black holes and gray matter. in one thousand tangos.

             

“Music moves people of all cultures, in a way that doesn’t seem to happen with other animals. Nobody really understands why listening to music — which, unlike sex or food, has no intrinsic value — can trigger such profoundly rewarding experiences. Salimpoor and other neuroscientists are trying to figure it out with the help of brain scanners.

Yesterday, for example, researchers from Stanford reported that when listening to a new piece of classical music, different people show the same patterns of synchronized activity in several brain areas, suggesting some level of universal experience. But obviously no one’s experience is exactly the same. In today’s issue of Science, Salimpoor’s group reports that when you listen to a song for the first time, the strength of certain neural connections can predict how much you like the music, and that these preferences are guided by what you’ve heard and enjoyed in the past. […]

A few years ago, Salimpoor and Zatorre performed another type of brain scanning experiment in which participants listened to music that gave them goosebumps or chills. The researchers then injected them with a radioactive tracer that binds to the receptors of dopamine, a chemical that’s involved in motivation and reward. With this technique, called positron emission tomography or PET, the researchers showed that 15 minutes after participants listened to their favorite song, their brains flooded with dopamine.

The dopamine system is old, evolutionarily speaking, and is active in many animals during sex and eating. ‘But animals don’t get intense pleasures to music,’ Salimpoor says. ‘So we knew there had to be a lot more to it.’”

Why Does Music Feel So Good

“No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.”

Vonnegut

I hate to break it to you, Kurt, but that’s no longer the case.

“It’s time we stopped disavowing happiness and measured pride, we punk survivors, wrapping ourselves in itchy thrift-store horse blankets thinking that only discomfort is honest. It’s time we stopped hating ourselves, our ambition, and our sincerity, guarding our integrity credentials in fear of interrogation by the secret punk police. It’s time to unmask punk rock, admit that it has done us no favors, and banish it from our minds. There is no one waiting for us at the gates of heaven with a big book of punk, ready to judge our souls and validate our credibility. Punk rock is bullshit, and was always bullshit. Say it with me.”
Punk Rock is Bullshit

“Beyonce’s rump shaking and knee knocking may trigger a noticeable libidinal response in many, and strike fear in the parental hearts of some. In its Super Bowl edition, it also nicely honored the host town, home of the spectacularly bootylicious bounce music scene. But it’s neither merely instinctive nor an example of video girl-era exhibitionism.

In fact, the shimmy, the Black Bottom, the Quiver and the Funky Butt — the building blocks of what Beyonce does so well — were popular at the turn of the 20th century, and themselves are rooted in the traditions slaves kept alive beyond the Middle Passage. All rock-and-soul era dancing stems from this stuff, of course; but as her Super Bowl routine so memorably demonstrated, Beyonce gets the connection like nobody else. She invokes the madcap, revolutionary spirit of the first great generation of African-American female stars of vaudeville and the cabaret: women like Josephine Baker and Ethel Waters, who once attributed her early success to her “completely mobile hips.”

As a prime mover in the hip-hop era, Beyonce connects these fundamentals to today’s street dances and stepping competitions. But she is easily as interested in how greats from Michael Jackson to Lena Horne absorbed and transformed those vernacular moves. Something similar happens in her sound, which often works like African-Americana, incorporating marching bands, the Aretha of Sparkle and “I Say a Little Prayer,” and the sassy harmonies of the swing era alongside more contemporary beats and studio tricks. Last night, when Destiny’s Child harmonized on their famous line, “I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly” — a lyric that invokes both the sensuality of classic blues and the loose-limbed sound of early jazz — it all suddenly made sense: Beyonce, the showbiz kid, has worked her whole life for this moment, where she can fully represent an entertainment lineage that inevitably leads to her.”

The Roots of Beyonce’s Super Bowl Spectacular | NPR

“A decade after Apple revolutionized the music world with its iTunes store, the music industry is undergoing another, even more radical, digital transformation as listeners begin to move from CDs and downloads to streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and YouTube.

As purveyors of legally licensed music, they have been largely welcomed by an industry still buffeted by piracy. But as the companies behind these digital services swell into multibillion-dollar enterprises, the relative trickle of money that has made its way to artists is causing anxiety at every level of the business.

Late last year, Zoe Keating, an independent musician from Northern California, provided an unusually detailed case in point. In voluminous spreadsheets posted to her Tumblr blog, she revealed the royalties she gets from various services, down to the ten-thousandth of a cent.

Even for an under-the-radar artist like Ms. Keating, who describes her style as “avant cello,” the numbers painted a stark picture of what it is like to be a working musician these days. After her songs had been played more than 1.5 million times on Pandora over six months, she earned $1,652.74. On Spotify, 131,000 plays last year netted just $547.71, or an average of 0.42 cent a play. […]

Spotify, Pandora and others like them pay fractions of a cent to record companies and publishers each time a song is played, some portion of which goes to performers and songwriters as royalties. Unlike the royalties from a sale, these payments accrue every time a listener clicks on a song, year after year.

The question dogging the music industry is whether these micropayments can add up to anything substantial. […]

In a recent interview, Sean Parker, a board member, said he believed Spotify would eventually attract enough subscribers to help return the music industry to its former glory — that is, to the days before Mr. Parker’s first major enterprise, Napster, came along.

“I believe that Spotify is the company that will make it succeed,” said Mr. Parker, who is also a former president of Facebook. “It’s the right model if you want to build the pot of money back up to where it was in the late ’90s, when the industry was at its peak. This is the only model that’s going to get you there.””

Streaming Shakes Up Music Industry’s Model for Royalties

©2011 Kateoplis