Let's talk music, no genre boundaries

@stuartk,

I like a lot of ideas in the youtube you posted. I think there is no question that music affects our emotions and moods. I have no idea what it means to affect our DNA. Although, I think that since I've begun listening to music all morning and early afternoon, I have become more "mellow" and accepting. I don't get stressed out the way I used to.

As for your series of notes, I don't have an instrument to play them and I can't imagine them in my head. Maybe you'll play with them on your guitar? It seems like the Mhiz posted on the youtube were all mid-bass?

As for patterning in general, I did a lot of reading about fractals and complexity a number of years ago. I've also read some interesting books on the evolution of the universe. The British physicist Paul Davies has written about the universe and God. I read a book about the Gaia Theory by James Lovelock many years ago. He talks about the universe and the earth being living beings. Mathematical fractals correspond to the shapes of leaves and other natural occurrences. An artist friend talked to me about some studies that found fractals in Jackson Pollack's art. 

I often wonder what the earliest music must have sounded like. I assume it had a strong beat and the melody from a flute or whatever was less important than it is today. Music is the only art that exists in time, as @mahgister has talked about, and I have a feeling that the beats in time are fundamental to any human music.

@kofibaffour,

Thank you for the list. I'll listen to the ladies later. I've been listening to Robyn as I write this because it's late in the day and I need a kick in the ass. I, too, love the female voice. Maybe I'll post some youtube examples later.

In the beginning there was not speech on one side music on the other. Social interaction must had been motivated by rythms to unite the tribe in a work.

Speech dont exist without body members gestures rythms and without throat/mouth motivated  tonal sound (continuous vowel and discontinuous consonants) and specific body timbre.

In the beginning speech and music are one, and when they separate in the days activities they reunite in the calm of night.

Speech makes music through not only singing but speaking. And music spoke as in the Nigeria the Yoruba they call their drum "talking Drums". Yoruba is the name of a tribe of his language and of his drums.

Also music not only exist in time but exist as time itself, at least a time of his own.

Musical time is a specific musical concept...Musical time cannot be reduced to measurable physical time. It is a qualitative rythmic time linked to the body gestures felt as a rythm.

here from the web a few concepts  about musical time you certainly know:

«Beat: The basic unit of time in music, providing a regular pulse. 

Tempo: The speed of the music, often measured in beats per minute (BPM)

Meter: The grouping of beats into recurring patterns, indicated by time signatures.

Measure (or Bar): A segment of time corresponding to a specific number of beats, separated by bar lines

Time Signature: A notation that indicates the meter, specifying the number of beats per measure and the type of note that receives one beat. 

Rhythm: The arrangement of sounds and silences in time, encompassing note durations, rests, and patterns»

Now these concepts come from written classical music.When i speak about musical time ( Ansermet wrote a huge book about it) i spoke mainly from the phenomenology of felt conscious qualitative  time(a duration said Bergson debating with Einstein) 

In our evolution it was the body improvising gestures that created his own time as a meaningful content to be repeated or commented by others body gestures as a musical and spoken answer in the tribe or in the social group.

I often wonder what the earliest music must have sounded like. I assume it had a strong beat and the melody from a flute or whatever was less important than it is today. Music is the only art that exists in time, as @mahgister has talked about, and I have a feeling that the beats in time are fundamental to any human music.

@mahgister,

All of this musical sophistication couldn't have occurred at once. Certain things must have happened first, then others, then others. Early Homos sapiens probably didn't have a concept of time beyond the sun setting and rising. Phases of the moon, too. This is a total aside, but I wonder what was inherited from the Neanderthals. Apparently they made art and buried their people. 

I don't think Einstein every speculated on how people experience time in relative time frames. It seemed to me that the twin going nearly the speed of light would experience relative time the same as the twin "standing still." A concept that nobody has ever explained to my satisfaction. How can it be that centrifugal force works whether we're on a space ship traveling 60,000 mph relative to the earth or resting on the earth? 

 @kofibaffour ,

Below I will post a youtube of one of my favorite female singers, Tracy Thorne of "Everything but the Girl." In the jazz forum we were talking about Billie Holiday having a limited voice but tremendous depth of emotion. I am not comparing Tracy Thorne with Billy Holiday, exceept she also has a somewhat limited voice with not a lot of range, yet she hits me emotionally as deeply as any other singer. Her husband Ben Watt lays down the background.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAKpK5E09Ys

You dont get what i spoke about it seems...

When you speak are you conscious of the complex mechanisms behind syntax and semantic ? Not at all, we learned it without even knowing what we do...

It is the same for the musical time, which is born from our complex response to society and to Nature from the body members (rythm) and from the throat/mouth (timbre and tonality)...

Then this  "musical sophistication" occurred from the beginning...But it is now that we get this sophistication consciously understood...

Ancient language are not less complex than english... it is the opposite...

 And Einstein concept of time or Newton concept of time has nothing to do with "musical time" not measured by the watch, and if so is being denatured and lost...It must be felt not counted...

@mahgister,

All of this musical sophistication couldn’t have occurred at once. Certain things must have happened first, then others, then others. Early Homos sapiens probably didn’t have a concept of time beyond the sun setting and rising.

@audio-b-dog 

I often wonder what the earliest music must have sounded like. I assume it had a strong beat and the melody from a flute or whatever was less important than it is today

The first nations people of Australia seem to have a continuous culture extending back at least 65,000 years.  Their songlines are a form of oral history documented in dance formations and storytelling.  Remarkably, they include a narrative of the end of the last major ice-age about 12,000 years ago, when sea levels rose by several hundred feet as ice sheets melted.  The shoreline swallowed large tracts of land, and allowed the Great Barrier Reef to form.  In North America the Great Lakes formed at this time from the remnant fresh water from melting glaciers. This period marked the first cultivation of plants by humans.

Most likely the earliest musical instruments go back at least 40,000 years and included two clapsticks beaten together, plus hollowed out tree branches - the didgeridoo. Ants do a good job of hollowing gum tree branches.

Didgeridoo players can breathe continuously into the instrument while 'talking' to create an incredible variety of sounds.  Clapsticks (hundreds of them) and didgeridoo featured in the opening work of the refurbished Sydney Opera House, in "Of the Earth" by Willian Barton. I cannot conceive how music for the didgeridoo can be written down!

Unfortunately archeological evidence of very early instruments may be restricted to rock paintings, as the instruments were made of perishable materials.