Human Hearing and the Reality of Music

Author: Armin J. Husemann
Publisher: Steiner Books
ISBN: 9781621480204
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Book Description
Dr. Husemann shows how hearing is a sensory activity that encompasses far more than processes in the ear and brain, and that the whole body is involved. He also discusses the relationship between music and chemistry. Music is "chemistry from the inside." And finally, from 1915 to 1918, Rudolf Steiner developed a physiology of artistic imagination based on the movement of the cerebrospinal fluid during respiration.

Human Hearing and the Reality of Music

Author: Armin J. Husemann
Publisher: Steiner Books
ISBN: 9781621480488
Category : Anthroposophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Music is not simply something we hear. We experience it and love it; it is a primal human need. If, as the pianist Alfred Brendel put it, we are able to "take music at its word," we confront questions that also moved the author since his adolescent years: What takes hold of me when I experience music? What reality touches me when music is playing? What happens physiologically in the human body when we experience and make music? The author approaches these questions from three perspectives: first, from his personal experience and active love of music; second, from the physiological perspective; and third, from Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science. Dr. Husemann (author of Form, Life, and Consciousness An Introduction to Anthroposophic Medicine and Study of the Human Being)shows how hearing is a sensory activity that encompasses far more than processes in the ear and brain, and that the whole body is involved. He also discusses the relationship between music and chemistry. Music is "chemistry from the inside." And finally, from 1915 to 1918, Rudolf Steiner developed a physiology of artistic imagination based on the movement of the cerebrospinal fluid during respiration. Human Hearing and the Reality of Music is the first attempt to relate Steiner's spiritual research to the findings of natural scientific research in this area.

MP3

Author: Jonathan Sterne
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822352877
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Book Description
Jonathan Sterne shows that understanding the historical meaning of the MP3, the world's most common format for recorded audio, involves rethinking the place of digital technologies in the broader universe of twentieth-century communication history.

Musicophilia

Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307373495
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Book Description
What goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music? What is it about music, what gives it such peculiar power over us, power delectable and beneficent for the most part, but also capable of uncontrollable and sometimes destructive force? Music has no concepts, it lacks images; it has no power of representation, it has no relation to the world. And yet it is evident in all of us–we tap our feet, we keep time, hum, sing, conduct music, mirror the melodic contours and feelings of what we hear in our movements and expressions. In this book, Oliver Sacks explores the power music wields over us–a power that sometimes we control and at other times don’t. He explores, in his inimitable fashion, how it can provide access to otherwise unreachable emotional states, how it can revivify neurological avenues that have been frozen, evoke memories of earlier, lost events or states or bring those with neurological disorders back to a time when the world was much richer. This is a book that explores, like no other, the myriad dimensions of our experience of and with music.

Reminded by the Instruments

Author: You Nakai
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190686766
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 769

Book Description
David Tudor is remembered today as an extraordinary pianist of post-war avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and as a founding figure of live-electronic music. His bold reinterpretation of Cage's Variations II and his idiosyncratic performances using homemade modular instruments inspired a whole generation of musicians. But his reticence, his unorthodox approaches, and the diversity of his creative output-which began with the organ and ended with visual art-have kept Tudor a puzzle. Reminded by the Instruments sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor by applying Tudor's own methods for approaching the materials of others to the vast archive of materials that he himself left behind. Author You Nakai deftly patches together instruments, electronic circuits, sketches, diagrams, recordings, letters, receipts, customs declaration forms, and testimonies like modular pieces of a giant puzzle to reveal a new perspective on Tudor's creative process. Rejecting the established narrative of Tudor as a performer-turned-composer, this book presents a lively portrait of an artist whose work always merged both of these roles. In reading Tudor's electronic devices as musicological 'texts' and examining his dissection of electronic circuits, Nakai transcends discourses on sound and illuminates our understanding of the instruments behind the sounds in post-war experimental music.

