Feb

3

From Einstein On Creative Thinking: Music and the Intuitive Art of Scientific Imagination:

In other interviews, he (Albert Einstein) attributed his scientific insight and intuition mainly to music. "If I were not a physicist," he once said, "I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music…. I get most joy in life out of music" (Calaprice, 2000, 155). His son, Hans, amplified what Einstein meant by recounting that "[w]henever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music, and that would usually resolve all his difficulties."

btw, today [3 Feb] is the birthday of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.

Stefan Jovanovich writes:

I don't really think; the few insights I have come from early training in copy editing and a certain skill for moving 3D objects around in space so they fit better (in the good old days this was called warehousing). For that kind of mind mulling, Haydn's Piano Trios have become the essential daily brain food for over a year now.

Nils Poertner replies:

perhaps there is a type of music, or composer, or melody, that resonates with a certain person for a while - almost like good medicine? a little goes a long way though.

Adam Grimes comments:

Speaking personally, I can't listen to complex music and do any other task. My attention is too easily diverted to the music and I spend too much time focusing on the music, which is an obvious reflection of how my brain has been trained. (I do think there are some fundamental differences in the way musicians perceive music compared to "everyone else", and different types of musicians also perceive differently, based on my experience.)

I do, however, like a wide range of musics, and I find bluegrass and old-school country are especially conducive to writing and programming. (Again, a very personal perspective.)

I do think musical training teaches people to hold and to manipulate patterns in a special way. There's also a lot to be said for the work ethic and focus of a musician. (When I was younger, I spent 6+ hours in front of my instrument, day after day. That requires a degree of focus and attention to detail that most people don't encounter very often.) But I'm still a little skeptical about wide-ranging benefits… maybe they are there, but expertise can be frustratingly domain-specific. I suspect there might be something in the pattern recognition and manipulation aspects that's meaningful, though.

Stefan Jovanovich responds:

For one thing, AG, you all actually hear the music. I can recognize the differences between the F-Minor (#26) and the E-Flat Minor (#31) because I have heard the pieces often enough to distinguish one combination of noises from the other; but that is all. I do not perceive the music.

Zubin Al Genubi adds:

After training and practice you can hear in your mind the perfect pitch of a note out of thin air and tell if a note is not in tune. Its another thing to train your voice to hit that perfect pitch.

Adam Grimes writes:

The skill of "perfect pitch" (absolute pitch), which is the ability to name notes out of thin air, is actually not trainable, despite a lot of work and effort. It appears to be a skill that probably all babies have, just as babies have the ability to hear all phonemes in all human languages. At some point, early on, the brain changes and unused (unheard) phonemes become relatively inaccessible (which is why, for instance, native French speakers struggle with the English "th" (and there are many other examples), and this appears to be the window that closes on developing perfect pitch. If musical training begins at a young age, this skill of absolute pitch may continue into adulthood.

It's also interesting that there's a range of pitches that will be accepted as "A", just as there are a range of mouth sounds that will be perceived as a specific phoneme. (in other words, not all speakers will produce the same sounds in a language exactly the same, and the same speaker might produce sounds slightly differently in different words, but the brain adjusts by categorizing.) I don't have absolute pitch myself (though I do have a few absolute "notes" that I can recognize or pull from memory), but in working with people who do, I've noticed they don't have quite the precision of a tuning fork. What they do have is a radically different perception of music than the rest of us, though the rest of us aren't as handicapped as we would be inclined to think.

There's a lot of very interesting work done and being done on perception. David Huron has written a few books that are both precise and accessible–always a nice combination of attributes!

Though perfect pitch can't be trained, what CAN be trained is the ability to judge relative pitches and to hear multiple notes played with precision. As you say, training the voice is another skill. I'm a very poor singer, but producing pitches with the voice is a critical part of internalizing pitch (and music, in general) for instrumentalists.

Big Al adds:

I think one of the most important lessons in music, especially for young people, is that you can begin studying something you know nothing about and, through practice, master it. Many people do not learn this and schools don't overtly teach it.


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