BrainScan

For instance:

... I was rooting around in the castle here, tidying stuff up for the end of the year, and came across a copy of Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony by Lewis Thomas (1980) ... In an essay titled "On Matters of Doubt" he writes:

 

If you are looking about for really profound mysteries, essential aspects of our existence for which neither the sciences nor the humanities can provide any sort of explanation, I suggest starting with music. The professional musicologists, tremendous scholars all, for whom I have the greatest respect, haven't the ghost of an idea about what music is, or why we make it and cannot be human without it, or even -- and this is the telling point -- how the human mind makes music on its own, before it is written down and played. The biologists are no help here, nor the psychologists, nor the physicists, nor the philosophers, wherever they are these days. Nobody can explain it. It is a mystery and thank goodness for that. The Brandenbergs and the late quartets are not there to give us assurances that we have arrived; they carry the news that there are deep centers in our minds that we know nothing about except that they are there.

[emphasis added]

The New York Times is so good for this kind of writing ... take this May 22, 2008 story for instance -- "Music's charms could also be a potent cure" which describes the work of surgeon Claudius Conrad, who has also studied music since he was 5....

Like many surgeons, Dr. Conrad says he works better when he listens to music. And he cites studies, including some of his own, showing that music is helpful to patients as well — bringing relaxation and reducing blood pressure, heart rate, stress hormones, pain and the need for pain medication.

But to the extent that music heals, how does it heal? The physiological pathways responsible have remained obscure, and the search for an underlying mechanism has moved slowly.  Now Dr. Conrad is trying to change that. He recently published a provocative paper suggesting that music may exert healing and sedative effects partly through a paradoxical stimulation of a growth hormone generally associated with stress rather than healing.

This jump in growth hormone, said Dr. John Morley, an endocrinologist at St. Louis University Medical Center who was not involved with the study, “is not what you’d expect, and it’s not precisely clear what it means.”  But he said it raised “some wonderful new possibilities about the physiology of healing,” and added: “And of course it has a nice sort of metaphorical ring. We used to talk about the neuroendocrine system being a sort of neuronal orchestra conductor directing the immune system. Here we have music stimulating this conductor to get the healing process started.”

The article goes on to discuss Mozart:

Dr. Conrad’s music dissertation examined why and how Mozart’s music seemed to ease the pain of intensive-care patients. He concentrated not on physiological mechanisms but on mechanisms within Mozart’s music.  “It is still a controversial idea,” he said recently, “whether Mozart has more of this sort of effect than other composers. But as a musician I wanted to look at how it might.”

Dr. Conrad noted that Mozart used distinctive phrases that are fairly short, often only four or even two measures long, and then repeated these phrases to build larger sections. Yet he changed these figures often in ways the listener may not notice — a change in left-hand arpeggios or chord structures, for instance, that slips by unremarked while the ear attends the right hand’s melody, which itself may be slightly embellished.  These intricate variations are absorbed as part of a melodic accessibility so well organized that even a sonata for two pianos never feels crowded in the ear, even when it grows dense on the page. The melody lulls and delights while the underlying complexity stimulates.

But even if this explains the music’s power to stimulate and relax, “an obvious question that comes up,” Dr. Conrad said, “is why Mozart would write music that is so soothing.”

Mozart’s letters and biographies, Dr. Conrad said, portray a man almost constantly sick, constantly fending off one infection or ailment after another.  “Whether he did it intentionally or not,” Dr. Conrad said, “I think he composed music the way he did partly because it made him feel better.”

(Remember, you have to register to read articles from NYT online -- but there's no downside to that registration, so I urge you to consider doing it ... and catch this article soon, before it archived into the pay service.

For more insights into music (among many things) try out the WIRED interview with Brian Eno (WIRED 16.06 - 15th Anniversary issue) ... a short excerpt:

The problem comes when you find yourself doing things just because they are now technologically possible. An example of this is "correcting" drum takes in a song. Few drummers are really constant and accurate, and there is a ridiculous temptation — because it is now possible — to correct them, to make sure that every beat falls precisely in the right place. I hate this approach and would rather use a good, honest rhythm box than convert a living drummer into one.

What do people want from Art? I don't know the full answer, but one thing I'm increasingly sure of is that they want life. They want the sense that there is something going on, that something real and exciting and of its moment has been captured — from a performance of a Chopin Nocturne just as much as from a Bruce Springsteen song. As John Cage used to say, "Art is a verb" — and as I always say, "So should be the experience of Art".

In an age of digital perfectability, it takes quite a lot of courage to say, "Leave it alone" and, if you do decide to make changes, [it takes] quite a lot of judgment to know at which point you stop. A lot of technology offers you the chance to make everything completely, wonderfully perfect, and thus to take out whatever residue of human life there was in the work to start with. It would be as though someone approached Cezanne and said, "You know, if you used Photoshop you could get rid of all those annoying brush marks and just have really nice, flat color surfaces." It's a misunderstanding to think that the traces of human activity — brushstrokes, tuning drift, arrhythmia — are not part of the work. They are the fundamental texture of the work, the fine grain of it.

Indeed, in some sorts of music they are the primary content. A lot of music doesn't seek to innovate structurally or compositionally, but entirely in terms of the individuality of performance. Think of the blues: the same three chords in pretty much the same structure, and with little variation of lyrical content (Robert Wyatt once described the blues as 12,000 versions of the same song). What listeners treasure about blues performances are the textural and performative differences from one to the next, differences that come to seem very important and huge as we become accustomed to the restricted vocabulary of the medium. Similarly, connoisseurs of piano sonatas will hear enormous differences between Alfred Brendel's version of a piece and the same piece played by Arthur Rubinstein.

But if you're sitting in a studio, listening to things over and over and over again, and there's a big ProTools rig sitting there, and an engineer itching to show his chops, it's hard to resist saying "OK — straighten those drums out." And indeed, when you first do it, it sounds better. And so you do more of it — fix up the guitar riffs, get that vocal really in tune, replace some indistinct bass notes, sugar the whole thing up so it's sparkling like a Christmas tree. Ah — it's all so wonderful...until you finally realize you've reached not audio Heaven but audio Hollywood — bland, tasteless, entirely indistinguishable and standard product. Brendel becomes Liberace.

He's still the guiding light for Intelligent Dance Music of all sorts

And another one from the NYT, sent in by a friend in California:

“Listen to this,” Daniel Levitin said. “What is it?” He hit a button on his computer keyboard and out came a half-second clip of music. It was just two notes blasted on a raspy electric guitar, but I could immediately identify it: the opening lick to the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar.”

Then he played another, even shorter snippet: a single chord struck once on piano. Again I could instantly figure out what it was: the first note in Elton John’s live version of “Benny and the Jets.”

