New Age Music & Meditation

In the 70's, I enjoyed aspects of the subculture that was called the New Age. I embraced concerns, values, art and ideas that seemed to promise the emergence of a a new world order. Someone called the eclectic music of the time New Age music. New Age music was often peaceful, dreamy and unstructured sounds played on synthesizers and quiet instruments. The idea was to feel calm if not blissful. Chanting merged with synthesizer pads and flute obligatos. I especially recall Paul Winter's Missa Gaia, a world mass the celebrated the wolf and whale. I heard this new mass performed in one of Vancouver's large churches and was thrilled by the performance. Winter wrote real music with complex, sophisticated arrangements and a deep feeling for the animal nature in humans.

Some New Age music albums come with liner notes encouraging the music's use in meditation, and many albums were deigned and recorded for this purpose. Some pundits suggested that New Age music was relaxing, calming and supported healthy living. Health food stores, new age book stores, spas, and specialized radio stations played this music.
New age music became fusion music combining world sounds and instruments with an odd mix of activities - mediation, yoga, trance dancing and drug parties that featured LSD, grass and later ecstasy.

The contrast between calming music and frantic rock and roll sometimes separated groups with divergent values and sometimes restless youth would alternate between calm and frantic, pot and speed. If you tune into Sirius satellite radio, the Spa and Chill channels offer some music from the new age era. The new new age music of 2010 and beyond remains to be defined. I was surprised that iTunes categorized one of my albums, Going Beyond as "new age." The compositions were composed as 21st century music- eccentric compositions with jazz energy, rhythms and dense improvisations -- no resemblance to the new age music of the 70's. Maybe the iTunes pundits are right identifying interesting, energetic, innovative music as the new age. New genres emerged around the notions of relaxation, meditation, trance and trance dance. I recall liking other studio musicians who produced eclectic albums such as Enigma, Incognito, Air, Air Supply, Zero 7. Kitaro, Enya, Delerium.

Meditation

Mediation refers to a variety of methods to calm and focus the mind. Sitting practice is a universal form of meditation. The sitter ignores both external and internal distractions and aspires to have a calm mind and body. The idea is to transcend obvious concerns, worry and tame the endless chatter of spontaneous mind activity.

Meditation is one method of understanding how our mind works, how we know things and what conclusions we can derive from our knowledge. I prefer sitting on a beach, on a mountain, in a garden, in a boat, or floating on an inflated tire on a lake. Sitting inside buildings is not so appealing. One of my practices is sky and cloud watching which requires you to lie on a grassy or mossy patch of ground and looking up. One of the rules of mediation is not to look around and become distracted. Sky watching requires you to look up at the same patch of sky and let events such as birds, clouds and insects pass without following their paths.

The practice of meditation is based on a fundamental disinterest in the redeeming possibilities of language. Meditation leads to ineffable experiences and away from the beliefs, demands and rules of the local group. The Buddha manifests his identity as a professional philosopher by sitting upright in the Lotus position, poised, calm and alert. The lotus position is stable and can be maintained for hours. He has a gentle smile and his philosophical work looks effortless and natural.

Transcend means to rise above and go beyond. The idea is that properly chosen music itself goes beyond preceding music and listening to this music helps you transcend whatever local concerns that might preoccupy you. I appreciate that the listener can be a very creative person in the mix of composer-performer-listener.
The essence of healing music is not just a calming or soporific effect, but an opportunity for the listener to participate and create. This opportunity requires space between sounds, gradual transitions and nuanced understanding of the brain processing of sound. I use the Korg M3 Karma to generate complex polyrhythms that combine arpeggios, scale passages and chord changes played on the keyboard. The Korg Trinity contributes sustaining voices and the Proteus 2500 some percussion and instrumental sounds.

