Interesting music facts

Timbre is a very important characteristic of musical sounds. Despite the fact that it is much fewer effects on the psyche than the height or amplitude of sound, timbre is one of the main ways for translating creative ideas of composers to real musical works.

Each instrument has its own distinct timbre. Complex sounds are most saturated timbre. People often describe the timbre using the associations that arise when listening to sounds, such as acute, juicy, velvety, sharp, muted … The human ear analyzes sound comparing it with images stored in memory, and selecting the appropriate association.

Pitch can be described with sufficient accuracy by an oscillation frequency. The timbre is much more difficult to characterize. In addition, two of the sounds with the same pitch but different timbre rather difficult to reproduce using the human voice (except the singer have extraordinary abilities).

Classical instruments such as piano, violin, drums, usually have a fixed tone, which can be varied by changing the technique of playing the instrument.

Electronic synthesizers, in turn, have countless opportunities to change the timbre due to the phase and frequency modulation, changing the shape of the generated wave, addition and subtraction waves …

E.g. tone of violin or cello includes many harmonics, each of which carries a certain amount of sound energy. The combination of these harmonics in a certain ratio is a major factor in the formation of a timbre.

The second important aspect of the formation of tone is dynamic changes in frequency and amplitude. By the way, often negligible changes in physical parameters become very noticeable to the ear, while the other ones person’s brain is simply not paying attention. The reason for this is the specificity of the human psyche and the mechanisms of perception of sounds.

Composers and producers are widely used to spice up the timbre of musical works. Timbre allows you to move into front one or another component of music when creating a complex musical picture. In some styles of music, like “ambient” changing timbres of musical sounds are most important than even melody or harmony.

There is an interesting effect, named the “binaural beats” that arises when several musical instruments or the chorus of people sing in the same key is. Most strongly this effect is manifested in ethnic music.

While listening to the sounds whose frequencies are close to each other, one can experience these binaural beats. The greatest effect is achieved when using stereo headphones.

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What happens to us under the influence of music? What substance produces the brain when we are listening to music?

 Now, after the method of functional magnetic resonance imaging was developed, there is an opportunity to study changes in the activity of neurons – cells of the nervous system – while listening to music.

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The connection between music lessons and a improved memory previously reported Chinese scientists from the University of Hong Kong. For the experiment, the researchers selected 90 children aged from 6 to 15 years old. Exactly half of them played in the school orchestra, or take individual music lessons. The remaining 45 students have never engaged in playing musical instruments. Children engaged in music, showed significantly higher verbal ability, and their memory was significantly better than those who have never opened the note. Follow-up study one year later showed that the results of students, who during this time dropped his music lessons, have significantly decreased.

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With age, people begin to hear the worst. They do not distinguish individual sounds in the background noise, did not immediately respond to a question addressed to them. This is due not to the deaf, but the deterioration of neurons. The cells in the brain of old people react to the signals slowly. According to scientists, the music can prevent senile deafness. The brain of musicians does not age.

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No matter the genre of interest, every person in the world is affected by music. Sometimes music triggers a memory that is associated with a certain song, melody or sound, and a sense of nostalgia washes over you. For the most part though, music has the ability to make us happy. Although most people don’t know why.

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Woodwinds, brass instruments… Every musician knows about these groups of instruments, included in a symphony orchestra. But is it so simple? Of course no! It would be naive to believe, that, for example, flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons are made of wood. What the symphonic orchestra all the same consists of? Let’s see what materials made symphony orchestra.

Wood. In the old days, it was a very popular material in making musical instruments. Flutes and oboes were making of the different types of wood. Usually, it was a hardwood. For example, can be found cherry flute or pear oboe. At the present time mutes for trumpets, sticks for percussion instruments and handpieces for them are making of wood.

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Why they compose music?

The first composers lived eight hundred years ago. During eight centuries music was composing. And today each moment some composers are writing music in a lot of points on Earth. But why do they do it? What motivation to composing music these people have? A little thought we can see the following motives:

Money.

Composing of music can be profitable? Yes, but only at special cases. For example: if a composer works for a film company and writes music for movies he can get good money. For example, Dmitry Shostakovich and Georgy Sviridoff have made music for a lot of films.

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Just some of the professional musicians have perfect pitch. There is around ten percent of such musicians in European orchestras. And among the common people, only one from every ten thousand has absolute pitch.

It is believed that early contact children with music increase ability to accurately identify the pitch. In this case, the skill to recall a melody is formed by the three or four years. People with absolute pitch, often unconsciously analyze background noise, which the average person does not notice, or at least does not give them much importance.

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