Music Is Not for Insects

If you have been watching “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” you may have seen his Twitter Tracker sketch…

While it’s easy to poke fun at Twitter and the mindless tweets that are floating in the twittersphere, I was able to make some cool music connections with neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin on Twitter last week that were fun and surprising while I was watching “The Music Instinct: Science and Song“…

HOW DO YOU HAVE TIME TO TWEET?
I usually don’t have any time during the school year to Twitter, but last week I downloaded a new Twitter client for my Mac and iPod Touch called Tweetdeck. It’s easy to customize and create columns in Tweetdeck to organize your tweets at a glance:

So you can have a column with all the messages of people you follow; another called “Mentions” that only shows @messages to you; and “Direct Messages” that only you can read (Don’t know how Twitter works? Check out Twitter in Plain English)

“HEY THAT GUY ON T.V. IS TWITTERING ME RIGHT NOW!”

So with my laptop in hand and Tweetdeck up and running, I start Twittering while I’m watching the much anticipated PBS documentary “The Music Instinct: Science and Song” on my new television. I happen to tweet “Watching the music instinct science and sound on pbs remarkable show” with no intention of anyone responding, when about 3 minutes later I receive the following Tweet:

Did you see who the message was from? danlevitin is Daniel J. Levitin, the guy who is co-hosting the show I’m watching right at that very moment! I exclaim to my wife, pointing wildly at the television “Hey! That guy  there on t.v. is twittering me right now!” I was embarrassingly giddy.

LET THE CONNECTIONS BEGIN

So now I can send a message directly to Dr. Levitin as I’m watching this show. Not only that, but I can see others who are interested in this fascinating show (with excellent lesson plan resources for music educators) and interact with them as well. As part of the live Q & A mentioned in the tweet, Twitter allows you to create what’s called a #Hashtag. As myself and others were twittering, Levitin designated the hashtag #musicinstinct for anyone who was Twittering about the show. Any tweets with #musicinstinct in the message can now be searched and filtered in the Twitterverse. (This is a great idea if you end up Twittering about a specific topic with several different people.)

TIME WELL SPENT?

Considering I had access to Dr. Daniel J. Levitin and met some fellow music educator’s with similar interests, I think my time on Twitter was well spent. In fact, I’ll be Twittering about this blog post soon…

When we double or halve a frequency, we end up with a note that sounds remarkably similar to the one we started out with. This relationship, a frequency ratio of 2:1 or 1:2, is called the octave. It is so important that, in spite of the large differences that exist between musical cultures- between Indian, Balinese, European, Middle Eastern, Chinese, and so on- every culture we know of has the octave as the basis for its music, even if little else in common with other musical traditions.

p. 31 from the book This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin

Since today was a Veteran’s Day Holiday, I heard a re-broadcast of a story on NPR about this book: This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin.

The web-site for the book has some fun interactive features including mp3s of the songs mentioned in the text.

I’ve just started the book, but here are some of my favorite quotes from the introduction:

Nowadays there is a great emphasis on technique and whether a musician is “good enough” to play for others. Music making has become a somewhat reserved activity in our culture, the rest of us listen.

Music listening, performance, and composition engage nearly every area of the brain that we have so far identified, and involve nearly every neural subsystem.

It’s a shame that many people are intimidated by the jargon musicians, music theorists, and cognitive scientists throw around…in the case of music, music experts and scientists could do a better job of making their work accessible. That is something I tried to accomplish in this book. The unnatural gap that has grown between musical performance and music listening has been paralleled by a gap between those who love music (and love to talk about it) and those who are discovering new things about how it works.

Preach it!!