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Radio “hits” deliver long term brain damage

CHICAGO

Fri Nov 12, 2010 8:09am EDT

(Reuters)

HEALTH

Researchers at the University of Nijmegen report today that sustained exposure to certain musical structures through headphones may, in as few as five years, shrink soft cartilaginous tissues of the outer ear and weaken craniofacial nerves. For 3% of test subjects, the effect is accompanied by slight deformation of the sinus cavity and neurasthenia within the prefrontal cortex.

Scientists believe the condition correlates significantly to a documented rise in musical homogeneity since 1985, an effect sociologists have attributed to the inability of audiences to dislodge aesthetic taste from narrow and repetitive conventions of popular music. The study has been funded as part of renewed efforts to investigate the role of socio-economic, cultural, and even aesthetic factors in human epigenetics. The multidisciplinary research team at the University of Nijmegen includes political scientists, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists. In their report, the team describes lax enforcement against payola radio; a statistical analysis of radio playlists reveal that a handful of songs on heaviest rotation have not changed in more than forty years.

The tendency to cling to outdated artistic forms as evidenced by the persistence of “hit music” in popular culture since 1965 is what led the Nijmegen researchers to investigate the possibility of attendant physical effects. “We found a significant neurasthenic effect. Apparently, listening to Hotel California three thousand times doesn’t just suck, it can actually cave-in the head and debilitate the prefrontal cortex.” Martin Ledwick, head nurse on the research team, said in a statement. “Think of it as an injury, a kind of plantar fasciitis, the equivalent of shin splints caused by traipsing endlessly over one musical terrain.”

Dr. Emil DeMaris, professor of Psychoacoustics, presented the group’s findings at a conference in Rotterdam. “Our species is perhaps poorly described as Homo Sapiens. We are in many ways a herd species, led astray by a willingness to conform to social stability so long as basic needs of food, shelter and clothing have been met. This social behavioral fact makes human beings particularly susceptible to the numbing effects of cultural homogeneity. The danger to humans is no different than domesticating other species; a herd of wild caribou survives in the shifting environment of arctic tundra, but slowly perishes in the stultifying terrarium environment, a Habi-trail, either for caribou or humans is a tool of genocide. We have been dangerously slow to detect the equivalent tools wielded in corporate advertising culture today.”

By focusing on contemporary art and popular music, DeMaris said his team sought to improve on “the myopia of the microscope” which passes for scientific method today. “The assumption that humans are ruled by logic, long discredited in economics and political science, persists today as the facile foundation of too many scientific disciplines.” The report, to be published in the Journal of Psychoacoustics, concludes that human faculties of reason and perception are engaged most fully by experiences that are unnerving, confounding, and even terrifying.

Pressed by reporters to explain whether and how science should arbitrate aesthetic and cultural tastes, DeMaris explained that his team took an “anything but Top 40” approach and had found many contemporary artists actively developing radically new aesthetics. Study participants introduced to recordings from a new musical group called Nerfbau showed high brain function in the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for fight or flight responses which are known to heighten acuity of perception. The researchers also cite facial expressions of anguish, horror, surprise, and amazement as responsible for the attendant strengthening of craniofacial nerves rooted to the outer ear. Such phenomena were present in fewer than .01% of control subjects who were more likely to exhibit slack facial expressions when exposed to music from the VH1 Classics playlist. Members of the band Nerfbau were contacted for comment via their record label, Resipiscent. Responding by phone and only through voice masking software, one band member was quoted as saying, “Blood builds your smiles from loose screams.”

© Thomson Reuters 2010 All rights reversed

Resipiscent Q&A

[Heule] Resipiscent focuses on Bay Area musicians, but has also released albums by artists from around the nation. There seems to be a unifying element of playfulness, looseness, humor, invention, and experimentation in the Resipiscent catalog that seems particularly strong on the West Coast, if not in the Bay Area itself. Do you see the Bay Area as a special place for this sort of music, or is it thriving in obscurity everywhere?