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Music styles have interbred and proliferated beyond anyone's ability to classify and defend musical styles in a meaningful way. You could argue that this is good -- musical styles should be proliferating and evolving. Or you might value tradition over innovation and argue that styles should have well defined boundaries that players respect and audiences rely on. The proliferation of styles is supported by the internet and unprecedented music distribution network that erases many boundaries and permits aspiring musician to seek direct access to audiences. Persona Music Recordings: Our Music Catalogue includes recorded performances under the titles Persona Digital, P2500 Band, Em4U, and the Persona Classical Consort. Music online is offered to illustrate music history, advance music education and appreciation. The recordings presented online demonstrate Persona Studio's arranging, recording and mastering techniques. All the recordings are arrangements and performances completed in house by Stephen Gislason. The music selections and their history are explained in the book, Sound of Music.
Topics presented at Persona Digital Studio are from the

The Sound of Music by Stephen Gislason
Click Download to order from Alpha Online

Jazz

From The Sound of Music by Stephen Gislason

"I love that word ‘jazz,’ man. Jazz is a beautiful word. I connect jazz not with what’s happening today in America so much as when I was young and listened to Ellington, Miles Davis, Bird, Dizzy Gillespie: how beautiful music was then and how exciting music was then. That’s what I connect myself with.” Joe Zawinul

I have eclectic musical interests, but the rhythms, ideas and complexity of jazz dominates my music. Some will say that jazz is performance music, that demands novel improvisations from skilled performers. Others will emphasis jazz traditions and perform standards that recall the history of jazz. Since I am studio musician, I enjoy the privilege of private improvisations, thoughtful reflection on the structure and meaning of jazz forms and ample opportunity to score, edit and refine jazz performances before they become a public spectacle. The passionate energy of some jazz pieces has been, for me, healing music supplying energy that pushed and pulled me through hard times.

Jazz became intellectual music but originated as dance music played by black musicians in New Orleans. Jass referred to sex and the rhythmic dances in the black community were sensual and erotic. Original jazz was band music for dancing, street parades and funerals. Jazz bands featured brass instruments, drums, and woodwinds. The favored brass were coronets and trombones. Pianos, guitars and banjos added ethnic flavors to the Creole bands who played rhythmic, complex arrangements with brief improvisatory breaks.
The evolution of jazz is fascinating and complex. The coronet was replaced by he trumpet, saxophones became more important than clarinets, bass fiddles became a standard instrument, and electric guitars eventually replaced acoustic. The drum kit with kick drum, snare, tom, toms and cymbals also became a standard feature of jazz ensembles. In the 30's big bands dominated dance halls and celebrated band leaders and soloists such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong became celebrities. Big bands eventfully shrunk to small bands. Soloists with virtuoso skills became the heroes of jazz. Band musicians would meet in after hours clubs to jam.

Interesting rhythms and improvisation were two essential elements of jazz. Innovations appeared quickly and were often resisted by more traditional musicians and audiences. Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie invented modern jazz, beginning in the 1940's. Their "bebop" rhythms, sophisticated arrangements and "wild" improvisations inspired the best of the new jazz players. Traditional jazz players scorned the innovators.
Jazz fusion describes the merging of progressive jazz formats with a wide variety other musical styles including funk, rock, R&B, electronic, Latin and world music.

Miles Davis moved his jazz expressions through cool jazz, bop, and modal jazz. The 1968 album “Miles in the Sky” introduced Herbie Hancock playing electric piano and Carter playing an electric bass guitar. In 1969, electronic instruments dominated the next album “In a Silent Way”, an innovative fusion album.

The musicians who played with Miles often continued to develop fusions styles. 1970’s fusion bands originated with Miles Davis alumni: Tony Williams Lifetime, Weather Report, McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, Corea's Return to Forever, and Herbie Hancock's Headhunters band. Herbie Hancock was one of the first jazz keyboardists to use synthesizers. Funk jazz emerged in his albums, Head Hunters 1973 and Thrust in 1974.

Weather Report, featuring Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter developed "world music fusion jazz." Jaco Pastorius, the electric bass player, went on to great fame and a tragic death in 1987. In 2006, Pastorius was voted "The Greatest Bass Player Who Has Ever Lived" by reader submissions in Bass Guitar Magazine. Zawinul, a jazz keyboardist and composer used synthesizers and retired to his studio to record complete compositions on his own was widely admired. He won the "Best Keyboardist" award 30 times from American jazz magazine.

Chick Corea, another of the great keyboardists, founded the band Return to Forever in 1972 with latin-influenced music. The band soon evolved into a jazz-rock band. John McLaughlin was influenced by his guru, Sri Chinmoy and created the Mahavishnu Orchestra that merged psychedelic rock with Indian music. Carlos Santana’s band blended Latin salsa, rock, blues, and jazz. Pat Metheny started a fusion band in 1977 that produced popular recordings that made both jazz and pop charts. Cool jazz groups such as Dave Sanborn's bands and the Rippingtons became popular with more melodic pieces that appealed to listeners at home.