Scientifically, Dr. Levitin’s colleagues credit him for focusing attention on how music affects our emotions, turf that wasn’t often covered by previous generations of psychoacousticians, who studied narrower questions about how the brain perceives musical sounds. “The questions he asks are very very musical, very concerned with the fact that music is an art that we interact with, not just a bunch of noises,” said Rita Aiello, an adjunct professor in the department of psychology at New York University.

“So I started wondering: How was the brain able to do this?” Dr. Levitin said. “What’s going on there, and why are some people better than others? And why is music such an emotional experience?” He began sitting in on neuroscience classes at Stanford University.

Dr. Levitin grinned. “That,” he said, “is the original demo tape of the Beatles. It was rejected by every record company. And you can see why. To you and me it sounds terrible. But George Martin heard this and thought, ‘Oh yeah, I can imagine a multibillion-dollar industry built on this.’

This spring Dr. Levitin began an even more involved experiment to determine how much emotion is conveyed by live performers. In April he took participants in a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert — the conductor Keith Lockhart, five of the musicians and 15 audience members — and wired them with sensors to measure their state of arousal, including heart rate, body movements and muscle tension.

Dr. Levitin’s work has occasionally undermined some cherished beliefs about music. For example recent years have seen an explosion of “Baby Mozart” videos and toys, based on the idea — popular since the ’80s — that musical and mathematical ability are inherently linked.

But Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard known for his defense of evolutionary psychology, has publicly disparaged this idea. Dr. Pinker has called music “auditory cheesecake,” something pleasant but not evolutionarily nutritious. If it is a sexual signal for reproduction, then why, Dr. Pinker asked, does “a 60-year-old woman enjoy listening to classical music when she’s alone at home?” Dr. Levitin wrote an entire chapter refuting Dr. Pinker’s arguments; when I asked Dr. Pinker about Dr. Levitin’s book he said he hadn’t read it.

The New York Times, September 16, 2003: 
 We Got Rhythm; the Mystery Is How and Why
 By NICHOLAS WADE

In lovers' songs, military marches, weddings and funerals, every occasion where a degree of emotion needs to be evoked, music is an
indispensable ingredient.

Yet the ability to enjoy music has long puzzled biologists because it does nothing evident to help survival. Why, therefore, should evolution have built into the human brain this soul-stirring source of pleasure? Man's faculties for enjoying and producing music, Darwin wrote, "must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed."

Music is still a mystery, a tangle of culture and built-in skills that researchers are trying to tease apart. No one really knows why music is found
in all cultures, why most known systems of music are based on the octave, why some people have absolute pitch and whether the brain handles music with special neural circuits or with ones developed for other purposes. Recent research, however, has produced a number of theories about the brain and music.

It could be that the brain perceives music with the same circuits it uses to hear and analyze human speech, and that it thrills to its cadences with centers designed to mediate other kinds of pleasure. Dr. Anne Blood and Dr. Robert J. Zatorre, of the Montreal Neurological Institute, recently took PET scans of musicians' brains while they listened to self-selected pieces of music that gave them "chills" of euphoria. The works included Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 and Barber's Adagio for Strings. The music, the researchers reported, activated similar neural systems of reward and emotion as those stimulated by food, sex and addictive drugs.

If music depends on neural circuits developed for other reasons, then it is just a happy accident, regardless of evolution, that people enjoy it. This is the position taken by Dr. Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard University. Music, he writes in his 1997 book "How the Mind Works,"
is "auditory cheesecake"; it just happens to tickle several important parts of the brain in a highly pleasurable way, as cheesecake tickles the
palate.  These include the language ability (with which music overlaps in several ways); the auditory cortex; the system that responds to the emotional signals in a human voice crying or cooing; and the motor control system that injects rhythm into the muscles when walking or dancing.

That music can activate all these powerful systems at once is the reason it packs such a mental oomph, in Dr. Pinker's analysis. But since each of these systems evolved for independent reasons, music itself is no more an evolutionary adaptation than is the ability to like dessert, which arises from intense stimulation of the taste buds responsive to sweet and fatty substances.

But other evolutionary psychologists believe the faculty of enjoying music is no accident. Darwin suggested that human ancestors, before acquiring the power of speech, "endeavored to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm." It is because of music's origin in courtship, Darwin believed, that it is "firmly associated with some of the strongest passions an animal is capable of feeling."

In his theory of sexual selection, Darwin proposed that traits found attractive in courtship would enable their owners to get more genes into the
next generation. The upshot would be the emergence of adornments that had no immediately obvious survival value in themselves, like the peacock's tail or the troubadour's ballads.

Darwin's ideas about music have been extended by Dr. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Miller notes their potency in pointing to the opportunities open to popular musicians for transmitting their genes to the next generation. The rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix, for instance, had "sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel long-term relationships with at least two women, and fathered at least three children in the United States, Germany, and Sweden.  Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he would have fathered many more," Dr. Miller writes.

Why on earth would nubile young women choose a rock star as a possible father of their children instead of more literary and reflective professionals such as, say, journalists? Dr. Miller sees music as an excellent indicator of fitness in the Darwinian struggle for survival. Since music draws on so many of the brain's faculties, it vouches for the health of the organ as a whole.  And since music in ancient cultures seems often to have been linked with dancing, a good fitness indicator for the rest of the body, anyone who could sing and dance well was advertising the general excellence of their mental and physical genes to a potential mate.

"Music evolved and continues to function as a courtship display, mostly broadcast by young males to attract females," Dr. Miller writes in "The
Origins of Music," a collection of essays by him and others. 

But other psychologists argue that Dr. Miller's courtship theory does not do full justice to another important dimension of music, its role in cementing social relationships and coordinating the activities of large groups of people. Dr. Robin Dunbar, of Liverpool University, has shown that monkeys spend a large amount of time grooming other members of their social group, so much so that they would scarcely have time to look for food if their 50-strong groups were to grow any larger.

Dr. Dunbar believes that the much larger human groups, of 150 members or so, overcame the grooming barrier by developing a new kind of social glue, namely language. Group singing, or chorusing, may have been an intermediate step in this process, he suggests. He has preliminary evidence that singing in church produces endorphins, a class of brain hormone thought to be important in social bonding, he said in an e-mail message.

Others, like Dr. Edward Hagen of Humboldt University in Berlin and Dr. Gregory A. Bryant of the University of California at Santa Cruz, believe the
role of music in human evolutionary history was not to create social cohesion but to signal it to rival groups. By putting on a better song-and-dance display, a group could show it had the coordination to prevail in a scrap, and could thus avoid a fight altogether, they write in an article available on the Web.

Male chimpanzees sometimes chorus in a call known as a pant-hoot, though usually to attract females to a new source of fruit they have found. For human ancestors, musical displays of this kind "may have formed the evolutionary basis for the musical abilities of modern humans," Dr. Hagen and Dr. Bryant write. The Pentagon's vigorous support of military bands; $163 million in 1997 — lends a certain resonance to this view.

