Posts Tagged ‘direction’
Research: Jazz and the Brain
Posted in Music
Jazz Improvisation Transports the Human Brain to a Different Realtiy
New research by John Hopkins University and National Institute of Health scientists found that the brains of improvising jazz musicians operate in a fundamentally different way than those of musicians playing a memorized, composed melody. .
The study was under the direction of Charles Limb, a hearing specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital and teacher at the University, lecturer on the neuroscience of music and music perception at Peabody Conservatory of Music, is also a jazz saxophonist.
Jazz and the Brain Research Methods
Designing effective equipment for watching the brain at work is difficult. Limb and Allen Braun, who co-authored the paper published in the journal PLoS One, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look into their subject brains. The device emits a strong magnetic field, which creates images based on the movement of blood through the brain. Interpreting the images is based on the idea that blood flows in larger amounts to active areas of the brain.
A Jazz Instrument that would Work inside a Scanner
The researchers created a keyboard with no magnetic parts that could be linked to a computer outside the scanner. It plays like a piano, but when someone presses a key, it actually sends a signal to a computer, which then sends a sound sample from a real piano into a set of headphones worn by the musician in the scanner. Read the rest of this entry »
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Jazz: Swingle Singers
Posted in Music
Classical Music as Vocal Performance
Singing concertos, symphonies, and other instrumental music might seem at first like a gimmick, but this vocal ensemble provides both an enjoyable and light-hearted approach to old standards in the classical music repertoire. In fact, the unusual “instrumentation” causes the listener to pick out nuances that familiarity with the works may have downplayed before.
Imitating instruments with the voices is certainly not a new thing: when the American Federation of Musicians went on strike in 1942-1944, singers (and other “non-musicians”) were recruited to fill in the gap. From imitating instruments to providing vocal back-up, singers enabled record producers to keep turning out more music. Quite possibly this switch to instrumental imitation was aided by the earlier development of scat singing, a technique of wordless singing made famous by jazz musician Louis Armstrong. In classical music, wordless vocals emphasize long vowel sounds, but in scat singing, the syllables are full of soft consonants (such as “b” and “d”), imitating the up-tempo rhythms and slightly percussive timbre of the jazz band. Read the rest of this entry »
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