In reading Ralph Ellison’s “Living with Music” and Oliver Sacks’s “A Bolt from the Blue,” you have encountered several extreme examples of people defining themselves through music. Analyze one or two of these examples and try to come up with general ideas about the relationship between music and how one defines themselves. Here are some questions to consider (These are just meant to get your thoughts moving. You don’t need to answer all or any.): How do race and music help Ellison define himself as an artist in his essay? How does Ellison describe how music affects his attitudes toward spaces–such as his apartment, his building, and New York City. According to Oliver Sacks’s examples, to what degree are musical identity formations related to brain science? What do these examples illustrate about the relationship between psychology and music? (around 250 words)
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Musical identity formations relate to the brain science in many ways One of the first things that happens when music enters our brains is the triggering of pleasure centers that release dopamine, a neurotransmitter that affects your emotions. It could make you feel happy or sad or angry. Some researchers believe certain music genres might also be linked to aggression. I believe listening to music does put you in a certing mental space. Take athletes for instance, when a boxer or basketball player is about to fight or play a game he or she has a certing song they listen to so they can get them pumped up or ready to perform. They identify winning and being a winner to that particular song. Research has shown that listening to music can reduce anxiety, blood pressure, and pain as well as improve sleep quality, mood, mental alertness, and memory. Which is why music is used in the medical field to promote healing and also provide relief to heart attack and stroke victims and patients undergoing surgery. Me personally I like to listen to music while cleaning I feel it give me more energy and take away the daunting of the task at hand. I love gospel music and when I listen to it, it takes me to a place where I can feel my connection with God. It reminds me of who I am and my strength in God. I don’t know how I would live without music in my day to day.
Hi Marissa, definitely music has an impact in our brain, like exercise, meditation and religious experiences alter the brain chemistry. The question is how the individuals in the essays developed a spontaneous attraction to music? or maybe they have a different brain wire composition than the rest of us. Regarding to musicophillia, I think everyone of us have capacity to enjoy music.
Music without a doubt has an impact on us. Music regulates our mood because of its strong ties to our emotions. Since music is idiosyncratic, we can listen to the same song and express different emotions.
I agree with you Marissa. I really enjoyed reading your blog post because I feel the same way about music. Music drives people. It motivates people, it heals people, etc. The power that music has over us is incredible. I feel as though music is extremely therapeutic. For some, music is just music and entertainment, nothing more. For others, however, listening to music is an intense and meaningful experience. It brings about so many emotions, feelings, thoughts. It really is special.
After reading these two papers, I find myself connecting more with Sack’s paper of how brain-science interacts with one’s artistic preferences. According to Sacks’s examples and prior knowledge, brain science is very closely related with one’s musical identity. Medical cases have shown that physical changes to the brain can alter an individual’s way of thinking. I think of it as a back-and-forth mutual relationship where our thoughts are influenced by the physical structure and stimulants from our brain, and what we think about, the neuron connections we build will change the physical structures of our brain, affecting our future thinking.
Our understanding of the brain and how it relates to our mind is actually somewhat limited. Modern science is based on the principle that in order to understand the whole, we will take it apart and see what the individual pieces do to understand how it works. It’s difficult to do that with the mind as you cannot really take it apart. We can see the sophisticated neuron networks firing signals but we can only guess what each area does. Most of our understanding is based on observations of behavior, which as we can see in Sack’s examples, probably plays a critical role. It will take more time and investigation to further our understanding of the brain and its relationship with art.
Hi. It was very nice to read a completely different perception from you. Since, the reason is not clear about the cause it is just that we give logics. I really liked how you interpreted it.
Hi Andy. I also think it is crazy that there actually is a connection between our brain and the taste in music that we have. I think that the topic of music is so broad that it is still hard to tell exactly how it affects us and most importantly in how many ways it can affect us that it will take decades if not more to have clear answers and know what impact it has on our body and brain.