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Persona Music Recordings: Our Music Catalogue includes recorded performances under the titles Persona Digital, P2500 Band, Em4U, and the Persona Classical Consort. Music online is offered to illustrate music history, advance music education and appreciation. The recordings presented online demonstrate Persona Studio's arranging, recording and mastering techniques. All the recordings are arrangements and performances completed in house by Stephen Gislason. The music selections and their history are explained in the book, The Sound of Music.

Topics presented at Persona Digital Studio are from the

The Sound of Music by  Stephen Gislason

Click Download order eBook from Alpha Online

Classical Music - Persona Digital Studio

Classical music began as entertainment for rich aristocrats and a showcase feature of rich churches who could afford to support composers and musicians as full time employees. In the smaller venues of entertainment rooms in the homes of the wealthy, small chamber ensembles played pieces composed specifically for those audiences. Some pieces were for listening, others for dancing, and others as background music, part of the décor. Virtuoso performers played pieces designed to impress audiences with their technical skills.

Some of the great composers were also skilled performers who improvised in these small gatherings and competed with each other. Mozart was a childhood virtuoso and talented improviser who travelled Europe with his father and sister, impressing audiences.
Beethoven took advantage of improvements in instrument construction that allowed players to develop more virtuoso techniques. Beethoven is credited with the kind of progression of musical innovation that we recognize in the evolution of jazz in the 20th century. Stravinsky referred to his last quartets, as "this absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever." Among Beethoven’s innovations are complex syncopations and cross-rhythms; synchronized runs of sixteenth, thirty-second, and sixty-fourth notes; and sudden modulations requiring special attention to intonation.”

The Persona Classical Series focuses on the music of JS Bach and Amadeus Mozart. Stephen Gislason selects and arranges pieces that are then developed in the studio using synthesizer voices and multitrack recording. In previous years, some of Bach’s pieces became contemporary hits: for example, by the Swingle Singers' (Air on the G string, Wachet Auf chorale prelude) and Wendy Carlos' 1968 album, Switched-On Bach, created with a Moog synthesizer. Stephen recalls " I enjoyed the Carlos arrangements and was inspired to learn about synthesizers. The distinct timbres of the Moog synthesizer voices made the four voices in preludes and fugues stand out clearly. I have edited and rearranged Bach's pieces with new voicing, new intonations seeking the clarity of voice definition I heard in "Switched on Bach." I like to imagine the if Bach were alive, he would enjoy this novel play on his musical ideas."

Digital Bach for the 21St Century

Art of the Fugue

 Counterpoint for Genius

Music's True value

The true value of music lies in the musicians ability to attract, entertain and inspire an audience. Musicians are members of a local community who do best when they remain local, enjoy local celebrity and assume positive, if not exemplary roles. They contribute to the common good. Music education for children has benefits in many directions and music literate teachers are valuable in schools and as private educators in the community. If you assume, as I do, that everyone should play and enjoy music – if only to clap your hands and sing a tune- then musicians are always needed to promote musical expressions. In my town, there are many musicians who are constantly at play. Some entertain, teach and participate in a variety of musical groups. Some earn a modest living but all enjoy their expression of music. Many amateur groups practice and perform without pay just for the pleasure of making music.

Sometimes, young aspiring musicians are lured by the example of distant celebrities and try in vain to become great singers or great bands. In my view, the wish for celebrity can be self-defeating, a bad idea. Occasionally, a local celebrity through much practice and dedication to the art of music will become known outside the local community and one may even become rich and famous. It is something like the lottery – its fun to fantasize what you could do if your won, but the odds are 1 in 14 million, so don't hold your breath.

I tell the fame-seekers that commercial success is a product manufactured by groups of business people. It is an industrial activity that turns a very small number of specially compliant musicians and a few formula-produced songs into products that will be mass-marketed and bought by millions of highly programmed people. If you have a touch of artistic integrity or a taste of personal freedom, you should probably stay far away.

Celebrity

Famous people have always fascinated inspired and led ordinary people. Fame has always been achieved through stories, publicity and public spectacles. For the long stretch of human history rulers, military leaders, and priests with high status were the main celebrities. Gods and goddesses were made celebrities by rulers and priests in the same way that actors became celebrities with the sponsorship of wealthy movie studios.

