Music and Sexualization

by Pam Vogel

Music and Swimming Costumes by Violets and Handshakes

In the 1950s, parents around the world were weary of the dirty rock music invading the airwaves. They were concerned that the vulgar lyrics – yes, Elvis was considered vulgar – would inspire their children to grow into sex-crazed juvenile delinquents. As a nation, we have since developed a much higher tolerance for questionable artistic expression in pop music and now scoff at the modest social norms of the previous century, but new research suggests Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham from Happy Days may have been onto something, after all.

In a world where teenagers and adolescents are becoming sexualized beings at increasingly younger ages, it is important to understand the different sources for such a socially significant change. A February 2009 study from the University of Pittsburgh shows a strong correlation between listening to music with sexually degrading lyrics and sexual activity in teenagers. Ninth grade students that reported listening to over 14 hours of music per week containing degrading lyrics – the group with the highest exposure – were more than twice as likely to engage in sexual activity than their presumably more innocent counterparts were. While the contemporary lyrics students were exposed to were obviously more explicit than the lyrics of Jerry Lee Lewis, the results of this simple observational study indicate a much bigger correlation than one might think.

A more extensive study (Martino et al., 2006) indicates that routine exposure to contemporary popular music – of which 15% was determined to contain degrading lyrics – led to increased likelihood of initiating or progressing in levels of sexual activity among adolescents. The 2006 research also shows that these results are persistent despite the consideration of eighteen other factors that may contribute to sexualization. The study also distinguished between degradingly sexual lyrics and otherwise sexual lyrics, stating that the degrading nature was the cause of increased sexual behavior, whereas sexual lyrics that were not inadvertently offensive had little or no effect on young listeners.

Healing the brain through music

By  Jennifer Beckerman

Photo by foreversouls

Over the years, researchers have studied the various effects of music on human health, intelligence, and well-being, but more recently, researchers came to fascinating conclusions regarding music’s medicinal qualities.  Music’s various positive benefits reach diverse groups of people: adolescents involved with music perform better in school , music increases exercise endurance by up to 15%, music lowers stress levels, anxiety, and depression in pregnant women, and may be an inexpensive and enjoyable way to facilitate recovery in stroke patients -imagine that!

In order to fully comprehend music’s influence on stroke recovery, we must consider the mechanics.  A stroke occurs when blood supply to part of the brain is blocked, which prevents the admittance of oxygen and glucose.  Without oxygen, brain cells die.  This blockage results most commonly from the blockage of a small artery within the brain itself, but there are several other mechanisms for a stroke as well.  Some factors that lead to strokes and artery blockage include: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and smoking.    Strokes are unexpected and dangerous incidences that remain the third leading cause of death in the United States behind heart disease and cancer. A Harvard Imaging technique reveals increased brain activity when people play or listen to music because more blood and oxygen flow to the brain, healing brain damage.

The sweet sound of brain development

By Elizabeth Packer

When my sister was in elementary school, she had a close friend who studied the violin under the Suzuki Method. Developed by the Japanese violinist Shinichi Suzuki, it centers on the concept of beginning musical training when the child is no older than five years old and thus encouraging these young musicians to develop such personality aspects as self-esteem. But does the Suzuki Method do more than character build?

In a recent article published on BBC, “Music Training Boosts the Brain,” an answer to this question is unearthed. Citing the work of a study undertaken by Dr. Takako Fujioka at McMaster University in Canada, the article asserts that training in classical music from a very young age does indeed do more than build character. It really does alter the brains of young children.

Within the study, Fujioka and his colleagues worked with a group of four to six year olds, half of whom had received musical training for a year. They were exposed to a violin tone and “noise-burst stimulus” in four repeated intervals, and then had their neural responses recorded through the use of an imaging technique which measures the magnetic fields produced by electrical activity in the brain known as magnetoencephalography (MEG). Through the MEG scans, it was discovered that the musically trained children showed higher peaks in brain activity in the left hemisphere in response to the violin than the untrained group. The musically trained group also demonstrated an increased ability to discriminate between the two different sounds they were presented with: they responded more quickly to the sound of the violin when it was played than their nonmusical peers.