Ways of Hearing

Author: Scott Burnham
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691204470
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
An outstanding anthology in which notable musicians, artists, scientists, thinkers, poets, and more--from Gustavo Dudamel and Carrie Mae Weems to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Paul Muldoon--explore the influence of music on their lives and work

A History of Performing Pitch

Author: Bruce Haynes
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810841851
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 628

Book Description
Haynes (U. of Montreal) traces the history of musical pitch standards over the last four centuries, linking frequency values to pitch names and telling where, when, and why various pitch levels have been used. With a focus on Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the Hapsburg lands, he covers the pitches of about 1,400 historical instruments and how the design and function influenced and were influenced by changes in pitch. In addition, he studies the effect of pitch differences on musical notation and choice of key. The author has also written a book on the oboe, the instrument that plays the "A" to which a symphony orchestra tunes. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This is Your Brain on Music

Author: Daniel Levitin
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241987369
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
From the author of The Changing Mind and The Organized Mind comes a New York Times bestseller that unravels the mystery of our perennial love affair with music ***** 'What do the music of Bach, Depeche Mode and John Cage fundamentally have in common?' Music is an obsession at the heart of human nature, even more fundamental to our species than language. From Mozart to the Beatles, neuroscientist, psychologist and internationally-bestselling author Daniel Levitin reveals the role of music in human evolution, shows how our musical preferences begin to form even before we are born and explains why music can offer such an emotional experience. In This Is Your Brain On Music Levitin offers nothing less than a new way to understand music, and what it can teach us about ourselves. ***** 'Music seems to have an almost wilful, evasive quality, defying simple explanation, so that the more we find out, the more there is to know . . . Daniel Levitin's book is an eloquent and poetic exploration of this paradox' Sting 'You'll never hear music in the same way again' Classic FM magazine 'Music, Levitin argues, is not a decadent modern diversion but something of fundamental importance to the history of human development' Literary Review

The Electronic Doppelganger

Author: Rudolf Steiner
Publisher: Rudolf Steiner Press
ISBN: 185584477X
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 165

Book Description
'Large temptations will emanate from these machine-animals, produced by people themselves, and it will be the task of a spiritual science that explores the cosmos to ensure all these temptations do not exert any damaging influence on human beings.'In an increasingly digitised world, where both work and play are more and more taking place online and via screens, Rudolf Steiner's dramatic statements from 1917 appear prophetic. Speaking of 'intelligent machines' that would appear in the future, Steiner presents a broad context that illustrates the multitude of challenges human beings will face. If humanity and the Earth are to continue to evolve together with the cosmos, and not be cut off from it entirely, we will need to work consciously and spiritually to create a counterweight to such phenomena.In the lectures gathered here, edited with commentary and notes by Andreas Neider, Rudolf Steiner addresses a topic that he was never to speak of again: the secret of the 'geographical' or the 'ahrimanic' doppelganger. The human nervous system houses an entity that does not belong to its constitution, he states. This is an ahrimanic being which enters the body shortly before birth and leaves at death, providing the basis for all electrical currents that are needed to process and coordinate sense perceptions and react to them.Based on his spiritual research, Rudolf Steiner discusses this doppelganger or 'double' in the wider context of historic occult events relating to 'spirits of darkness'. Specific brotherhoods seek to keep such knowledge to themselves in order to exert power and spread materialism. But this knowledge is critical, says Steiner, if the geographical doppelganger and its challenges are to be understood.

The Concept of Music

Author: Robin Maconie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198163886
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
What is music for? How does it work? What can it teach us? Intuitively, we feel there must be answers to such questions, but they tend to be scattered throughout a wide range of different areas of study, from acoustics to music history, from psychology to composition. In this brilliant and thought-provoking book, Maconie seeks the answers to these and other fundamental questions about music, integrating music and appropriate scientific research in a new evaluation of his topic. In so doing, he argues passionately for a reappraisal of music, not as mere entertainment, but as something basic to our experience of listening and communicating in sound, and an art which has exerted a profound influence on society.