Rock Music: Are We Witnessing Its Demise ?

During the past few years how often have, we heard about the demise of Rock Music?  At the moment it may be in a temporary state of hibernation but eventually, it will rise again from this dormant slumber and those 'gentle'  electric guitar riffs will be heard once again.  An interesting article by Jason Axelrod  titled  " Debating the death of rock music" explores this further:

"If you take a glance at music history over the past 50 years, you’ll notice rock bands used to dominate the pop charts. At one time, even in the recent past, rock was synonymous with popular music."  Read More

Related articles

• The Timeless of Rock Music (the-music-digest.blogspot.com)
• Alltopics.com Offers Hottest News on Rock Music (prweb.com)

The Benefits That Music Can Bring You

Music has the ability to tap those hidden resources that lie in each of us and help us cope with those challenges that life often throw at us from time to time.   Siobhan Faith explores in her article  'The Healing Benefits of Music' the link between music and healing.

"Music can also be a great source of healing. It can calm and soothe, rejuvenate, energize, relax, inspire and restore. Music can have an amazing transformative effect in harmonizing our body systems. In fact, studies have shown that using music with the intention of healing has brought about positive effects on the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems." MORE

Various Affects of Music On The Brain

Via Scoop.it - the psychology of music

"Brain functioning, moods of an individual, emotions and behaviors have great connection with music. All of them can be altered, changed and improvised according to the requirements and perceptions with the assistance of ... "Via health.ezinemark.com

The Sounds of Colour: A look at Synaesthesia in Relation to Music and Colour

Let us begin this article by asking the question what is 'synaesthesia'? Well synaesthesia can be described as people having 'hallucinations'. A hallucination roughly speaking is usually an error of the brain in its interpretation of the mass of sense-data, which our senses send to the brain.  The the most common example of this is the falling sensation, this is when a person thinks they are physically falling when they are on the verge of falling to asleep.

The most typical of these synaesthesia experiences is probably in relation between music and colour. This is when a person sees colour when he or she hears music, this is often known as  as 'colour hearing'.  This particular experience has been known since antiquity.

A number composers have actually been fascinated by this concept of 'colour hearing'. They have included Sir Arthur Bliss, whose composition 'The Colour Symphony', offers a vivid recollection about his own personal colour perceptions that may have passed through his mind and imagination while he was composing this symphony.  Each and every one of the titles of the movements is in fact a colour. 'The 'First Movement': Purple the Colour of Amethysts, Pageantry, Royalty and Death. The 'Second Movement': Red the Colour of Rubies, Wine, Revelry, Furnaces, Courage and Magic. 'The 'Third Movement' : Blue the Colour of Sapphires, Deep Water, Skies, Loyalty and Melancholy. The 'The 'Fourth Movement': Green the Colour of Emeralds, Hope, Joy, Youth, Spring and Victory.

For other composers musical keys seemed to have held a great deal of interest.  Beethoven for instance is known to have referred to the B minor key as a black key.  If one accepts black as being a symbol associated with death together with suffering and many other darker emotions, Beethoven must have thought of this key as gloomy and sad.  This music however is not as  nearly as so dark, tragic and heartbreaking as when the key of B minor was used by J.S. Bach in his own compositions. The music which flowed from this genius mind in the B minor key is some of the most despairing, desolating and painful music within that key.

The Russian composers Rimsky-Korsakov and  Scriabin  both developed strong associations  between particular musical keys and colours though each interpreted these associations in their own way. Though generally there are disagreements  among composers on what colours relate to what musical keys, these differences are fundamentally unimportant compare to whether these types of relationships and connections exist any way.

Different parts of the orchestra have even being given colours, black for instance has been given for strings and voices, red for brass and drums, blue for wood. It has even been suggested that to help to make orchestral scores easier to read, the above colours ought to be used in the printing of the staves committed to the different families of musical instruments.  Associations have also  been made between timbre and colour such as cello - indigo blue,  human voice - green,  trumpet - red, bassoon – violet and so forth.

So  irrespective whether or not an individual person has actually have has personal knowledge of “colour hearing” for themselves, there do exist  people for which the synaesthesia experience connecting music and colour is a very real experience and not simply an 'hallucination'.

Can Listening To Music Make You A Happier Person ?

Are we a happier person after listening to music ?  Well there have been various studies over the years trying to answer this question .   Here is an article which expounds on the subject further.

"Music & Emotions: Can Music Really Make You a Happier Person?  Music affects us all. But only in recent times have scientists sought to explain and quantify the way music impacts us at an emotional level. Researching the links between melody and the mind indicates that listening to and playing music actually can alter how our brains, and therefore our bodies, function".   MORE

Choosing The Right Genre Of Music

When deciding on what music to listen to it is important to choose the right genre of music for the mood you are in at the time.

" Research has proven that music could be a major mood lifter particularly when one is undergoing tough times. At least every person encounters a downhill in life and during such times, music would probably be the best thing to address such situations else one would find it extremely tough to cope. " MORE

A Musical Synesthesia Experience

Maurice Ravel - "Daphnis et Chloë - Suite No.2" ('Daybreak')

This is a great example of French impressionist music. The synesthesia experiences this piece of music evokes in me is that of a sound picture in where waves from the sea are lapping to the shore while I watch a summer sunrise and experiencing the first breezes of the morning across my face.

It occasionally happens that a great work is better known by excerpts. Such has been the fate of Maurice Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe every since its creation. While occasionally performed as a ballet, it is usually heard in concert, represented by its final three numbers: "Lever du jour" (Daybreak), "Pantomime" and "Danse generale." Ravel himself designated these excerpts as Suite No. 2 after the score's completion in 1912.  MORE