In the 20th century, the expansion of media created in both local and worldwide networks a more profuse and complicated world of celebrities. With the ascent of popular music, radio, television and movies, one path to riches and fame was popular music. By giving public performances, selling recordings and appearing often in the media, a few popular singers became stars, even with mediocre musical ability. If you look closely at 21st century celebrities, you find mostly attractive, photogenic people whose faces are recognized by a large audience. Photographs of celebrity faces became commodities purchased by a receptive marketplace. Celebrity faces appear everywhere. Facial recognition is an important determinant of human behavior. A familiar face becomes a friend; a friend becomes family or even a lover. Fantasies of sharing wealth and fame develop around the familial face. Some idolize and worship a familiar, celebrity face.

Page wrote: “Celebrities are fascinating because they live in a parallel universe—one that looks and feels just like ours yet is light-years beyond our reach. Stars live in another world entirely, one that makes our lives seem woefully dull by comparison. It’s easy to blame the media for this cognitive whiplash. But the real celebrity spinmeister is our own mind, which tricks us into believing the stars are our lovers and our social intimates. Celebrity culture plays to all of our innate tendencies: We’re built to view anyone we recognize as an acquaintance ripe for gossip or for romance. Since catching sight of a beautiful face bathes the brain in pleasing chemicals, George Clooney’s killer smile is impossible to ignore. Stars summon our most human yearnings: to love, admire, copy and, of course, to gossip and to jeer. It’s only natural that we get pulled into their gravitational field. John Lennon infuriated the faithful when he said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, but he wasn’t the first to suggest that celebrity culture was taking the place of religion. With its myths, its rituals and its ability to immortalize, it fills a similar cultural niche. In a secular society our need for ritualized idol worship can be displaced onto stars. Horan speculates that celebrity fills some of the same roles the church fills for believers; the desire to admire the powerful and the drive to fit into a community of people with shared values.”

From The Sound of Music by Stephen Gislason

Music Theory

Beautiful music one the greatest achievement of humans.  The sense of musical beauty is elusive and does not require complexity or even great skill, although beautiful music is more likely to occur when the composer and performers are accomplished and devoted to their art.

Music describes a remarkable variety of human activities that involve making sounds. Musical sounds convey meaning without the decoding required for language sounds. Some musical phrases are copies or facsimiles of alarm cries, bird songs or human shouts and cries that attract attention, signal danger and express emotion. Bird songs are most easily identified with musical melodies and composers have copied a bird song as a theme for a musical composition.
Music comes in all shapes and sizes. Some music is spontaneous and easy to make. A folk singer may be quite charming, strumming simple chords on a guitar, singing a plain song in a spontaneous and undisciplined manner. Other music requires years of disciplined study and practice and involves complex concepts and notation systems.

Musical expression begins with and is usually associated with body movement. Music begins with rhythm, repeated vocal sounds and stylized body movements. Dance is an elaboration of gestures and body movements associated with both performing and enjoying music. Children will spontaneously dance and sing and raise their arms above their head and sway from side to side creating a momentary ecstasy that is repeated at all ages and many difference contexts from temples to discotheques.


Musical instruments are variations on tools used for other purposes and all you need to begin a music composition is your own voice and body movements. If you strike two sticks together, you are beginning to play music. Rhythm is essential to music and originates in nature before and aside from musical sounds. A musical phrase obtains meaning when it finds a compatible brain receptor and activates an emotional or behavior response. Humans respond emotionally to music and experience a range of emotions from elation to despair. I respond to beautiful music with tears. This a version of crying in response to the sadness or joy expressed by the music; the intense emotional response also feels like admiration and gratitude for the beauty of the composition and the skill of the performers.  I am most likely to cry when I hear a female singer who expresses herself in a strong, clear voice with sincerity and passion.

Musical information consists of pitch, loudness, timbre, location, and movement of the sound source. A combination of sounds of different pitches produces harmony and a sequence of pitches becomes melody. Timbre describes the harmonics in a sound that give it recognizable qualities. A range of timbres in human voices provides for the sound identification of individuals. You can identify who is talking from voice timbre and intonation, just as you can identify a trumpet, an oboe or a violin.

