Musical Language

Maggie McBrady
Musical Language Podcast
Assigned Topic

This podcast was very interesting for me.  There are many times when I have heard musical sounds and thought I heard words in simple sounds or have turned a simple repetitive beat into a complex tune inside my head after listening to it over and over again.  The crosswalk from main campus to east campus are constantly beeping and saying "wait".  All year when I wait at the crosswalk this beat gets stuck in my head and I find myself joining along and turning a simple beep "wait" rhythm into this elaborate piece inside me head.  In high school I remember learning about Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and how it caused the audience members to riot.  The podcast explained that since humans are patterning searching animals the brains of the audience members were working on overdrive to find a pattern in a piece that had no pattern.  Since the neurons couldn't find a pattern they began releasing large amounts of dopamine which caused the audience members to fall into a brief schizophrenic episode which caused their rioting.