amount of training and effort to make the labeling a habitual thing, and for it to interfere with your pure experience.

Also, hearing your description of listening to music is rough right now, because I'm studying for two finals right now but all I want to do is put on headphones and listen to music, and not think about quantitative genetics. ARGH.

[enzokrew]

oh Stroop, that's what I did for one of my research methods projects, my other was to ask ppl for cigarettes w/ or w/o offering a quarter and testing whether I got one, and if so did they accept the quarter. That was fun.

[quietgladness]

Hey, how's it going?
Are you talking about Italo Calvino? He's one of my favorite authors after I read Cosmicomics. I just read Hermit In Paris.

And I ended up subbing for Carly today, how's that for a coincidence.

[enzokrew]

yes I'm referring to something he said in If On A Winter's Night A Traveler where a character talks about removing herself from the writing process because she feels it'll ruin the way she experiences books. I also recently finished Cosmicomics (which brings to mind the story "A Sign in Space" where he discusses the relevance of symbols and how they can never fully describe something...probably guided some of my thinking of viewing music from a symbolic standpoint)and I am finishing up the sequel T Zero. Those books have really been getting me to think more analytically about how I think about or describe my experiences.
-Qfwfq