Tag Archives: music

September 2026 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Concerns about the food supply over the next year or so have seeped from alternative media into mainstream media stories. I consider this indicator at least as frightening as the content of the stories themselves. Honorable mention: tactical nuclear weapons (these would not help the food supply).

Most hopeful story: While there has been somewhat of a rollback in the number of competitive electoral democracies over the last 20 years, this is a minor blip when you look at the democratic revolution over the past 250 years.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: While exercise lowers dementia risk in general, exercising at or on the way to work does not seem to help as much. I speculated this might be due to some combination of stress, noise pollution, and air pollution, with the latter two being solvable problems. But although raw “fluid” intelligence seems to peak around age 20, “crystalized intelligence” which accounts for experience does not start to decline sharply until well after age 50, and possibly not until after age 70. Reading, physical activity, and “engagement with arts and culture” are all good for the aging brain.

What is good for the aging brain?

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What is good for the aging brain? First, reading. Is this really a surprise? There is some suggestion that reading about people in social situations might help substitute for being in actual social situations. Introverts rejoice! But there is also some suggestion of book clubs. Ugh…what I don’t like about book clubs is the idea that I am going to waste my remaining mortal reading time on suboptimal choices that other people think are good for me to read. Maybe online book clubs help solve this problem, because somewhere in the world’s billions there are probably at least thousands or even millions who want to read the things I want to read. But the idea of engaging with strangers on a screen is less appealing than a small group of friends or at least acquaintances discussing something. I like the idea, really – how about just reading something shorter than a book? I am not a huge short story fan, but maybe this is the happy medium. I can sit down and do my “homework” the night before or morning of book club. One more random thought – I wonder about audiobooks vs. reading on a page or screen. I enjoy both, but I actually find that both take regular practice at staying focused, and if I get out of practice with one or the other it takes some effort to get back into the swing of it. If you lose focus while reading words on a page, it’s easy to pause or backtrack, while if your mind wanders during an audiobook, it’s more annoying to rewind and try to figure out where you went wrong. I kind of like podcasts for this reason, because if I lose focus or doze off I don’t really care about going back. I’ll admit I also pay more attention to something I have paid money for than something I have not. Trying to concentrate and process the spoken word may very well be a useful cognitive exercise though, so when I say “annoying” that translates to “effort” which is the thing you have to do to improve or at least maintain yourself.

“Physical activity” – well, we knew that – but also “engagement with arts and culture“. Now that sounds kind of nice, but again I want to pick my arts and culture and not just ones that other people engage in to show off. I wonder if people have separated music from other arts, which could engage the brain differently. Music is inherently mathematical, it requires you to connect your senses and your brain in a unique way, and it is also creative, especially if you are making or writing it yourself. Really concentrating on music takes effort, similar to an audiobook, but you also just let it wash over you in the background without making the effort. Engaging in music with others might have different benefits than doing it by yourself. Damaging your eardrums with excessively loud music is almost certainly not good for your brain.

if a tree falls in the woods, and a microphone picks it up and is reviewed by an AI, who emails a human but the human doesn’t check their email, did it make a sound?

I’ve read the first couple chapters of This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. I don’t know if I’ll finish it, because I don’t seem to be in the mood for long non-fiction books at the moment. But there are some really interesting things. First, there is a definitive answer to the “if a tree falls in the woods…” question. The tree causes air and soil molecules to vibrate for sure. But for that to qualify as “sound”, it has to be detected by ears and transmitted to a brain, where it becomes sound. Squirrel ears can qualify, so the brain doesn’t happen to be human. In fact, scientists have put electrodes in animal brains and confirmed that they react to sound exactly as our brains do. So it’s interesting me to that we are born wired to understand music at a neural level – this is an instinct actually much more fundamental than language.

There’s some more interesting stuff. The reason a violin sounds different from a flute or a human voice has mostly to do with overtones – a note is not just a single pitch but many mathematically related pitches where the strength varies between pitches. (Some people say the violin is the most beautiful instrument because it is most like the human voice. I say this is an insult to violins.) There is also the “attack”, which is the percussive noise made when sound first starts on a given instrument, which is chaotic for a short period of time before stabilizing. Then there is reverberation or echo of the space the instrument happens to be in (as I was musing about pipe organs recently, you could think of the space as part of the instrument since it is so fundamental to the sound). Pipe organs are particularly interesting because they give the organist control over which overtones are sounded at various strengths. Digital synthesizers are intended to do exactly this, but I think anyone with well-functioning ears can still detect the difference between a synthetic sound and one produced by physical instruments. Then again, as most of the music we hear these days is recorded and played back, we are probably losing a lot of nuance of what the instruments sound like at the same time the synthesizing technology is continuing to improve.