The courting and social cohesion theories of music's origins assume that there are structures in the human brain that have evolved specifically to handle music. If no such structures exist, then Dr. Pinker's theory or something like it is correct.

A leading clue that points to music-specific structures, yet is so far not conclusive, is that many features of music are universal as well as  apparently innate, meaning present at birth. All societies have music, all sing lullaby-like songs to their infants, and most produce tonal music, or
music composed in subsets of the 12-tone chromatic scale, such as the diatonic or pentatonic scales. Some of the earliest known musical instruments, crane bone flutes from the Jiahu site in China, occupied from 7000 to 5700 B.C., produce a tonal scale.

Dr. Sandra Trehub, of the University of Toronto, has developed methods of testing the musical preferences of infants as young as 2 to 6 months. She finds they prefer consonant sounds, like perfect fifths or perfect fourths, over dissonant ones. A reasonable conclusion is that "the rudiments of music listening are gifts of nature rather than products of culture," she wrote in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience.

But although certain basic features of music, such as the octave, intervals with simple ratios like the perfect fifth, and tonality, seem to be innate, they are probably not genetic adaptations for music, "but rather appear to be side effects of general properties of the auditory system," conclude two Cambridge scientists, Josh McDermott of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dr. Marc Hauser of Harvard, in an unpublished article.

The human auditory system is probably tuned to perceive the most important sounds in a person's surroundings, which are those of the human voice.  Three neuroscientists at Duke University, Dr. David A. Schwartz, Dr. Catherine Q. Howe and Dr. Dale Purves, say that on the basis of this cue they may have solved the longstanding mysteries of the structure of the chromatic scale and the reason why some harmonies are more pleasing than others.

Though every human voice, and maybe each utterance, is different, a certain commonality emerges when many different voices are analyzed. The human vocal tract shapes the vibrations of the vocal cords into a set of harmonics that are more intense at some frequencies than others relative to the fundamental note. The principal peaks of intensity occur at the fifth and the octave, with lesser peaks at other intervals that correspond to most of the 12 tones of the chromatic scale, the Duke researchers say in an article published last month in the Journal of Neuroscience. Almost identical spectra were produced by speakers of English, Mandarin, Persian and Tamil.

The Duke researchers believe the auditory system judges sounds to be pleasant the closer they approximate to this generalized power spectrum of the human voice. "A musical tone combination whose power is concentrated at the same places as a human speech sound will sound more familiar and more natural," Dr. Schwartz said.

Some people are unable to appreciate music, raising the question of whether some music-specific faculty has been damaged. People who are tone deaf also fail to hear pitch changes in the human voice, so this deficit does not seem specific to music. Some patients have music agnosia, an inability to recognize familiar melodies, even ones to which they know the lyrics. But the brain has to store memories about music somewhere, and the music agnosia patients could have incurred memory damage that just happened to hit the music archive, Mr. McDermott, of M.I.T., said.

"Any innate biases on music must derive from something in the brain, but at present there is little evidence for neural circuitry dedicated to music," Mr. McDermott and Dr. Hauser conclude.

Dr. Zatorre, of the Montreal institute, takes a similar view. The brain has evolved faculties for perceiving sounds, organizing events in time and
maintaining memory stores, he said. "Once you've got all that hardware in place, it can be used for a lot of different purposes. But I don't think
it follows that music was selected for."

Whether music is cheesecake, courtship or cohesion, its mystery remains unbreached.

Music and Language Connection 

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/11/09/songs_of_ourselves/ 

Songs of ourselves
New research suggests that we like music that sounds just like us
By Christine Kenneally, 11/9/2003

MUSIC IS ONE OF THE human species's relatively few universal abilities. Without formal training, any individual, from Stone Age tribesman to suburban teenager, has the ability to recognize music and, in some fashion, to make it.

Why this should be so is a mystery. After all, music isn't necessary for getting through the day, and if it aids in reproduction, it does so only in highly indirect ways. Language, by contrast, is also everywhere -- but for reasons that are more obvious. With language, you and the members of your tribe can organize a migration across Africa, build reed boats and cross the seas, and communicate at night even when you can't see each other. Modern culture, in all its technological extravagance, springs directly from the human talent for manipulating symbols and syntax.

Scientists have always been intrigued by the connection between music and language. Yet over the years, words and melody have acquired a vastly different status in the lab and the seminar room. While language has long been considered essential to unlocking the mechanisms of human intelligence, music is generally treated as an evolutionary frippery -- mere "auditory cheesecake," as the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it.

But thanks to a decade-long wave of neuroscience research, that tune is changing. A flurry of recent publications suggests that language and music may equally be able to tell us who we are and where we're from -- not just emotionally, but biologically. In July, the journal Nature Neuroscience devoted a special issue to the topic. And in an article in the August 6 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, David Schwartz, Catherine Howe, and Dale Purves of Duke University argued that the sounds of music and the sounds of language are intricately connected.

. . .

To grasp the originality of this idea, it's necessary to realize two things about how music has traditionally been understood. First, musicologists have long emphasized that while each culture stamps a special identity onto its music, music itself has some universal qualities. For example, in virtually all cultures sound is divided into some or all of the 12 intervals that make up the chromatic scale -- that is, the scale represented by the keys on a piano. For centuries, observers have attributed this preference for certain combinations of tones to the mathematical properties of sound itself.

Some 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras was the first to note a direct relationship between the harmoniousness of a tone combination and the physical dimensions of the object that produced it. For example, a plucked string will always play an octave lower than a similar string half its size, and a fifth lower than a similar string two-thirds its length. This link between simple ratios and harmony has influenced music theory ever since.

This music-is-math idea is often accompanied by the notion that music, formally speaking at least, exists apart from the world in which it was created. Writing recently in The New York Review of Books, pianist and critic Charles Rosen discussed the long-standing notion that while painting and sculpture reproduce at least some aspects of the natural world, and writing describes thoughts and feelings we are all familiar with, music is entirely abstracted from the world in which we live.

Neither idea is right, according to David Schwartz and colleagues. Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular -- which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage. Says Schwartz, "The explanation of music, like the explanation of any product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, not in numbers per se."

Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analyzed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only on the raw sound, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning and sliced sentences into random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 brief segments of speech, they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the building blocks of music are to be found in speech.

Far from being abstract, music presents a strange analog to the patterns created by the sounds of speech. "Music, like the visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world," says Schwartz. "It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the visual environment." In music we hear the echo of our basic sound-making instrument -- the vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras's mathematical equations: We like the sounds that are familiar to us -- specifically, we like sounds that remind us of us.

. . .