In Ellison’s essay “Living with Music”, he started out by saying “In those days it was either live with music or die with noise” (Ellison 1). This means in our life we choose our own way to interpret music, whether we find meaning or not it changed our perception on how we listen to music. Ellison also mentions how music from an early age can have a big impact when we grow up. He grew up with sound and music, living with thin walls in his apartment made him realize how much he was going to miss it when he moved out. It played a big role and based the experience he had in the apartment to connect to his work.
In “A Bolt from the Blue”, Dr. Cicoria out of the sudden had a strong desire to listen to classical music despite not having a strong connection to it from his childhood. After his accident he came to realize the smaller things in life. His way of music has changed, he became more focused on the piano than ever before. He believes it was due to some sort of reincarnation but it could be linked to the brain based on various studies.
Yeah, I thought it was pretty cool how he interpreted the noise in his life like that. What he listed as music would typically written off by others as meaningless or disruptive sounds. But I also agree that our interpretations of music can influence the meaning we can derive from it. Music can be a very subjective experience. It’s kind of cyclical by way of how we interpret music is affected by our experiences, but music can also affect the way we experience the world.
I do find it interesting that we can listen to the same song and there will always be several perceptions. Songs do have a way of making us feel connected to our former self (a proustian moment) bringing us back to something we forgot due to everyday life. I think both writers manged to tell this through the essays
From both the readings, “Living with Music” and “A Bolt from the Blue” I came to realize how passionate people can be towards music. Relating with my experience of music with these two articles I do not feel different anymore. I always thought I was boring because I never listened to music or songs. I prefer playing music when I cook or drive but my concentration is somewhere else. I mean, there may be a romantic song and I might be thinking about Milky Way Galaxy. So, I never felt connected with songs. Also, the instrumental music gets in my nerve after few minutes of listening to it. Well, coming on the topic I understood that the music is a sense of feeling that one can get. It can be the way of life which people can choose to make like how Ellison did. A person can be able to articulate their feelings and emotion through music.
Human brain is dynamic and the traumatic experience of life can change the overall aspect of life. As I am spiritual, I believed in what Dr. Cicoria said. It could be a new life where things changed and he started getting along with Piano out of no where. It was not just him other people like Franco and Salimah who were inclined to painting and music respectively. This gives a hint that people feel reborn with new energy in life.
I agree, it is really affirming to know that music also has this power on other people as well considering that it is my passion. I also agree that it is really interesting for that man to have a sudden interest in Piano after being shocked by lightening. I feel like it affected part of his brain that has to do with emotional awareness. Music will be even more interesting now after reading these articles and the different point of views that my classmates had.
Both Ralph Ellison’s “Living with Music” and Oliver Sacks’s “A Bolt from the Blue,” show us several extreme examples of people defining themselves through music. Ellison talks a lot about some of the inevitable exposure to music that we receive and how we identify ourselves through it. Ellison also shows example of how the spaces we live in affect our taste and identity in music, especially when in close quarter to many other individuals. Ellison also talks about the impact that music has on us as we are growing up.
I personally enjoyed the reading by Oliver Sacks because the three different cases that I read about helped me stay intrigued and made me believe in the points that Sacks was trying to get across. I do believe that people who are advanced in the music industry or in this case, receive all of these notes and sounds in order to be constantly be able to compose new sounds that also affect other human beings. I see it as a gift, I can also relate to having a gift like this. I think many people can tap into their creative outlet which comes from different parts of the brain where we hold intuitive thoughts and different emotions. My favorite example was the guy who was struck by lightening and how many of these people didn’t have an extreme interest before the incidents happened. I can relate to sharing my feelings through music when I Dj and these reading helped me put even more value on the effect that music has on different people.
The value of music in a human being’s life is described in Ralph Ellison’s essay “Living with Music.” He goes through the features it provides, such as providing individuals with knowledge, discipline, and purpose, as well as assisting us in developing our cultural and social characters. After reading it, I realized that everyone has a visual image of themselves that they convey in a variety of ways, such as through music, which may be a piece of our character, or through the collection of habits and beliefs that describe us. It also can generate tremendous physical impacts as well as deep and powerful emotions in us. Millions of people including me can’t live without music because it helps us to relax and strengthen our health. So, the majority of us always listening to music.