Formal music is assembled into language-equivalent structures, suggesting phonemes, syntax and semantics. Music performance involves many agreements about instrument design, pitch assignment, the meaning of notation so that groups of people can produce harmonious sounds with compatible rhythms. One musical agreement is about the pitch interpretation of notes. The standard concert pitch, A, for example denotes a sound with the principle frequency of 440 cycles per second. When an orchestral assembles, each instrument is tuned to the standard pitch. Other agreements determine the pitch meaning of other notes.

The piano is the reference instrument; its keyboard represents a standard for the pitch meaning of each note. Scales are standard sequences of intervals that are used in orchestral and popular music.  The Greek philosopher, Pythagoras, determined that if you divided a vibrating string in half, you would hear an octave at double the fundamental vibration frequency. The octave interval sounds like the same note is being played, but at a higher pitch. Since we hear intervals differently as the pitch increases, a well-tempered tuning has been adopted that adjusts the wave frequency difference of intervals, which decrease as the pitch increases.

While classical music written in Europe is appreciated as high art and performed by skilled musicians, musical styles and forms in the 20th century proliferated and incorporated sounds from all over the planet. At the same time electronics advanced so that recorded music became the most popular way to experience music. The science and technology of sound physics and the neuroscience of sound perception advanced remarkably.

I have enjoyed many different expressions of this technology and continue to learn about sound synthesis, instrument modelling, recording and editing sound. All these activities inform about the way our brain processes sound. The main distinction in the world of sound is between music which is intelligent and pleasing and noise which is neither.

Humans have a strong tendency to bond to sounds early in life and prefer to hear or sing simple songs they learned earlier. Popular songs can be repeated throughout their life with the same strong feelings of identity and comfort. Simple melodies have the greatest appeal and widest audience, because they are easy to remember and resemble the simple phrases of ancient animal communication. Songs, of course, combine words and music and are potent in eliciting emotional responses. The combination of words and sounds reveals the relationship between music and spoken language. Without music, religious meetings would be boring and movies would be disappointing.

A singer communicates emotionally with the audience, using gesture to emphasize the emotional values of a song. I must admit that singers who indulge in exaggerated and strenuous gesturing and frantic dance often offend me. In contrast, I am enchanted to hear and watch Andrea Bocelli, the blind and eloquent Italian tenor. Because he is blind, he stands motionless on the stage with his eyes closed. Bocelli sings with a perfect composure that is consistent with the mastery of his art. He is a Buddha.

Chanting is soothing to humans and group chanting can induce euphoria that some humans call a “religious” or “mystical” or “spiritual” feeling. The benefits of chanting are independent of the meaning of the words, although meaning can enhance the experience of chanting. Words used in chants are simple and often have a musical quality of their own.

Repeating the same phrase rhythmically has a trance-inducing power. If you combine chanting with dancing or just holding you arms in the air, swaying back and forth, you become euphoric and feel bonded with others in your group.  Music induced trances work at Woodstock, folk concerts, rock concerts, support groups, churches, all night voodoo dances and on camping trips, sitting around a camp fire. The latest version of chanting is rap, a monotonous monologue accompanied by rhythm that combines  simple narratives and repeating phrases.

Musical sounds are processed in the temporal lobes in humans, especially in the left planum temporale. Pitch recognition is a built-in talent that is not uniformly inherited. Some humans are described as “tone deaf” when they cannot identify or reproduce pitches they hear. Pitch like, color is a subjective experience that correlates more or less with the wave frequency of the source. Sounds have a fundamental frequency with timbral harmonics as multiples of the fundamental.  The same pitched note played on a trumpet and piano can be readily identified even though the waveforms on an oscilloscope are quite different.

Bendor and Wang discovered neurons near the anterolateral border of the primary auditory cortex in marmoset monkeys that respond to both pure tones, providing a neural correlate for pitch constancy. They stated: “Pitch perception is critical for identifying auditory objects, in music and speech. Pitch is the subjective attribute of a sound's fundamental frequency (f0) determined by the temporal regularity and average repetition rate of its  waveform. Spectrally dissimilar sounds can have the same pitch if they share a common f0.
Platel et al used PET scanning to study the cerebral activation of volunteers performing 4 tasks: selective attention to pitch, timbre and rhythm and semantic familiarity with tunes. They observed that the left hemisphere was more active for familiarity, pitch and rhythm determination. The right hemisphere was more active for the timbre task. The familiarity task activated the left inferior frontal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus. The pitch task activations were observed in the left cuneus/precuneus. The rhythm task activated left inferior Broca's area with extension into the neighboring insula, suggesting the processing of sequential sounds similar to word recognition processing.