This brings up some chicken-or-egg evolutionary questions. It may be that music imitates speech directly, the researchers say, in which case it would seem that language evolved first. It's also conceivable that music came first and language is in effect an imitation of song -- that in everyday speech we hit the musical notes we especially like. Alternately, it may be that music imitates the general products of the human sound-making system, which just happens to be mostly speech. "We can't know this," says Schwartz. "What we do know is that they both come from the same system, and it is this that shapes our preferences."

. . .

Schwartz's study also casts light on the long-running question of whether animals understand or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of "music" in the natural world -- birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronized chimpanzee hooting -- previous studies have found that many laboratory animals don't show a great affinity for the human variety of music making.

Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don't create or perceive music the way we do. The fact that laboratory monkeys can show recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory system, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability. As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognize their own tunes -- a narrow repertoire -- but don't generate novel melodies like we do. There are no avian Mozarts.

But what's been played to the animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve preferences for sound as we do -- based upon the soundscape in which they live -- then their "music" would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way our scales derive from human utterances, a cat's idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and meows. To demonstrate that animals don't appreciate sounds the way we do, we'd need evidence that they don't respond to "music" constructed from their own sound environment.

No matter how the connection between language and music is parsed, what is apparent is that our sense of music, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our biology and in our brains as language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Trehub at the University of Toronto, who also published a paper in the Nature Neuroscience special issue.

For babies, music and speech are on a continuum. Mothers use musical speech to "regulate infants' emotional states," Trehub says. Regardless of what language they speak, the voice all mothers use with babies is the same: "something between speech and song." This kind of communication "puts the baby in a trance-like state, which may proceed to sleep or extended periods of rapture."So if the babies of the world could understand the latest research on language and music, they probably wouldn't be very surprised. The upshot, says Trehub, is that music may be even more of a necessity than we realize.

Christine Kenneally is writing "From Screech to Sonnet," a book about the evolution of language, for Viking.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

NEUROLOGISTS LINK BEAUTIFUL  MUSIC TO BRAIN POWER (Reprinted  from the Los Angeles Times by the Sarasota Herald Tribune, Sept. 9, 1998)

The music that makes the foot tap, the fingers snap and the pulse quicken may one day help scientists retool brains afflicted with a variety of emotional disorders or neurological diseases, a group of researchers said Sunday.

After exploring the neurobiology of music, the researchers reported evidence of music stimulating specific regions of the brain responsible for memory, motor control, timing and language.

Among other things, researchers reported finding particular areas of mental activity linked to emotional responses to music.

In the long run, music could be used in dealing with a variety of disorders, they said.

"That's our goal," said neuroscientist Anne Blood, who conducted the study at McGill University in Montreal. 

"You can activate different parts of the brain, depending on what music you listen to.  So music can stimulate parts of the brain that are underactive in these disorders. Over time, we could retrain the brain in these disorders."

The findings, presented at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Los Angeles, underscore how music may orchestrate a wide variety of neural systems to cast its evocative spell.

"Undeniably, there is a biology of music," said Harvard University Medical School neurobiologist Mark Jude Tramo.  "There is no question that there is specialization within the human brain for the processing of music.  Music is biologically part of human life, just as music is aesthetically part of human life."

Among other things, researchers said different parts of the brain seem to respond directly to harmony.

Using a medical PET scanner to monitor changes in neural activity, neuroscientists at McGill discovered that specific parts of the brain involved in emotion are activated depending on whether the music is pleasant or dissonant.

"Everyone knows music can produce powerful emotional effects.  This suggests different emotions are represented in different parts of the brain," said Blood.

Overall, music seems to involve the brain at almost every level.

Even allowing for cultural differences in musical tastes, the researcher found evidence of music's remarkable power to affect neural activity no matter where they looked in the brain, from primitive regions found in all animals to more recently evolved regions thought to be distinctively human.

"We find that harmony, melody and rhythm had distinct patterns of brain activity.   They involved both the right and left sides of the brain," Parsons said.

Melody affects both sides of the brain equally.  Harmony and rhythm seem to activate the left side of the brain more strongly than the right side.

The neural mechanisms of music may have originally developed as a way of communicating emotion as a precursor to speech, the researchers suggested, offering insights into how the mind integrates sensory information with emotion.

Already, researchers are looking for ways to harness the power of music to change the brain.

Preliminary research in laboratory animals and humans suggests that music might play a role in enhancing intelligence.

The scientists Sunday said the new research could help the clinical practice of neurology, including cognitive rehabilitation.  As a therapeutic tool, for example, some doctors today already use music to help rehabilitate stroke patients.

 

MUSIC, THE BRAIN AND ECSTASY by Robert Jourdain
(1997, Wm. Morrow & Co.)  

Jourdain's work deals with the emotion ecstasy, not the drug.

In the course of discussing how appreciation of music operates as a variant of pattern recognition, and why that is crucial to humans on essentially a cellular level, Jourdain offers such insights as these:

"By providing the brain with an artificial environment, and forcing it through that environment in controlled ways, music imparts the means of experiencing relations far deeper than we encounter in our everyday lives....  In this perfect world, our brains are able to piece together larger understandings than they can in the workaday external world.... It's for this reason that music can be transcendent.  For a few moments it makes us larger than we really are, and the world more orderly than it really is.  We respond not just to the beauty of the sustained deep relations that are revealed, but also to the fact of our perceiving them.  As our brains are thrown into overdrive, we feel our very existence expand...."

"However our bodily representations of music are achieved, they may be responsible for boosting our pleasure all the more by causing our brains to churn out the opiate-like endorphins....  So music is capable of delivering pleasure at virtually every level of our being."

Find out what it is about music that captivates the mind....

Music may also heal the mind....This is from an article by Oliver Sacks, April 2002, in Parade Magazine.

"For reasons we do not yet understand, musical abilities often are among the last to be lost, even in cases of widespread brain damage.  Thus, someone who is disabled by a stroke or by Alzheimer's or another form of dementia may still be able to respond to music in ways that can seem almost miraculous."

....

"This almost universal responsiveness to music is an essential part of our neural nature.  Though analogies often are made to birdsong or animal cries, music in its full sense -- including complexities of rhythm and harmony, of pace, timbre and tonality no less than of melody -- seems to be confined to our own species, like language."

Red Bull Music Academy includes a page by and about Tom Middleton -- Classically-trained musician, DJ and producer Tom Middleton is responsible for an archive of critically-acclaimed productions that draws on everything from Classical to Techno. He owns half of Global Communications with partner, Mark Pritchard. Together, they set up the Evolution label in 91. Middleton has worked under a variety of names including Cosmos and as part of enigmatic live band, The Bays.

In part, Tom observes the following about music:

Three really essential things are melody, harmony and rhythm. These are the ingredients of a piece of music. That's what I've been thinking about a lot recently, just refining it back to those rudiments of music. It's like a nice groove, a rhythm, a pulse and then a melody - something that just sticks in your head. Something you can communicate an emotion through, a simple line. Harmony is that kind of richness and warmth that gels everything else within the music together.