[decker] We’ve released internationalists in Masonic Youth, and talking with Freeka Peeka and Company Fuck among others but hard to jumpstart from afar.

There does seem to be a connection between playfulness and obscurity, the kind of play that experiments and discovers doesn’t have time or energy for popularity or acceptance. Often, it’s those who gave up on social acceptance (not hindsight claims of being maverick, but actually gave up) who came to dwell in experimentation as play. Contrast that to retro and pop bands that want to entertain and be super uncool, they forms tons of new bands that quickly dissipate into clothes fashion, that long popular recess of irrelevance on the “upper playground.” Artists of obscure music would love to be cool, but they aren’t. Obscure music attracts audiences with terrible social skills, awkward human beings paralyzed by the high stakes of starting a conversation. That kind of community draws artists whose own ideas are a real threat to themselves, they may produce horrible results which fascinate audiences but also may both audience and artist alike by catching a current of totally unique potential. Either way, you can’t afford to miss it.

The artists we put out have to be heard live since experimentation is so much about time, accident and the manifold rifts between thought and action; but recordings are an important secondary point of reference, an idealized space where you get to hear what musicians achieve in an environment of artificial time. Recordings are also essential for audiences to acclimate to unorthodox sounds and non-repeating compositions. Once people do acclimate, few can go back to repetitive conventional self aggrandizing music, so caveat emptor.

[Heule] Modular synthesis is all over the Resipiscent catalog, notably on the new Serge compilation, and Loachfillet's new album. Of course Don Buchla invented this instrument here in the early 60s, in collaboration with Morton Subotnick and the SF Tape Music Center. Serge itself was eventually based in the Bay Area. And Mills College has for years been training an army of modular synthesists. Do you see the Bay Area's rich history and leadership in experimental electronic music as a direct influence on the musicians released by Resipiscent?

[decker] Absolutely! Unlike so many bay area cultural institutions helicoptered in as the requisite establishments of a big city (e.g. SFMOMA, ACT, sfOpera, etc), the street-level advent of electronic music in San Francisco proved beyond doubt what a willingness to shed conventional methods, materials and aesthetics can yield. Maybe not the great shopping mall of Haight & Ashbury, but when the SF Tape Music Center found a home at Mills it established music as the most vital art of experimentation in the bay area, challenging composers, musicians and audiences alike to forge new sensibilities. That in and of itself is distinct from entertainment that measures success by prestige whether top40 or fetishist classical anachronisms (both of which substitute formal repetition for composition.)

When Buchla, Subotnick , Oliveros, et al. disabused us of the idea that there are rules or limits to what materials, modes and aesthetic norms are possible, they accomplish something tantamount to inventing the cello, or drum! Yet monied patrons insist on dressing up as Nelson Rockefeller for yet another rendition of Mahler and refuse to even hear local contemporaries, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick much less Hans Grusel, sfSound, or Anti-Ear. SF Symphony’s American Mavericks effort was apparently a one-time-only nod. MTT knows where his bread gets buttered and he’s keeping that Barry Manilow golden retriever look well-honed for the long haul.

Rather than assail 18th century music fans, better to praise the SF Tape Music Center and Buchla who fundamentally changed how audiences worldwide hear sound and conceive of music. Along with a new texture, pitch, and tempo (not to mention the stacks of circuitry with patch cables pouring out that forged new visual associations for sound) musicians on older instruments gained license to play extended technique, microtonal, harmolodic, disassembled and bent instruments, though certainly Partch and others didnt wait on that license.

Many of the artists on Resipiscent came out of Mills’ world-class program, but it’s the ability of those composers and musicians to collaborate with and be influenced by emerging self-taught artists (who spent those same years outside any academy) that’s most unique. That collision is what makes bay area experimental music as unpredictable and rich as it is. That sensibility seems to arise from the street-level origins of the SF Tape Music Center, invention and performance joined there to forge a playfulness that proved resistant to dissipation as clothes fashion.