The writer Oliver Sacks explores the strange connection between music and the mind in his essay explaining why music may inspire and motivate individuals to extremes of feeling. Cicoria, a person who had experienced after being struck by a powerful thunderstorm unintentionally. He had a strange experience as a result of this. He had fully healed after several months, he immediately felt compelled to perform piano music, something he had never considered before. According to numerous scientific studies, as a result of their inability to focus on other things, individuals who have been in a tragic accident tend to become more attentive in the musical area. I noticed a fascinating connection between his music and his rapidly changing personal character. As a result, I realized that Cicoria was on the lookout for something. As a result, he chose to pursue learning piano in the heat of passion. I am certain that music mostly has positive impacts on a person’s mind. Most of the paragraphs were encouraging, which made me happy to see individuals enjoying music
I find it very interesting how people think of music. Because for some of us music is just a “combination of sounds” that they hear while doing other things like out shopping or partying or even eating dinner at a restaurant but for others like Ralph Ellison or Oliver Sacks music or those “combinations of sounds” have a much deeper meaning. Nowadays though, I feel like expressing ourselves through music has become something what many people do. There are so many kinds of it that it is not hard to find something for ourselves and once we do, we may become very dependent on it as it defines us like no other thing in life. There is this type of a bond between us and music that lets us dive into different spaces that we cannot reach when we are not listening to it. In some cases it lets people relax, vent or even focus. You can ask a stranger that you meet on a street what song he or she is listening to as you pass him and their answer could tell you more about them then you may thing. We both do it consciously and unconsciously but the truth is, what we listen to is what describes us. Our emotions, thoughts, problems, all of that is somehow included in what we listen to. Oftentimes our music taste is something that we have been building over the years, just like Ellison explains it. The way I view it is for instance when we are exposed to some kinds of music in our childhood we are more likely to like it in the future because we are transparent to it and music has a great influence on us especially at a young age.
After reading Living with Music by Ralph Ellison and A Bolt from the Blue by Oliver Sack, I determined that music can actually have a life-changing effect on you. Starting with Living in Music started with music being spoken about negatively and referred to as simply being nothing more than just noise that distracted him from his work. In the essay, later, he discusses his own experience with music about learning to play the horn and the embarrassment associated with it and swearing off using the horn. Showing Ellison’s experience with music was associated with fear/trauma, causing him to stay away from music. The real turning point is when he begins to have this battle with his upstairs neighbor to cancel out her bad singing by bringing out an old radio of his. Eventually, it becomes frequent, and he starts developing a love for music again after hearing Kathleen Ferrier causing him to buy a whole new stereo just for music. He praises the singer for her courage, that she still kept up with her music even though her singing was terrible. He even states that he begins to use music less as a weapon to cancel her out and show more appreciation as a form of art. Looking at A Bolt from the Blue, music could be used as a symbol of being reborn where Tony found himself in a near-death experience and pretty started devoting his whole life to music. You can say he discusses how he would play before work and then play right after work, and even then, with the divorce from his wife continued to play and eventually attempting to make a career out of it. In a way, I feel like Tony’s obsession with music was also a way to show appreciation for having a second chance at life, causing him to spend so much time on it.
Oliver Sacks gives specific examples of people who had changes in personality and a new passion for music after having changes in their brain chemistry, and he relates each of these changes in behavior to brain science. Sudden musicophelia is not the only phenomenon that can occur after brain trauma or surgery, as it is possible to lose or gain conscious access to other parts of the brain. For instance, I once read a story about a man who became a mathematical genius after a brain injury, but he also developed OCD and his carefree personally changed to be more of an analytical one. In “A Bolt from the Blue,” Oliver Sacks describes the experience of Salimah M, who’s experience was quite the opposite. She not only had a passion music after a brain tumor in her right temporal lobe was removed, but also became more emotionally aware of the world around her. She considered her significant change in personality to be a gift. I believe that in most cases, those who are emotional tend to also be the ones with a greater connection to music or art and vice versa. This is in fact related to the brain chemistry of an individual, which may even come down to the specific types of music we prefer or dislike.