Also very key is creating excitement and tension like in a movie. There are various things you can do within a piece of music to do that. With this I left the bassline until four minutes into the tune and then bring the bassline and then it's like 'Uuhh' - there is the warmth. It's using elements of the 2-step flavour. The sound I'm really passionate about at the moment is Deep Step. It's a fusion of UK 2-step Garage, Deep House, Electro and Techno with a bit of R&B influence. It's a really fresh fusion. MJ Cole has been doing some stuff recently with a urban, Deep Step flavour. I don't hear many people playing this sort of vibe but it's a pulse that is important to pay attention to. It's a new sound. It's fresh.

..................

I played this in a club called Fabric. It's one of the most modern clubbing environments in London at the moment. In the main room, they have a thing called the 'Body Sonic' dancefloor. It connects you to the bass frequencies, resonates bass frequency. If you want to feel music as well as hear it, go to Fabric Room One. It's the next level of clubbing experience because you have that actual sensation of bass frequency in your body. There are some points, when the basslines are in a tune, that are so intense, it feels like you're levitating. You can't feel your feet your whole torso is just.

Heres the science bit. We are resonant beings, just like the resonating molecules that is sound. We are resonating at a certain frequency. It makes us physical. We can feel it. If you look at it on that kind of level, molecules are vibrating at a specific frequency to make us physical. The 'Body Sonic' dancefloor is connecting with that through this medium, the wood floor. You can't get more profound than that, actually connecting with the sound.

Read the entire page at The Red Bull Academy website, or use this Tiny URL:  http://tinyurl.com/7yre 

The January 2001 Issue of MIXMAG has an article in this vein: "How Does Music Work?"  (p. 70)  MIXMAG isn't exceedingly deep as a rule, but they pull together a respectable mix of observation, fact and instruction for this piece:

"Since prehistoric times, music has played a central role in human culture.  It's a big part of most rituals....  Even religion loves music.  Apart from a few uptight (and relatively recent) European theologies, religion without music is rare.  The Hindu vedas, the world's oldest scriptures, say that the universe was created through sound. ...Shamans use drumming to help them enter drug-induced trances."

From there, it's off into a discussion of the discovery by the Greeks of the mathematical foundations of harmonics in music and how, in modern times, this relationship makes computer manipulation of music a natural evolution of the artform. (*Check out Goldie's take on the anti-technology complaints about music -- it's a classic rejoinder.)

In a number of accompanying sidebars, the authors discuss DJ techniques for building and maintaining crowd reaction during a set, comparative sound quality of CDs and vinyl, decibels as a weapon and other informative tidbits.

If your newsstand doesn't stock MIXMAG, visit their website at http://www.mixmag.net/ for information on subscriptions and back issues.

djmixed.com is the source for BPM Culture magazine, which featured Perry Farrell on the cover of the March 2001 issue.  Discussing his new interest in DJing, Farrell says:  

I feel like dance will save our lives.  Those that don't dance have emotional imbalances and illnesses.  I mean, here's an interesting thing I learned very recently:  The matrix of the mind, the organizational skill of the mind, is strengthened through DJing.

Contact www.djmixed.com for more information on the article.

Fiction abounds in homages to music and its power in our lives ... and the way it reflects our lives, even our biochemistry:  Try Richard Powers' 1991 novel, The Goldbug Variations.  A massive intellect, Powers has proposed an equation between the structure of Bach's Goldberg Variations and the body's RNA ... right in the midst of a compelling love story..

Also in the realm of fiction, Issue 76 of Granta (the "Music" issue) included Philip Pullman's Medtner, a short send-up of writing music criticism and reviews.  I'll try to give you a bit of the flavor of this terrific piece with a short quote:

Not long ago I tried to explain to a friend the effect that Nicolai Medtner's music has on me.  I spoke with eloquence, passion and wit; analogies of the most ingenious kind sprang to my lips; I found myself stirred to a frenzy of admiration for the profundity of my insights.

"I don't know what you're talking about," said my friend.

Discussing music when you have no technical knowledge of it is to be reduced to finding more or less fancy ways of saying, "I like that bit when it goes da-da-da-DUM."  However, we have to try, or be silent; so I shall try to say why I love Nicolai Medtner, and why his piano music satisfies me so deeply....

The entire piece is under three pages ... I recommend it.

On the real-life-personal side, here's a page that appeared on DJ Dazy's website (www.djdazy.com) used with her gracious permission, featuring a few of the SisterDJs being interviewed about women making music :

Girl DJs
Melanie Dawn and Lisa Louise Santonato

What offers a person the ability to step outside of one's given roles and into another one? To scratch convention and throw in experience, to spin thought into action? Lately, it seems girl DJs have been the ones mixing it all up. For any aspiring DJ, there's definitely a learning curve and a lifestyle change involved in playing music professionally. For women DJs - or girl DJs, if you prefer - the learning process is not necessarily more difficult, it's the shift that's harder.

The process of choosing to become a DJ is what I find the most fascinating. It's that moment when a person realizes he or she must play music. Not only for themselves, but playing for others as well.  There's a lot of excitement that comes with the many challenges involved in being a DJ. So, with all those guys out there doing their thing, and doing it well, what happens when a girl decides to get up there and do it herself? From most of the DJs Melanie and I talked to we found that if there's one common thread it leads to one thing - it's about the music, the way it makes you feel, and having the ability to share that experience with others while getting them to dance.

When a girl discovers how to take the music in her hands, and spin it, play it, scratch it, and fuckitup until it's dope, does that make her any different from a guy, or from the girl she was before, for that matter? Probably not, but we sure did sit and think about it for a long time. We got a bunch of girls around a table and checked it out. Regretfully, we couldn't hook up with all the girl DJs out there, but we talked with as many as we could. Here's the scoop.

***

Lisa Louise and I had a wicked girl bonding night as we sat with Little T, a.k.a. Tanya Brunes (Leaf Recordings), Michelle McKay (Diva Productions / Full Moon Records), Leanne Bitner (Leaf Recordings / Nettwerk Records), and Amtrack a.k.a. Annmarie McCullough (Girls Kick Ass Productions / Bucko-5 Records) gabbing about all aspects of the scene. Everyone seemed to come to a consensus on what drew them to the tables. THE MUSIC. That is what it's all about! But to start at the beginning, it is about as hard to find even an intro, as it is to enter into the world of DJing. In a lot of ways, the two just go hand in hand. A Woman DJ, what a concept! At least that's what some guy thought at the last party I went to.  There was DJ Heather (of Chicago) rippin' up the tables, when this guy walks over, mystified, points to the tables and shouts, "Do you hear that mix? And it's a girrl!" Of course it's a GIRL, pal. I mean, are you really that surprised that the feminine energy could display a mix as tight as that?!

