University research in France, published in Learning and Individual Differences, found that students who listened to a one-hour lecture where classical music was played in the background scored significantly higher in a quiz on the lecture when compared to a similar group of students who heard the lecture with no music.
Worried about upcoming exams? Then pay attention to research from Duke Cancer Institute that found classical music can lessen anxiety. Researchers gave men undergoing a stressful biopsy headphones playing Bach concertos and discovered they had no spike in diastolic blood pressure during the procedure and reported significantly less pain.
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But make sure you are listening to classical music, because not all music aids blood pressure, a University of San Diego study found. Scientists there compared changes in blood pressure between individuals listening to classical, jazz or pop music. Those listening to classical had significantly lower systolic blood pressure when compared to those listening to other musical genres or no music at all.
If testing anxiety causes sleepless nights, classical music can help soothe insomnia. A team of researchers at the University of Toronto found that tuning into classical music before bedtime helped people fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. Works by Brahms, Handel, Mozart, Strauss and Bach were effective sleep aids because they use rhythms and tonal patterns that create a meditative mood and slow brainwaves, the study found. (Hint: KUSC makes it easy to access quality classical music all night, every night. Its California Classical All Night program airs from midnight to 5 a.m., seven days a week.)
Elizabethan consort music from the late 16th century, played on viols, was intended to create a pleasant atmosphere at court without demanding attention, Chapman said, and is another good candidate for music to study by.
If testing anxiety causes sleepless nights, classical music can help soothe insomnia. A team of researchers at the University of Toronto found that tuning into classical music before bedtime helped people fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. Works by Brahms, Handel, Mozart, Strauss and Bach were effective sleep aids because they use rhythms and tonal patterns that create a meditative mood and slow brainwaves, the study found.
Go Classical: You may not want to go to a symphony concert, but the soothing sounds of classical orchestra music seem to increase mood and productivity, which makes it great for studying.
Nature Sounds: Like ambient music, the sounds of babbling brooks, birds, wind, and rain are very calming and make great background noise. You can even create your own mix with websites like Noisli.
The research team showed that music engages the areas of the brain involved with paying attention, making predictions and updating the event in memory. Peak brain activity occurred during a short period of silence between musical movements - when seemingly nothing was happening.
Beyond understanding the process of listening to music, their work has far-reaching implications for how human brains sort out events in general. Their findings are published in the Aug. 2 issue of Neuron.
The researchers caught glimpses of the brain in action using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which gives a dynamic image showing which parts of the brain are working during a given activity. The goal of the study was to look at how the brain sorts out events, but the research also revealed that musical techniques used by composers 200 years ago help the brain organize incoming information.
"In a concert setting, for example, different individuals listen to a piece of music with wandering attention, but at the transition point between movements, their attention is arrested," said the paper's senior author Vinod Menon, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurosciences.
The team used music to help study the brain's attempt to make sense of the continual flow of information the real world generates, a process called event segmentation. The brain partitions information into meaningful chunks by extracting information about beginnings, endings and the boundaries between events.
"These transitions between musical movements offer an ideal setting to study the dynamically changing landscape of activity in the brain during this segmentation process," said Devarajan Sridharan, a neurosciences graduate student trained in Indian percussion and first author of the article.
No previous study, to the researchers' knowledge, has directly addressed the question of event segmentation in the act of hearing and, specifically, in music. To explore this area, the team chose pieces of music that contained several movements, which are self-contained sections that break a single work into segments. They chose eight symphonies by the English late-baroque period composer William Boyce (1711-79), because his music has a familiar style but is not widely recognized, and it contains several well-defined transitions between relatively short movements.
The study focused on movement transitions - when the music slows down, is punctuated by a brief silence and begins the next movement. These transitions span a few seconds and are obvious to even a non-musician - an aspect critical to their study, which was limited to participants with no formal music training.
The researchers attempted to mimic the everyday activity of listening to music, while their subjects were lying prone inside the large, noisy chamber of an MRI machine. Ten men and eight women entered the MRI scanner with noise-reducing headphones, with instructions to simply listen passively to the music.
"The study suggests one possible adaptive evolutionary purpose of music," said Jonathan Berger, PhD, associate professor of music and a musician who is another co-author of the study. Music engages the brain over a period of time, he said, and the process of listening to music could be a way that the brain sharpens its ability to anticipate events and sustain attention.
According to the researchers, their findings expand on previous functional brain imaging studies of anticipation, which is at the heart of the musical experience. Even non-musicians are actively engaged, at least subconsciously, in tracking the ongoing development of a musical piece, and forming predictions about what will come next. Typically in music, when something will come next is known, because of the music's underlying pulse or rhythm, but what will occur next is less known, they said.
The results of the study "may put us closer to solving the cocktail party problem - how it is that we are able to follow one conversation in a crowded room of many conversations," said one of the co-authors, Daniel Levitin, PhD, a music psychologist from McGill University who has written a popular book called This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.
I tried to find this study, and the "study" itself does not appear to be on the Internet. It appears to be in conjunction with publicity for a new giant compilation of the works of Bach by Deutsche Grammophon and Decca called Bach 333 (i.e. 333 years since the birth of Bach), which includes 222 CDs from 32 labels, 280 hours of music, two "luxury hardback books," etc.
While this is interesting and may point to some trends, I find it a pretty big leap, to draw such conclusions based on three recordings. At best, the process seems vulnerable to the specific selection of certain artists who play at certain tempos, to prove a point. Of course, one has to keep in mind that, when it comes to Bach, the entire Historically-Informed Performance movement has influenced how the music is performed, and the style of that movement often is lighter and faster (implying that it was also faster in the day of Bach). If you've had a chance to play with a Baroque bow, it's a little like having a Ferrari. You just can't help but step on the gas and play faster!
Below are the tracks that have been cited as "proof" that classical music is speeding up, in recent stories. And below that, I had a little fun of my own. Enjoy! And if you are inspired, you can submit any of your own examples in the comments!
Below are a few more examples that I compiled, from recordings of Bach's Sonata No. 1 in G minor for solo violin. Looking at these, you might conclude that classical music has slowed up in the last 50 years. Then one could create another list, "proving" the exact opposite.
October 31, 2018 at 12:12 AMĀ Generally speaking, it is my understanding that Baroque music was likely played faster when it was written. Later, when vibrato become a widely adopted technique, the vibrato tended to slow tempos down. Then in the later part of the 20th century when Baroque performance practices became better known, tempos of Baroque pieces often returned to the faster end of the spectrum - depending on the performer's preference.
October 31, 2018 at 08:36 PMĀ I tell my students that what is printed on the page is called music but it is only the instructions - the music is found in you, the musician. The idea that there is one-right way to play any music is almost laughable. As Pearlman quoted DeLay: "Sugarplum, play it again, differently but great." Why not play printed music faster or slower just to see how it sounds - not to the critic but to you, the musician - after all the real music is to be found inside you communicating what you think and feel about the music that is printed on the page.
October 31, 2018 at 11:38 PMĀ One of my violin teachers in high school commented a couple of times that Italian recordings of baroque music was about twice as fast as Americans played it. And, since we don't have actual recordings from that era, I guess we'll probably never really know how fast music was played. The only time this ever became an issue for me, was when I was a professional dancer. A conductor who plays your variation at double speed makes your life hell, trust! 0852c4b9a8
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