Jazz your Lifes

Posts Tagged ‘human’

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 »

What Makes Jazz, Jazz? Defining the Jazz Genre of Music
Also known as, “America’s classical music” characteristics of jazz include the following:
• Strong beats or rhythms (often syncopated);
• Sad tones or blue notes;
• A swing element (playing of triplets);
• A call and response element (a musical phrase is echoed by different instruments or human voice);
• Frequent use of syncopation;
• Unique, individualized style of the musicians; and,
• Major emphasis upon spontaneous improvisation (using the harmonies of a composition then creating a spontaneous melody line).
History of Jazz
Where the actual name of jazz came from is anyone’s guess.
But first, work and misery produced the call and response element known to jazz from the plantation fields of southern American slavery. A leader during a work regime might call out a melodic line to be answered by the workers.
Additionally, the African-American spiritual was another root to the jazz genre. The drudgery of the plantation fields and all of the misery experienced by a people once considered less than human was captured in these musical pieces. Thus, these two elements began the foundation that jazz was built upon. Read the rest of this entry »