Now don't worry, this article is not going to be the proverbial 'I am Woman hear me roar!'', but it certainly is going to educate you on what it's like to be a woman in the world of DJing."  It's not an easy task to, well, as Little T put it "crap your pants the first time you play, in front of..."  

"Guys, all guys!" Leanne adds for emphasis. Of the handful of women DJs in a city teeming with some pretty good ones, here are some of the few women who have managed to pave the way and show the guys just what it's like when a chick gets behind the tables. Little T takes the lead.

***

Little T: "More for women than it is for guys, cause women feel things so differently than men do.  And we have so much more feeling for the music - I'm not saying... but in the beginning, we have more feeling for the music, and guys that I know that have started DJing, have more feeling for all the girls. And they'll openly admit that."

(Laughter all around.)

Michelle: "I think there's also an element, like when it comes down to playing out, specifically, of performance. There's a circle of completion there, and of communication as well. And I don't mean strictly ego-gratifying, but I mean like an exchange, of emotion, and energy, and completion, although that sounds a little cliche, it's definitely there for me, and it completes it when I play against that, and people get out and dance. It makes it feel completed."

Amtrack: "I think the music is the basis for everybody's draw to it, but then you find somebody who inspires you, then you see someone spin, and it's just such an experience. For me - for all of us I guess, but for me, it was Doc for sure. But I mean, I think we all have that one person that made that last push."

I (Melanie) got DJ Renee Brunette's views one night as we yelled over the throbbing bass, and soulful tracks one Wednesday night at Bar None. As women we all have different points of views on things, but it still seems to come down to the feeling you get from the music.

Renee: "Just the love of the music basically, and just deciding that out of all the industries out there the music industry was more appealing, cause I liked to listen to it so much... I like the feeling it gives me. I don't feel the same way when I hear other styles of music. It makes me happy."

TAXI: Let's talk about the relationship of how you as women communicate music. Do you find that you communicate something a little bit differently? I mean, as individuals each communicating a different style, a different message, or a different feeling, but as comparison to the way guy DJs are out there?

Amtrack: "Somebody actually commented this to me yesterday, somebody who has a very similar taste in music, said, 'You go out there on a different tangent than I do, because you bring the romantic, maybe love-stuff into your music, which I would never do.' The guy would go towards the harder, like you know what I mean? I think that's just it. You can like the same kind of music but I think women bring something different to it, I think it's a little bit more funky, a little bit more groovy..."

Michelle: "Not necessarily. I think even down to details, like how you touch the mixer, how you touch the record, watch the difference in touch..."

Renee: "Of the girls that I have heard, there seems to be more feeling to it, but that could just be me to. I do think that girls care more about what is going on. Girls are more receptive of other people and more sensitive."

Melanie spoke separately with DJ Dazy (from San Francisco / House Vibes) about her take on it all. As she says, "I think women who play records or make music, have a bit more passion in what they do. I'm not saying that men don't but now that I have heard a lot of women playing records, I can tell the difference."

When it comes to record shopping, the experience can be both gratifying and distasteful. Getting more records, well that's the gratification, dealing with the kid next to you, well that's a different story...

Leanne: "Even with record shopping you have to go through some bullshit too. You're in there and like... even when I go in there now, there's guys who look at me like, 'why even bother?'"

Little T: "I was at Trax last week, in Toronto, 'kay. Tim had put this stack of records - he always puts a stack of records aside for me when he knows I'm coming - so I had to go through 70 records. So this is like, this long, grueling, entire day procedure. So I get up there, and all the single booths are taken, and at Trax you have to go up there, and they play the records for you. You can't physically touch them and it's sooo frustrating cause all you wanna do is go? (flip flip flip) and you know what's up. So I go through this entire thing, put the stack on the counter, and the guy looks at me, like 'Oh, my god, I can't believe this girl wants to listen to 70 records. I gave him the first record, he looks at me and he goes...? Puts it on, and I go - no. 'Next'. And he goes "Can I ask you what you're looking for? Do you know what style of music you'd like to hear?" No, I don't. I go, "Yeah, what's here!" He goes, "Oh? fine." Totally treating me like I have no idea what's going on. Playing the entire side of a record, I'm like? "Next, go, great! I wanna know what happens right there. Okay, thank you. Next!"

***

TAXI: "Do you think that women are being accepted more as DJs than they were before?"

Unanimous: "Yes!"

Dazy: "Yes! It's totally awesome!"

Renee: "Basically if you love music it doesn't matter what sex you are, how you handle yourself in the industry is another thing. If you are just mellow and relate to guys on a level then it's cool. A lot of younger guys don't take you seriously, but on the other hands a lot of older guys are accepting of it. It really depends. It's the same for guys starting out, except girls have an advantage because they are a minority and they have tits. I think when Little T started, she had a tough time cause she was like one of the only girls, and she paved the way, but now more girls are popping up so it's more common."

Leanne: "There are advantages of being girls spinning. People want girls to spin, it's an attraction. It's completely an attraction to have a girl who wants to spin. Oh, and maybe she's good! Wow, what a concept!"

Michelle: "There was something I was reading last night, actually it was an interview with Krista, she made such a good point. It was just like, the problem with being a girl and being a DJ is that whole sexual angle. it completely overshadows everything. It's like, completely irrelevant. But the point that she made, was that if a girl happens to meet somebody at a party, or whatever, then it's like, oh yeah, she's using her sexual angle, blah blah blah. But if a guy happens to sleep with twenty girls from the party, then it's like, 'Wow, way to go!' Like the amount of DJ groupies you can pick up at a party is like, pasted to the top of your CV, you know, like, if you're a girl, it's like this horrible thing to have done."

Leanne: "You know what I've heard guys say a million times? Do you know how sexy it is - like if there's a good-looking girl up there playing records, it's like gotta be one of the most sexiest things in the world. I'm like, Yeah. Hell, yeah."

Little T: "I like, hide behind the turntables. I wear the biggest, baggiest, grossest clothing I can find. I like, slap it all on, I slink through the club and hide behind people, and I get behind the turntables and I like, hide there. I don't want anyone to look at me, I just want everyone to listen to what I'm doing and that's it."

That's exactly it. That is the reason the DJ is up there. Whether male or female, the DJ is the driving force communicating the music to you. It shouldn't matter who is up there, all that matters is that they establish a connection and communicate that connection to you. Becoming a DJ is not always what it's cracked up to be. Like anything it takes time, dedication, money, and the will to just do it. It takes years to achieve the status of making it a full-blown career, and it's not always a stable one at that. But those that put their heart and soul into it, love it like no other.

***

TAXI: "When it comes to actually getting out there and playing in front of people, how do you determine when you are ready? Is the first time generally the right time?"

Little T: "Can you imagine if that stuck in their mind? The first time you ever played. But the first couple years that you are playing you do improve every single time you play."