From the Sound of Music by Stephen Gislason

Revised Jan 2015

Music is Movement

Movement is the most fundamental feature of humans and other animals. The brain is the organ of the mind and the organ of movement. The brain is a matrix of meaningful connections between the body inside and the environment outside. Our speech and music grow from spacetime motion and communication with sounds. There is rhythm in our motion, in the sounds we hear and the sounds we make. Our languages emerge from spacetime maps and rhythmic sounds. We speak in terms of movement through spacetime, and of journeys both literal and metaphoric. We project out minds into the world and merge with the world of continuous changes and constant motion.

Humans act on the world through praxis or skilled movements. The root adaptive task is to learn what movements are required for survival today. Ten thousand years age, if you were male, you learned to throw a spear, catch a fish or carry a deer carcass on your back. Today, you learn to learn to throw a football, move a pen across a paper surface, push keys on a keyboard and control movement with a mouse or joystick. Musicians play instruments that require skilled movements and add a variety of dance-like body movements or really dance as they play. Virtuoso musicians acquire fast motors skills and accurate motor memory to play complex passages accurately.

Humans learn by imitating what they see and hear. An astute observer knows that learning movements is a mimetic task and recognizes that observing and performing movements is closely integrated. Sensory and motor systems are not separate entities. One well studied mechanism that underlies mimetic learning has been called mirroring. Mirror neurons were originally discovered in the ventral premotor cortex of the macaque monkey.  These neurons are active when a monkey performs a motor act and again when the monkey, at rest, observes another individual performing a similar motor act. The term mirroring is somewhat in error since similarity is based on a common purpose or goal of the action such as grasping more than a mirror image of the movements performed. 

Learning movement skills is so implicit in life experiences that most of the lessons are not recognized as such and most of the practice is built into the daily experiences of life. To learn, you copy the skillful movements of others and practice these movements until you match or surpass the teacher's skills. Humans create neuronal models of their own behavior and the behavior of others, remember and communicate these models. We can simulate experience and anticipate what we are going to do in the future. We can practice skills in advance so that can improve our performance. We expand this modeling capacity by using musical instruments. We can learn to handle sounds much like objects and do sound and symbolic transactions with each other. Movement originates in several areas of the brain. The final signals to muscles to contract emerge from the thalamus and motor cortex and travel along the spinal cord to the motor neurons in the anterior horn of the spinal cord grey matter. The spinal motor neuron sends a signal along a peripheral nerve to the muscle cells. The cerebellum does the fine-tuning of coordinated movements by adding to the signals emerging from the motor cortex. The parietal cortex stores maps that connect body movements with spacetime and recall learned patterns of movement. If the motor cortex is damaged, you are paralyzed. If the cerebellum is damaged, movement coordination is peculiar or lost. If the parietal cortex is damaged, you retain movements but learned motor skills may be missing and you may ignore part of your body as if it did not exist. A typical parietal deficit is that you cannot perform learned movements such as dancing or playing and instrument.

Three cortical regions control voluntary movement:
Primary motor cortex M1
Premotor cortex (PM)
Supplementary motor area (SMA)

The simplest idea of the brain begins with a sensory input entering a processor that then decides what to move and sends motor outputs to the motors which are muscle cells. The first complication in this model is that the motor cortex has sensory input and the sensory cortex has motor output.  The second complication is that some movement is generated in response to real-time sensory input and other movement is generated from memory that operates like internal sensory input.

