Geeko friendly's List: Music

• • Same thing. People mix music with emotions
• it's hard to think about a great film without also being influenced by that film's score.
• We know, for example, that the right kind of music can make us suspicious of an otherwise innocent-seeming character, or evoke feelings of delight watching a benign scene, or even cause false memories for images that weren't even present in the movie. But little research has considered how viewers respond to music played in other parts of a film. Surely what we see in one scene affects how we perceive the next scene. How about music?
• Here, the results are just for music clips played before the character was seen.
• The results were similar when music was played after the clip.
• Additional analysis by the researchers suggests that the music played before the scene had a more powerful effect on perceived emotion than music played afterwards, but both clearly have an important effect.

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• • Wii & Google Earth mashup
• • Google, Yahoo, Mozilla different mashup ideas
• Think it, find it, match it, mash it!
• 'Mash-ups' refer simply to the end result of bringing together two or more different creations or applications that were not originally intended to work together, and the concept is a firm part of the Web 2.0 world.
• Mash-ups date back as far as the 1960s with the mixing and sampling of different songs, and like those creations, the first computer-based mash-ups were largely music or image-based.
• mash-up culture is also booming with software and application mixing.
• The Wii remote control and the Wii fit board have been coded by mashers to be used with Google Earth, enabling you to use it as a flight simulator so you can 'fly' over the globe using the Nintendo controls.
• There is also a Web site which showcases the best of the Web's mash ups and gives out a daily and monthly award. Past winners include "twitzu" where users can send out invites to friends and they can RSVP via twitter. "Typobuddy" users can find misspelled eBay auctions and Craiglist items to get the best deal.
• On a more practical note, the Chicago Police Department uses a system called "Clearmap," a mash-up web application that integrates the department's reported crime database with Google Maps.
• Google and Yahoo both have mash-up editors where users can mash what they will. Just last month the Mozilla Lab announced Ubiquity, an experiment in using natural language to invoke Web services.
• But all of this excitement isn't without controversy. Much of the content that is mashed is done so illegally.
• The largest support for mash-up culture comes from the Free Culture movement and organizations such as the Creative Commons.
• "Mashing up is a good thing... people are being creative and expanding peoples' works.

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• trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us.
• Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.
• We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look at problems that are best solved by thinking 'out of the box',"
• One possible explanation the researchers offer for the musicians' elevated use of both brain hemispheres is that many musicians must be able to use both hands independently to play their instruments.

  • !
• they have to be very good at simultaneously reading the musical symbols, which are like left-hemisphere-based language, and integrating the written music with their own interpretation, which has been linked to the right hemisphere."
• divergent thinking, which is the ability to come up with new solutions to open-ended, multifaceted problems. Highly creative individuals often display more divergent thinking than their less creative counterparts.
• To conduct the study, the researchers recruited 20 classical music students from the Vanderbilt Blair School of Music and 20 non-musicians from a Vanderbilt introductory psychology course. The musicians each had at least eight years of training. The instruments they played included the piano, woodwind, string and percussion instruments. The groups were matched based on age, gender, education, sex, high school grades and SAT scores.

  • how they conducted the experment
• trained musicians had greater activity in both sides of their frontal lobes. Because we equated musicians and non-musicians in terms of their performance, this finding was not simply due to the musicians inventing more uses; there seems to be a qualitative difference in how they think about this information
• The researchers also found that, overall, the musicians had higher IQ scores than the non-musicians, supporting recent studies that intensive musical training is associated with an elevated IQ score.

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