Michelle: "It's like parenting, you'll never feel ready. Someone will kick your ass and make you do it... The first time I played out was the most horrible experience of my whole entire life. I was just so humiliated... Then someone booked me for a big party, and about a week later I called them back and said, 'you know that I am new.' He said, 'oh ya it's cool. I asked around and it's cool.' From that day, I practiced and played everyday for 6 hours. Everyday until that party, and it went off!"

Little T: "The first time I played out I had to play for two hours with T-Bone and Darius. It was Ray's party, he put on this Christmas party, and in the bottom underneath, it said '...And Introducing Little T'. Everybody had been hounding me to play out. I'd been playing for like 8 months. I'd be, 'I'm not ready I'm not going to play out anywhere in public.' I played for two hours and I was so upset.  Anyone and everyone came by to hear me play, and it was so horrid..."

TAXI: "Advice to newcomers?"

Little T: "Don't be intimidated. Buy some records. Learn the labels that your style of music is on."

Michelle: "Just go out and do it!"

Leanne: "Have someone show you the beats, the 4/4 time. People need to know that there is timing involved just like matching music. It's not just matching beats... and you are going to have to pay your dues."

Michelle: "Very important when you are starting is to prioritize your spending. It's expensive to get started."

Little T: "None of us have nice clothing."

Michelle: "It won't just be given to you on a silver platter. It's going to take a hell of a lot of work. It won't come easy, you are just going to have to earn the respect. Also you should expect that it is going to take a long time to learn."

Renee: "Be yourself, don't compromise anything. Respect yourself, and respect others. Follow your dreams and follow your passion. It sounds really cliche, but it's true. I think girls sometimes underestimate themselves, but anyone can do anything."

TAXI: "Would this be your most fulfilling out of all the jobs that you are doing?"

Leanne: "Hell ya!"

Amtrack: "Yes!"

Michelle: " It ranks up there, I'm also an artist."

Little T: "It's all I do except for the label."

TAXI: "What is the most exciting, most passionate thing about what you do?

Dazy: "The music...it seems to get better and better every year."

Little T: "The music that comes out everyday. And when you get records you're like 'woohoo, I got more records!'"

Michelle: "That searing hot track that hits you!"

Leanne: "One of the things that happened for me was on New Year's, I played every single one of my very favourite records, and for the first time everyone that was out there, they loved it, they were dancing. And I was, 'Oh my God you people are sharing my feeling!' It meant a lot."

Amtrack: " I think it's the feeling that you get when you know there is connection between you, the turntables, the records that are on them and the people. When you get that, you've made people dance. Cuz dancing is something I've always done, and when I see people dancing to my music, there is nothing that is better than that feeling."

"Feeling from the music", that phrase seemed to come up quite a bit with all the girls. Emotionally as women, the feeling we get when we hear a song, the way it hits us, the way it consumes our body is much the same we get from anything we are passionate about. If a woman is passionate about something it absorbs her whole being, and those around her can only be struck by it's sense of sensitivity. When a woman gets up there, fuks the mix up til it's so phat you don't you what hit you, she's just graced you with her technique and is giving a part of herself to you, and that makes it all worth the listening.

A few stats:

Little T: 7 years, house

Amtrack: 1 year, house, progressive house, downtempo

Leanne: 2 - 3 years, phat house

Michelle: 1 year, house (deep dubby to hard)

Renee: 2 ? years, house

Dazy: 6 years, house (chicago, deep, and disco)

Arizona Republic Newspaper

The Tables are Turning: Lady deejays don't want a revolution, all they want is a little respect

D. Parvaz adn David Proffitt

Pop quiz: Name some hot hip-hop deejays. Ok, who did you come up with? Robs Swift (of the X-ecutioners)? Gearhead? Invisibl Skratch Piklz? DJ Faust?  You're more or less on track. Thes guys are some of the top spinners in the business.

Now try and think of some female deejays. Go ahead, take your time.

Boy oh boy, where are all the girls? They're out there, you just don't hear much about them.  A few female deejays across the country and in Arizona are starting to make noise, but they still run into the attitude that they're "just girls" who are hired by promoters who want to prove their political correctness.  It's a distinction that many of them wish would disappear.

"The kids don't really care (about the deejay's gender)," says Mara, a Valley deejay who spins mostly electro, breakbeat and house. "The only people it really matters to are the promoter and the other deejays...and it disappoints me that they're not looking at who plays well."  She says everyone is too focused on bean counting.

After all, promoters benefit from a gender gap because they can say they've got female deejays on their fliers. But the problem is that they still don't expect much from female deejays.  Women get the gigs, but they don't get the respect. And the one thing they'd like to see change-- that they're viewed as novelty acts-- is precisely what gets them a lot of their gigs.

The irony isn't lost on the deejays. Still, they'd rather sacrifice a night's pay than play a gig they don't deserve.

"If you're hiring me just because I'm a girl, I won't play for you," Mara says. "If you're good enough to be up there (on the deejay stand), it shouldn't matter if you're a girl, a boy, whatever. That's the thing that upsets me about people hiring female deejays-- you wouldn't hire a male if he sucks."

After playin a couple of parties where she felt like she only got a spot because she's female, she avoids becoming the token woman on the flier by asking promoters who else is spinning and why they asked her before agreeing to play.

Mara's been playing out for about four years-- practically an era in the high-turnover world of dance music-- but she says she doesn't always get the same respect as her male counterparts.

DJ Symphony, the sole female member of the Beat Junkies, a Los Angeles-based hip-hop crew, says women probably view deejaying as a guy thing, while men don't take their female counterparts seriously.

"I think the male friends that have turntables might view a girl as a groupie," she says, recalling how a woman she knew of lost interest in deejaying. "I guess they just sent her little subliminal messages."

Other female deejays are beating the odds, such as the Valley's Miss Jag, who started spinning darkstep and techstep jungle about a year ago on a friend's decks.  "He said that I had natural beatmatching skills," she says. "We ran out to Swell (Cothing and Records in Tempe), and he bought me five or six records and told me to practice."

So she did.

Hundreds of practice hours and a few dozen record purchases later, she got a gig. Then another, and then another.  Now she's getting out-of-state bookings and is about to come out with her first mix tape.  She said that being female definitely helped her get attention, but that focusing on an accident of genetics takes attention away from the most important thing for deejays-- how well they play the music.

"I don't think it should matter-- what would happen if I dressed up like guy? Would I get the attention? Probably not," she says. "I think it's great to get attention, but I just want to be known as a deejay."

Tucson deejay Lady Jane also started spinning jungle about a year ago, and she's had the same quick rise as Miss Jag.  At one point male deejays were asking her to help them get jobs, an uncomfortable experience since they'd been spinning two or three times longer than she had.  She attributes this to female deejays' being something of a novelty.

"Promoters talk to so many guys, they must feel like it's the same thing all the time," she said.