The body is mapped onto the sensory and motor cortex. Smaller body parts such as the fingers, lips and tongue that are used for fine manipulative movement occupy larger areas of the motor cortex than larger body parts such as arms and legs that are involved in more vigorous movements such as throwing and walking. A smaller cortical area (SMA) in front of the motor cortex contains a separate body map and at least 4 other regions of the brain contain body maps. While cortical maps exist, the regions in the map are not discrete. If the map is displayed as pieces of a jig saw puzzle, the pieces are not placed side by side, but overlap. The arrangement would be easier to understand if motor neurons were assigned to one body part and made point-to-point connections that were stable over time.  However, the real cortex appears to have a dynamic map and a scheme of connections based on fields of activity that converge and diverge in complex patterns. Over time, the pieces of the map change with learning and practice, so that the construction of cortical connections is in flux. Schieber described general and specific activation.  "During natural movements of discrete body parts, activity is distributed across a wide territory in M1. In monkeys trained to perform individuated movements of each finger, single M1 neurons are active during movements of multiple fingers and neurons throughout M1 hand area are active during movement of any given finger. In humans, performing movements of different fingers, activity is distributed over the primary sensorimotor hand area whether the subject is moving the whole hand or a single finger."

Neuroscientists now make distinctions among many components of movement. For example, the preparation to make a movement is regarded separately from the volley of signals sent to implement the movement. Scheiber stated:  "Neurons in M1, SMA and PM discharge at the highest rate while a subjects waits to move in particular direction… during the delay between instruction and movement triggering, PM and SMA appear to store information on the direction of the impending movement… this represents (the retrieval of) stored information...To pick up a pencil, for example, you may glance at the pencil and then move your hand to the same place.

Insight into how cue direction is transformed into movement direction has come from tasks in which these two features were experimentally dissociated, similar to glancing at your pencil in a mirror and then reaching to pick up the real pencil instead of a mirror image…The cue direction is transformed into movement direction in the area principalis (of the frontal lobe) during the delay period… information is sent to M1 at the time of execution."

Revised Jan 2015

The Musical Brain and other topics presented at Persona Digital Studio are from the book, The Sound of Music by Stephen Gislason

For additional reading see Neuroscience Notes and The Human Brain, available from Persona Books

Fusion in Music

Fusion describes the merging of different musical styles and intentions. In the best case, Fusion is an open door to all music traditions everywhere to merge with novel, exciting creativity. Fusion is not always an easy path to follow. Musicians who are well established in one musical genre usually face criticism and degrees of rejection when they move in another direction. Bob Dylan switched abruptly from folk music to a rock and roll, electric band, suffering angry criticism in the process. Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker were criticized by fellow jazz musicians for their new jazz style "Bebop." Miles Davis also faced criticism as he moved from more "traditional jazz" into continuously evolving styles that incorporated world music and at times came perilously close to rock and roll. Davis attracted the best musicians available so that innovation was an eclectic group effort.

Rock and Roll emerged through the combination of rhythm and blues, gospel and country music. Some rock bands with more diversified and talented musicians moved in the direction of jazz bands and some moved to long pieces with symphonic orchestration. Jazz fusion merges progressive jazz formats with a wide variety other musical styles including funk, rock, R&B, electronic, latin and world music.

Latin Music arrived In American as a fusion mix of music traditions-- native music with Spanish, Portuguese and African music. In the US, Latin music fused with jazz, R&B, rock and roll and hip hop, in ever-changing, derivative styles.
Miles Davis moved through "classic jazz" to Bebop, cool jazz, and modal jazz. The 1968 album “Miles in the Sky” introduced Herbie Hancock playing electric piano and Carter playing bass guitar. In 1969, electronic instruments dominated the next album “In a Silent Way”, an innovative fusion album. The musicians who played with Miles often continued to develop fusions styles. 1970’s fusion bands originated with Miles Davis alumni: Tony Williams Lifetime, Weather Report, McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, Corea's Return to Forever, and Herbie Hancock's Headhunters band. Herbie Hancock was one of the first jazz keyboardists to use synthesizers. Funk jazz emerged in his albums, Head Hunters 1973 and Thrust in 1974.

Weather Report, featuring Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter developed world music fusion jazz. Jaco Pastorius, the electric bass player, went on to great fame and a tragic death in 1987. In 2006, Pastorius was voted "The Greatest Bass Player Who Has Ever Lived" by reader submissions in Bass Guitar Magazine. Zawinul, a jazz keyboardist and composer used synthesizers was widely admired. He won the "Best Keyboardist" award 30 times from American jazz magazine.

Chick Corea, another of the great keyboardists, founded the band Return to Forever in 1972 with latin-influenced music. The band soon evolved into a jazz-rock band.

