popular rhythms
Fifty shades of the dark middle ages
No, to be honest, the title is a bit tricky: we will give not fifty examples, but much less, but – nevertheless. The middle ages have always attracted musicians – including those whose idea of the middle ages is quite far from reality. But, perhaps, just because of this “medieval music”, including its dark hypostasis, boasts a considerable variety of shades.
It’s funny, but the term “medieval music” is not quite accurate: most often it means either folk, that is, the performance of folk music and the composition of their songs “in the same spirit”, or something like lute music of the Renaissance. The real “medieval music” sounds completely different – it is, for example, Gregorian chants. Continue reading
Mozart effect (part 2)
To test their assumptions Rauscher put a special experiment on rats, which is obviously not an emotional reaction to the music. A group of 30 rats was placed in a room where Mozart’s Sonata in C major sounded for more than two months for 12 hours in a row.
It turned out that after that the rats ran the maze on average 27 percent faster and with 37 percent fewer errors than the other 80 rats that developed among random noise or in silence. According to Rausher, this experiment confirms the neurological rather than emotional nature of the Mozart effect. Continue reading