But in the long run, deejays will earn respect for their solid skills, not the type of hormones they have.

"I think it's great that some people are like, 'Girl deejays! We need more!' but that's not it for me,"  Miss Jag says. "For me, it comes down to the music."

Such success could open the field to more women. San Jose-based DJ Dazy is optimisic. She runs an online mailing list called "sisterdjs" from her Web site (www.djdazy.com), with about 90 subscribers worldwide.

"There are a lot more female deejays everywhere," Dazy says. "When I first started deejaying six years ago, I could count all the women deejays on my hands. I think in the next couple of years we are going to see a lot more female deejays playing out."

Arizona Mix Mistresses

Profiles by David Proffitt

Miss Jag Also known as: Jennifer Tanguy Style: Darkstep and techstep, "moveable" jungle. Dating advice: "Sometimes guys says it turns them on (that a woman can spin records)-- I just blow them off." Mix tape? Soon. Check Swell Clothing and Records, 1444 N. Scottsdale Road, Tempe.

Genesis of a deejay: "After I saw Emile, Gary (Menichello) and Bahamut at Bassics (in November '96), I knew that I wanted to be up there and do that." Best trainspotter: "My mom came to my debut at Planet Rampant (in November '97). She said it was 'interesting.'"

Lady Jane Also known as: Erin Gwinn Style: Techstep jungle, "darker, musical stuff." Mix tape?  Yes, but supply is spotty. Check Swell, Plastik Records (101 S. Central Ave., Phoenix) or Burn Music (7607 E. McDowell Road, Scottsdale). Gut reaction to deejaying: "I play oboe in an orchestra (at the University of Arizona), so the thought of all the freedom I have deejaying was almost scary at first." Academic goal: To put on a party for her senior thesis where a deejay and a chamber orchestra play together. "I'd have to find some really good musicians, though. The beats on the record don't change, and they'd have to keep together." Parting thoughts on gender: "I've always been a tomboy, so maybe that makes me more open to being in a male-dominated situation like deejaying." Current whereabouts: Unknown. Gwinn feld Tucson for the wilds of Los Angeles this summer. Reports are that she'll be back for the fall semester at the UA.

Mara Also known as: Mara Arrieta Style: Electro, house and breakbeat. "I like to mix it up a lot and play different styles. It's important to show you can play everything, and it keeps them guessing."  Mix tape? No. "I find them really limiting. What if somebody hears your tape from a couple of years ago and thinks you're bad because the music's not fresh? If you want to hire me, I'll tell you where to come see me, and I'll do a good job." Trainspotters beware: "I'd rather play for three people dancing than 3,000 people standing there watching me. What kind of vibe is that? I hate it when people watch me.

DJ Andy W. shared tips on DJing with a friend, who shared them with the sisterdjs newsgroup.  Andy's tips on learning to DJ reflect the passion that committed people bring to the art of mixing music.  With Andy's kind permission, I share them with you:

From: AndyW 

Subject: Re: How did you learn to be a DJ

When first starting out, mix everyday... if only for a couple minutes. Never leave the decks frustrated. Have a positive attitude where there is no such thing as failure, just different modes of learning... some obviously more successful than others.

Make tapes of yourself.

Learn your records. Start with ten that you know work together. Know them well. Know when they break, know when they go. Practice them in a predetermined set (aka striving for "perfection" in mixes that you know sound good), and alternate with an on the spot mixed up order (aka learning to improvise) often as well.

Mix friend's records, especially if they spin another genre (acid breaks and jungle are particularly useful to learn to spin because the phrasing is so obviously off if you fuck up).

Buy more records.

Name different styles of mixes. For example, I try when I sit down and mix try to get a couple peak to drop mixes, a couple flat smooth runners, bass punch runs, a couple tricks, etc. Learn to be flexible. I know a lot of DJs who can't mix without seperate EQ per channel, and trust me...many massives still use those fucking peice of shit MP-24's with no bass cut or any EQ whatsoever per channel. Learn to mix without the crossfader, without monitors, without headphones... each of these teach you important things about what to listen for in a mix. Fuck with yourself and you'll better deal with adversity. Almost anybody with some basic skills and good records can get lucky and spin a good set when the fates are helping... the goal is playing solid and getting people off even when it's not a perfect setup or a good night for you (or say, some heartless mugwump nazi prick face steals your records and you end up playing a friend's that you're not entirely familiar with).

Grab a stack of records in a a similar BPM range and beatmatch from one to the next to the next as fast as you can (record this for some real fun).

Beatmatch whole records together and just let them play through...

Try not touching the record once you initially mix it in... use just the pitch (I've gotten away from this lately... something I'm working on actually).

Keep it fun.

Hit the basics: Get your volume control (like when you slam in a track, that it's at the volume you wanted it to be), phrasing (choosing points at which the records line up in a complementary fashion) and beatmatching down. Once that aspect of the technique is down, start playing house parties and giving your tapes to your more honest DJ friends and asking for reviews in return.

And notice to all DJs: Preplanned sets SUCK COCK!!! Why is it that we go to raves instead of just sitting home and listening to KOME or something? Cause we got sick of corporate playlist repetition and lame stiff musical programming that fails to take a crowd or mood into account and is just a list of tracks. Every set should contain a substantial improv element, especially if you play in the same town more than once (cause really, it might as well be a mixtape up there instead of a person unless you vibe off the crowd, change it up and go somewhere with it)!

Read Miyamoto Mushashi's Book of Five Rings and apply Japanese wordfighting strategy hints to your mixing. Apply Feng Shui to your mixing. Apply your emotions to your mixing. Get in there!!! Listen to various styles of music that use drum machines, and if possible, learn to mix from 60 bpm to 190. Dance while you mix. If you drink or smoke or use ketamine daily or whatever, practice in the same states of mind you might find yourself in when playing out... various chems change your perception is subtle ways that can really affect you unless you know they're there.

And PLEASE sets your sights higher than some of the wankers I keep hearing at parties around here that barely pull of 16 beat crossfades between two records by the same producer. Try the frenetic energy of Jeff Mills, the offbeat creativity of Stacey Pullen, the precision dicing and wreckless groove styles of turntablists, the wobbly classic flow of Juan Atkins, the smooth ride of Jeno, the assertive asskicking build to build phrasing of Carl Cox, the near perfect beat splicing of Alexi Delano, the pounding amorphous sound folding of Richie Hawtin... whatever.

I'll shut up now.

andyw

Goldie, quoted in URB Magazine (Jan/Feb 2001): 

"These people who've criticized this music of the electronic age, the fucking saxophone was a man-made instrument, so fuck you and ... That whole thing with that situation is like, hey, you don't like technology?  Give me your fucking car keys and walk the fuck home.  You know what I'm saying?  Walk the fuck home."

Couldn't have said it better myself.