Colorful Music

Music is essential to culture and society and has been for centuries.  Music surrounds us where ever we go; elevators, shopping malls, football games, and festivals.  Music is lovely and artistic, like this photo.  

In this image, the viewer is initially drawn to the color on the keys of a black piano.  Typically, piano keys are black and white but in rare instances all of the keys are black.  In this image, it is difficult to tell if there are white keys because of the paint covering the keys.  The yellow especially is apparent because of the sharp contrast to the black piano.  The colors could metaphorically represent the way the piano invokes creativity and brings color, or individuality through music.  Every piano player plays and performs the music differently in the same way that every person writes in their own individual way.  In each person's individual way the player changes the music, even the pieces by Beethoven or Mozart that have been around for centuries and thousands of people practice relentlessly are developed differently with each new student, with each new player.  

Furthermore, the colors hold no pattern which just adds to the beauty of this photo.  This art can never be reproduced, the art just happened just like music changes with each new performance.  

The point of view adds aesthetic appeal to the image.  The way the photo is taken so that the audience is peering down the keyboard in order to focus on keys and the colors they have been painted. This creates a focus on only the piano and the beauty of the scene. 

The effect of the picture is one of anticipation.  It is almost as if the audience is waiting, just as the piano is waiting, for hands to appear and begin to ske the keys, dancing up and down the keyboard and developing a melody.  The melody is different to every listener but to each the music speaks to the soul.  The music tells a story, shares a hardship, and embodies true love.  In this way, the effect on the viewer may transform from person to person, but to all the photo attempts to illustrate the beauty and majesty of music.  

Musical Training on the Child's Brain

The article, Effects of Music Training on the Child's Brain and Cognitive Development, is a scholarly article because of its publication in a scholarly, peer reviewed journal by the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.  

The article presents the case that adults who have had musical training have structural and functional differences in their brains as opposed to those adults without.  This has been discovered through studying children from the ages of five to eleven with musical training and comparing them to a control group of five to eleven year olds without musical training.  The experiment starting with children of similar ages and allowed the experimental group to undergo musical training (eventually amounting to four years) and comparing the results to children in the control group without the musical training.  The experiment would examine different parts of the brain in both groups of children and compare the differneces. These differences are apparent between those with musical training and those without and these differences carry on to the children becoming adults.  Musical training has been shown to improve fine motor skills, language, and mathematical performance. 

The article explores the case and presents the findings at multiple ages of the children through diagrams and written explanations.  Through the use of data and logos, the article presents the findings and proves the point that musical training is very important for the development of the brain and can help in many aspects of life throughout time. 

SCHLAUG, G., NORTON, A., OVERY, K. and WINNER, E. (2005), Effects of Music Training on the Child's Brain and Cognitive Development. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1060: 219–230. doi: 10.1196/annals.1360.015
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1196/annals.1360.015/full

Life, Love, and Good Memories

"Country music is the people's music. It just speaks about real life and about truth and it tells things how they really are." ~Faith Hill
Country music is music is similar to a fine white wine; it is an acquired taste. Most people who adore country music and listen to it almost exclusively have acquired the love from a young age from their parents and have evolved this love into their own. However, there are those, like myself, who have acquired the taste in another fashion.
I started to seriously get into and seek out country music when I started going to a dance hall/bar just outside of my small town in high school. In our small community, this was the place to go and dance and be seen on the weekends. The town in which the dance hall was located was so small that in fact we just called it for the town name; El Maton. Looking back, this small dance hall was not exciting or even very interesting but when I was sixteen years old wearing my cute blouse, shorts, and cowboy boots, out with all my friends and dancing with my high school crushes, those El Maton nights were a dream. It was here I developed my love for the music. The more I went, the more I sought out music for my iPod and country radio stations to listen to in my car. Even now, I go attend dance halls, and although they may be bigger and better than El Maton; although, perhaps different songs, the music has not changed.
Country music reminds us of the slow living, summer days sitting on the back porch and drinking sweet tea as you watch the sunset and the lightning bugs start to come out.  The music speaks of faith in God, hard times, bravery, and remembering those we have lost. There are countless songs of love and sweet times when the world is lovely because you are with the one whom you adore, there are songs of love lost and missing the one that got away, and there are songs about fishing and drinking beer.
Country music embodies all that is good in the country, especially in the south, where there are dirt roads, tractors, fields to plow and harvest, sunshine to be embraced (along with the sweat), hard work, and long evenings. It is the music that reminds us to slow down and remember where we come from. Once discovered and embraced, it is the music that one seeks out and consumes over half (if not all) the radio presets. There are those who prefer the city life and choose a different life set to a different tune and there are those who just can not stand all of the bad vowels in the singing but to those the music speaks to, country music is the lifestyle we wish to maintain.