John McLaughlin was influenced by his guru, Sri Chinmoy and created the Mahavishnu Orchestra that merged psychedelic rock with Indian music.
Carlos Santana’s band blended Latin salsa, rock, blues, and jazz. Pat Metheny started a fusion band in 1977 that produced popular recordings that made both jazz and pop charts.


Persona Music Recordings: Our Music Catalogue includes recorded performances by the P2500 Band, Em4U, and the Persona Classical Consort. Music previews and downloads are delivered from Reverb Nation and Alpha Online. Some music online is offered to illustrate music history, advance music education and appreciation. The recordings presented online demonstrate Persona Studio's arranging, recording and mastering techniques. All the recordings are completed in house by Stephen Gislason. The music selections and their history are explained in the book, Sound of Music.

Persona Music Jazz Links
Lois Armstrong
Wayne Shorter
Miles Davis
Chick Corea
Joe Zawinul
Louis Armstrong
Pat Metheny
Tom Jobim and João Gilberto
Dave Sanborn
Rippingtons
Herbie Hancock

Persona Digital Studio at FaceBook
Link to Persona Classical Consort at ReverbNation

Music Elements and Meaning

Music Elements

The elements of music began millions of years ago with other animals. We humans are just recent practitioners of the art of sound communication. Our brains have evolved to detect and evaluate discrete low volume sounds. Everyone who has spent time in natural environments will know that little sounds are ubiquitous in nature. Loud sounds are unusual and signal danger.

Human musical abilities, however, exceed the abilities of other primates. We have the special ability to synchronize movements so that group dancing and chanting to the beat of drums is a powerful method of achieving group cohesion. Ancient humans made wood and stone tools, hitting objects against each other, creating rhythmic sounds. Sticks, wood blocks, logs and animal skins came together as percussion instruments.

Musical information consists of pitch, loudness, timbre, location, and movement of the sound source. A combination of sounds of different pitches produces harmony and a sequence of pitches becomes melody. Timbre describes the harmonics in a sound that give it recognizable qualities. You can identify a trumpet, an oboe or a violin by recognizing different timbres. Music performance involves many agreements about instrument design, pitch assignment, the meaning of notation so that groups of people can produce harmonious sounds with compatible rhythms.

Music, in the original sense is communication, a feature of group assemblies that featured drumming, vocalization and dance. In an evolved sense, music became attached to rituals, celebrations, theatre and entertainment.

Music Unites Humans

Music is a powerful ingredient in human societies that facilitates group bonding and conveys feelings more poignantly than other forms of communication. Shrock suggested:” As a college student, my eyes would often well up with tears during my twice-a-week choir rehearsals. I would feel relaxed and at peace yet excited and joyful, and I occasionally experienced a thrill so powerful that it sent shivers down my spine. I also felt connected with fellow musicians in a way I did not with friends who did not sing with me. I have often wondered what it is about music that elicits such emotions. Philosophers and biologists have asked the question for centuries, noting that humans are universally drawn to music. It consoles us when we are sad, pumps us up in happier times and bonds us to others.”

 Oliver Sacks in his book Musicophilia suggested that music is as important communication as language and gesture. I prefer to recognize that music is language and gesture, not really a separate form of communication.  Music is feeling is meaning.

Scholarly investigations of music will emphasize the efforts of highly skilled professional musicians and forget that music begins with full participation of all members of local groups. Singing, dancing, chanting are aspects of group identity and group cohesion.  An ideal human group is coordinated by rhythmic expressions; they play instruments, sing and dance often. Music, as a performance by skilled musician who play to silent audiences sitting in chairs is a recent innovation that does not represent the deeper meaning of musical communication.

Schrock suggested that music “is almost always a communal event: everyone gets together to sing, dance, and play instruments. Even in societies which differentiate musical performers from listeners, people enjoy music together in a wide variety of settings: dancing at a wedding or a nightclub, singing hymns in church, crooning with their kids, Christmas caroling and singing “Happy Birthday” at a party. The popularity of such rituals suggests that music confers social cohesiveness, perhaps by creating empathetic connections among members of a group.,, music’s power stems from its tendency to synchronize our activities.”

The Sound of Music by Stephen Gislason

Persona Digital Studio

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^[i] Karen Schrock. Why Music Moves Us. New research explains music's power over human emotions and its benefits to our mental and physical well-being. Scientific Amer Mind: July 2009