A curriculum for abstract reasoning

Could abstract thinking become a subject in early and secondary education? Osmosis via myth/religion/fiction is the usual way, attempts to make it explicit are typically horrendous, conflating idiom with metaphor and so on. The tyranny of literal thought. My nephew brought home a worksheet that asked him to create similes, remove "like" and call them metaphors! As for grown ups, it's either lumped into "creativity" or, with Wikipedia's definition of inductive reasoning as one example, confined to...

1. Generalization and syllogism
2. Analogy
3. Simple induction
4. Causal inference
5. Guessing

...paying no attention to when or how metaphor is useful, unique, and essential. As Will Durant notes, Aristotle mis-characterized the human psyche as deductive rather than inductive. Yet, secular discourse keeps itself to the Logic=Reason fallacy. Even as machines perform logic, the least of our reasoning faculties, more reliably and efficiently than humans can, we continue to undervalue every quality other than quantity.

In education, the ability to apply something learning in one context to a new and unfamiliar context is termed "bridging". That an important idea, but I'm talking about the deep roots of bridging, the ability to forge an insight, not "creativity" as scrap-booking Aristotelian "nothing's new, only recombined" sense but in the Entelechy, Hegelian negativity, sense. The difference is huge. Shakespeare and Chaucer weren't coming up with catchy ad phrases and they're metaphors became idioms only after they were absorbed and subsumed by the usefulness of their function in communication and expression.

How would we go about teaching Induction, Abstraction, and Metaphorical Reasoning?

In addition to clear acknowledgment limits (namely, the ease of its abuse and the enormity of its persuasive power as evident in fundamentalism), teaching inductive, abstract, metaphorical reasoning would require two things:

• Defining the power of induction as a result of its being unbound from the usual (western) goals of consensus-building or objectivity. Weak forces.
• Identifying contexts where only abstraction will do (i.e. broad theoretical concepts, edges of understanding, the places where art thrives and most science throws up its hands)

As one example:

Parallel universes are like integers, each having its own particular infinite range of fractions. But in physics, the fractions would be temporal (Whatever time may be. Flux.)

Abstractly conceiving of space as an integer enables us to reverse the idea. If entanglement is a property of split spatiotemporal dimensions we can think of fractions as dimensional entanglements as well. Pi, prime numbers, etc.

So, parallel universes would not be the same idea as Bohr's or Schroedingers who seem (not having read either) to contemplate change of state (potential to kinetic) rather than a blossoming of temporal (maybe not even spatial!) dimensions.

In either the case of integers or photons, running fwd and back along a causal spatial temporal line would be the direction/mode that's most precisely un-entangled, interdimensional, and most interesting. That was always my hunch as a kid: that 2+2 just equals more 2. Prigogene's indeterminacy when I learned about it, felt like "ha, I knew it."

I've had some thoughts about global education curriculum too. Standards grounded/organized around principles that tip from one disciplinary domain into others. They'll read like platitudes but "getting" cliches is what a lot of novice learning is actually about. Laying traps, so they're proud when they catch their own ankles. Good training indeed for a life of "grab yer ankles"

Let's try to jot down some spastic truisms or hell, have a kid and they'll probly start to pour out. The notion is to articulate some milestone concepts for a global curriculum that needs to cross boundaries such as faith/reason but also form/content, subjective/objective, and space/time (aka here/now). That's where abstraction outperforms literal thinking.

"To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both‹a philosopher."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

What was religion to the Greek philosophers?

• Aristotle- born of wonder, it finds xpression in myth
• Epicureans- born of fear and ignorance, it seeks protection
• Euhemerists- born of heroism, it is cultural memory
• Stoics- born of some universal, transcultural spermatikos logos

But Xtians see these replies as pagan (or even jewish) ritualism and narcissism. Protestants see the "whore of babylon" perpetuating these pagan tendencies.

..external link..

Except that it focuses exclusively on money motives and business management, Edward de Bono's "thinking hats" is an interesting example of a curriculum for modes of reasoning..

http://blog.iqmatrix.com/mind-map/edward-de-bono-6-thinking-hats-mind-map