Based on their study, Fujioka and his colleagues reached a conclusion that musical training has an impact on the wiring of the brain in areas related to memory and attention. This matches up nicely with earlier studies showing that music students demonstrate better memory skills, even for non-music material, than their non-musical peers. They have thus demonstrated that there is more to the Suzuki Method—and instrumental training at a young age in general—than character building and getting children used to performing: it increases memory abilities by positively influencing brain wiring.

Reference:
Fujioka, T., Ross, B., Kakigi, R., Pantev, C., and Trainor, L. J. (2006). One Year of Musical Training Affects Development of Auditory Cortical-Evoked Fields in Young Children. Brain, 129, 2593-2608.

Oxford University Press (2006, September 20). First Evidence That Musical Training Affects Brain Development In Young Children. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 21, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2006/09/060920093024.htm

Jamshed Bharucha comes to Vassar

by Daniel Gordon

As a longtime musician, it is natural to wonder why it is that listening to music sparks strong responses in people; it seems to have the ability to kindle emotion like few other mediums of expression. On Thursday, February 20, 2008, Professor Jamshed Bharucha of Tufts University came to Vassar College to give a lecture. His work tries to answer this question and others. While Bharucha covered many topics in his Vassar presentation, one worth focusing on is the subconscious knowledge of music. According to Bharucha, the vast majority of one’s musical knowledge is subconscious. This type of knowledge is known as implicit memory, meaning that it is encoded as procedural information rather than declarative information. Even those who consider themselves musically inept have a large amount of implicit musical information. Just to recognize a tune, a large quantity of this information had to be acquired over one’s lifetime. An example of this is the brains response to modulations or key changes in a piece of music. Peaks in electrical activity in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain are recorded during key changes in a piece of music.
One of the main variables in one’s implicit knowledge of music is the differences in the culture in which one is raised. The ability to recognize musical aspects of a tune depends on the culture which a person is exposed to. For example, a person musically conditioned to Western music will be better able to recognize a tune in a Western structure, which is usually within the framework of a seven-note major or minor scale. According to some of Bharucha’s current research, response to a musical structure of a different culture is very different than that of one’s own. In this case, the recognition of familiar Western simple melodies was compared to the recognition of simple melodies based off the Indian rag Bhairav. Regardless of which melody the subject was listening to, the subject was always quicker to identify notes that fell outside a typical Western musical structure rather than the Indian structure. This experiment is a piece of the large picture of understanding the implicit knowledge of music.

Music and Language

by Bren Cavallo

As a music student I hear my teachers constantly making analogies between music and language to improve my playing and discuss musical ideas. Even further, when I play music I try to read chords as if they were words and improvise as if I’m speaking in sentences. Not that I’m as coherent in these abilities as a more serious music student or professional, but I always try to imagine that I’m telling a verbal
story in my musical improvisations and compositions. After the class on language I started to wonder if there is a genetic musical instinct like the one we discussed about for language and if one could discuss music in psychologically in a similar way to language.

In a study done in 1998, researchers found that there is a corresponding part of the right hemisphere of the brain to Broca’s Area in the left hemisphere that is activated when a person interprets written musical notes and passages like Broca’s Area does for letters and words. They also found that music activates many parts of the brain, including the cerebellum which mainly has to do with movement, even when the listener is not moving. In an article on the musician and neuroscientist Mark Tramo, Tramo indicates that, “If you’re just thinking about tapping out a rhythm, parts of the motor system in your brain light up.” On the topic of if humans have a genetic disposition to music like they do for language Tramo comments,

“Music is in our genes…Many researchers like myself are trying to
understand melody, harmony, rhythm, and the feelings they produce, at
the level of individual brain cells. At this level, there may be a
universal set of rules that governs how a limited number of sounds can
be combined in an infinite number of ways.”