now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational…pipe organ

The world’s largest (fully functional) pipe organ is not in a cathedral in Europe, or in fact a church or cathedral anywhere. It’s in an office building in Philadelphia, where I happen to work. It’s shame because it was part of a our Center City Macy’s which closed recently and it is not clear if the organ will need to be moved. Perhaps not if this website is accurate and still up-to-date. Anyway, I always had the impression it had been built specifically for the space it is in and would therefore be difficult to move, but I was wrong about that – it was built for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and later moved to the Wanamaker Department Store here. So it could be moved again if it needs to be. With a pipe organ though, the space it is in is part of the instrument in a way, so if you move it that particular sound you got from the combination of the organ and the space will never happen again. It would be like moving your guitar or violin strings to another completely different instrument. Anyway, they still play it daily because apparently it needs to be played to stay in good shape. It rattles the walls throughout the building, which is cool.

I do have one more question – how common are not-fully-functional pipe organs and where are they? Maybe they are hard to maintain in good condition, and therefore for every fully operational one there are a bunch of old broken ones lying around? I don’t know.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wanamakers_Organ_at_Macys_Philadelphia_in_2023.jpg

the PNC Christmas Price Index

For those who have never had an account, PNC is (or was once) the Pittsburgh National Corporation, and they are a regional bank. Anyway, they produce an annual whimsical 12 Days of Christmas price index. Ornamental/pet birds haven’t changed much in price since last year – no change for the partridge, the turtle doves, the calling birds, or the swans, and the price of french hens has only slightly outpaced inflation at 5%. Food has increased if pear trees and geese are good indicators (+15-16%). Maids a-milking are assumed to earn the federal minimum wage and have therefore not received a raise since 2009. Professional artistic performers have done pretty well, with 7-16% raises, although musicians seem to be doing better than dancers according to this index. As a family man financing a viewing of the Nutcracker next week, I can vouch for the fact that live entertainment is quite expensive. Not that music and art are not valuable – hopefully after the singularity we will spread our newfound wealth around so that all can enjoy in our newfound leisure time. Until then we will have to continue relying on some combination of government subsidies and the largesse of the wealthy, who seem willing to finance the arts because (a) this is tax exempt and (b) it benefits primarily other wealthy people.

Finally, PNC does remind us that we would have to actually buy 12 partridges in 12 pear trees 22 turtle doves, etc. if the repetition in the song is taken literally. So it would get quite pricey indeed.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Make/write/record music with R

Move over Garage Band, there is a new musical sheriff in town. For those of us who like to mess around in R – okay, realistically this gets added to my list of retirement projects a few decades down the road, assuming my body and brain manage to stick around for the next few decades.

gm: Generate Music Easily and Show Them Anywhere

Provides a simple and intuitive high-level language, with which you can create music easily. Takes care of all the dirty technical details in converting your music to musical scores and audio files. Works in ‘R Markdown’ documents <https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/>, R ‘Jupyter Notebooks’ <https://jupyter.org/>, and ‘RStudio’ <https://www.rstudio.com/>, so you can embed generated music anywhere. Internally, uses ‘MusicXML’ <https://www.musicxml.com/> to represent musical scores, and ‘MuseScore’ <https://musescore.org/> to convert ‘MusicXML’.

CRAN

this is your brain on music, but the kind matters

Here’s an interesting article on how jazz and classical music wire your brain differently.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences studied the brains of thirty pianists—half jazz players, half classical. They found, the Institute reports, that “different processes occur in jazz and classical pianists’ brains, even when performing the same piece…”

While jazz improvisation may better teach creativity, classical training, as neuroscientist Ardon Shorr argues in his TEDx talk above, may better train the brain in information processing. These studies show that the effect of music on the brain cannot be studied without regard for the differing neurological demands of different kinds of music, just as the study of language processing cannot be limited to just one language.

As a classically trained musician (okay, an out of practice, amateur one at best but I did put significant time and effort into it in my youth), I can vouch for taking a jazz improv class once and being completely out of my depth. But the other students were all jazz musicians and nobody was really interested in bringing me along as a beginner. I also took a class once called “far out improv” with other classical musicians and a teacher who was specifically interested in teaching classical musicians to improvise, and I remember that being very cool. I’ve never heard or experienced anything like that since so it must have been unusual.

“pro-growth education for Japan”

I was ready to rail against this article about “pro-growth education“, thinking from the title that it would be all about STEM and teaching job skills rather than thinking skills. But it turned out to be more about thinking skills, and went over some research on early childhood education with an emphasis to music, even giving a shout out to the Suzuki and Kodaly methods of teaching music to young children.