Jazz your Lifes

Posts Tagged ‘Machine’

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 »

When jazz musicians finally connected with sound recording studios in a big way during the 1920s, jazz was quickly carried beyond clubs and ballrooms and into America’s living rooms. Jazz’s most creative players soon relied upon 78-rpm (revolutions per minute) records to document each new development in their style – preserving each new piece of music, making it available to music fans in the United States, and even overseas.
Heavily reliant upon improvisation, jazz could never be effectively captured or passed around via sheet music. But with the advent of records, the new music spread quickly as musicians heard what their peers elsewhere were playing.
So who made the first jazz recording? While African American musicians such as Buddy Bolden, Sidney Bechet, and King Oliver laid the groundwork, the all – white Original Dixieland Jass Band (ODJB), made the first jazz record. The group formed in New Orleans, and after a stint in Chicago, opened at a popular restaurant in New York in 1916. Their performances in New York had an immediate effect on the music scene, so the Victor Talking Machine Company seized on their popularity and recorded the band in early 1917. Read the rest of this entry »