Strange Music Day
Joey Carlson
MSMU Class of 2025
(8/2022) August 24th is International Strange Music Day. While this information is interesting, most of us probably don’t care if there is a particular day dedicated to listening to peculiar music. There is also an International Mahjong day, a lemon juice day, a traffic light day; a theme for every day of the year. While most of these are not particularly important, the idea that we ought to be perpetually broadening our interests is. The one who is interested is interesting.
Music occupies a place of particular importance in the lives of human beings. From our earliest development, even in the womb, the music we listen to shapes our brains. In recent years, neurology has made a number of startling discoveries into how the brain works. In our first moments of development, from when our brains form in the womb to about a year old, our neurons are essentially looking for a job. It is during this time that questions of priority will be answered for our brains.
Particularly in discerning speech, an infant is practically a blank slate. Babies are born with the ability to hear thousands of different phonemes, sounds that human beings can make, in order to prepare them for whatever language they will grow up speaking. After about a year, babies lose the ability to easily understand new sounds, and it will become significantly more difficult to learn new languages, simply because our brains do not understand what the sounds themselves are, let alone how to replicate them. Thankfully, our brains have something called neuroplasticity, a theory that our brain establishes certain patterns, neural pathways, which form how we think about everything and what we are inclined to do.
In this schema, though neural pathways often seem set in stone, they are moldable through the conscientious forming of new habits and ways of thinking. This is a difficult process, but it's how we learn new things, especially a new language. Music is its own language, a language we are born able to appreciate every phoneme of, every pattern, though certain musical patterns come more easily than others. Though oftentimes the musical experience is enjoyable because of a certain song or genre’s familiarity, it is a beneficial practice for our neurological health to build new neural pathways—in other words, to listen to strange music.
There are certain people with a special gift called perfect pitch. Perfect pitch is thrown around a lot with many different meanings, but what it really means is someone who, without much special training, can hear different notes the way we see colors. That is, each note is distinctly understood on its own; much like how we can see red and know it's red, someone with perfect pitch can hear a B flat and know that it's a B flat without any work. What is special about perfect pitch is that, while musicians can get something close to it with hard work and ear training, whether someone has perfect pitch will have been decided by the time he or she has hit one year old. What is most interesting about this is that, much like how we are born to hear the sounds in any language, we are born to hear and understand musical notes and patterns.
A number of studies have actually shown that children before the age of one can be given perfect pitch by being exposed to a lot of music and a lot of different music. Besides in children, listening to music in adults has been shown to reduce anxiety, blood pressure, pain, and improve sleep quality, mood, mental alertness, and memory. So much of the brain is involved when we listen to music: our auditory cortex, which processes what we are hearing, the amygdala, which processes emotions, our dopamine response, our memory, and even our visual perception. This last one is particularly interesting because science has shown that the music one listens to actually makes one see the world differently! Try watching a clip of a movie you really like without the music playing (it's very weird).
Different genres of music have different psychological and neurological effects and benefits. For example, listening to music with a similar emotion as one is experiencing in a particular moment can be very affirming; one can feel, though he is completely alone, part of something significantly bigger and more important. Music and speech are very similar psychological experiences, and since speech is inherently relational, so is music. At the same time, listening to the same kind of music over and over again can promote chronic experiences of the same emotion. It is extremely important to pay attention to how a song is making you feel because how you feel is going to affect how you act for the rest of the day and your life.
More technical genres of music like classical and jazz (classical in particular) have the best effects on the ‘intelligence’ of the listener (speech recognition, memory, mental attentiveness, etc.). This is because, in classical music, the musical ideas being presented to the listener are less obvious than in popular music, and often require more focus to understand. Though it is not some magic pill to make you smarter, it is good for you.
Finally, of course, there are the social benefits of listening to music. As much as we care not to admit it, most of our musical tastes are fairly arbitrary. This renders many generalized disagreements over music as silly as arguing over ice cream flavors. I always enjoy the analysis of music, and you do not need to like everything you listen to (in fact, please don’t). At the same time, open-mindedness is a virtue, and you will find that it is a virtue that can drastically increase one’s quality of life since, thanks to neuroplasticity, the music that others enjoy so much can be yours to enjoy too! So, if you get a chance today, utilize the best part of the internet, and listen to some strange music!
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