Can you learn Synesthesia? | Q+A #47

hey everybody my name is Adam Neely I'm here answering all of your questions about bass into music in general so let's get started [Music] man kaput rates hello Adam I'm an analytical person engineer who loves music listening because of its magical qualities it evokes emotions by simple vibration of air even when it is in an unknown language I've started making music on bass now for a year it's space because I like the bass lines in music and it's the same range as my voice it's my attempt at singing my music theory knowledge is now mainly knowing notes in scale and I'll get a fear of theory because of the chance of losing the magic and analyzing it to a number of tricks its theory a Pandora's box or an enrichment of the magic so I definitely understand this you're afraid of losing that feeling that music gives you and you're afraid that if you overanalyze music you'll kill the magic of it and honestly there's been a bunch of writers and artists and musicians throughout history that have felt the same way Mark Twain wrote this essay called two ways of seeing a river and I'd like to read an excerpt of it for you now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to note every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet I had made a valuable acquisition but I had lost something too I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived all the grace the beauty the poetry had gone out of the majestic river Mark Twain worked on a riverboat on the Mississippi River for quite some time and often wrote about his experiences including apparently the feeling that he lost the magic of the river by working on the riverboat for so long and knowing so much about the river it's an apt metaphor for anything if you're too close to something it doesn't have the air of mystery and is beautiful and relatable as the language in this essay is and I strongly suggest that you read it if you have the time I think Mark Twain didn't take this analogy far enough because say Mark got a gig on a riverboat in the Yangtze River in China after he worked for many years in the Mississippi in America what he can do is take all the technical knowledge of sailing which he developed on one River and apply it in a completely different context using his old knowledge in the process of discovery yes maybe the Mississippi doesn't have the same magic but maybe the Yangtze River now does I hope the analogy from music is fairly clear because yes maybe the magic won't be in the mystery of the music anymore but maybe the magic will be in applying your knowledge to different contexts and that's definitely what it is for me so let's give it an example of this in practice say I learned the major pentatonic scale right and I learned all the different fingerings of the major pentatonic scale on my instrument and now I have a name for something that I've heard and all the songs that have listened to and there's a one-to-one relationship between name and sound and now all of a sudden I don't wonder what a sound is anymore I have a name for it it's been classified and yes in a way that's kind of like how Mark Twain rode down the Mississippi he had a name for everything that he came across but say now I broaden my context I look out to the rest of the world and I see what the Yangtze River has to say about the major pentatonic scale in other words like maybe Chinese traditional music and I compare how my major pentatonic scale sounds in the music that I've been listening to - Chinese traditional music and maybe West African traditional music and maybe Irish traditional music and you start seeing if you broaden your horizons to the different rivers of the world so to speak you realize that the process of naming things and analysing things can be a real tool for you to create more musical magic in your life Robert person calls this a life death cycle because as you learn things the mystery dies but as you learn things you realize that there are even more things to learn and more mystery to be had so I definitely understand where you're coming from but in order to get a bigger appreciation for music you can't leave it all a mystery Brian catcher writes Adam I love your stuff I'm not a basis but I always take something positive the way musically from each one of your videos keep it up question for you out of curiosity how did you end up getting that gig on the live with Kelly and Ryan show so I got that gig the same way that I get any gig honestly as a musician and that's knowing a person who as either recommending me or hiring me for a particular performance so in this case it was Josh Bailey the drummer and also music director for Erin Bowman the artist that we were playing with on live with Kelly and Ryan and I've known Josh for a long time now we've been playing up and down the east coast of the United States for a couple of years now and so he really knows what I can do as a bass player so when Charlie Rosen Aaron Bowman's normal bass player couldn't make the live with Kelly and Ryan gig Josh was like ah I know it would be perfect for that gig Adam I know what he can do he can fill in just perfectly fine and so it really didn't come down to my abilities although that helped it really just came down to knowing Josh Bailey so knowing people really can't be overstated having a strong and wide network of friends and musical colleagues will get you places if you want to be a working musician and get gigs that will hopefully advance your career Sean filling rates oh my dear Brian and Adam your math is spot-on but your logic is flawed there is no logical reason for what you call irrational time signatures to exist rather than new and confusing denominators one can achieve the exact same musical metrical effect with denominators divisible by two in any numerator also rhythms can be superimposed over the numerator creating the additional dimension that is described by your quote a rational time signatures so first of all it's not my concept of irrational time signatures it's not Brian crocks concept of rational time signatures it's not even Thomas Odysseys concept of irrational time signatures the composer is most associated with the concept this idea has been around for a while I'm not inventing the concept I'm merely describing practice which has already been put into place remember that irrational time signatures are a notational device and there might be different ways of writing the same music but the reason why we have irrational time signatures is because the notational device happens to be the easiest for given situations and so musicians have adopted those devices because it's simply easier let me show you what I mean there's this blog post by the Brooklyn composer D'Arcy James argue who's an amazing composer and I definitely look up to him personal influence of mine where he breaks down the baseline of this composition called trance by the band icebreaker it can be notated and felt a couple of different ways one with incomplete tuplets over the bar line and to using irrational time signatures which one of these feels better to you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] that might come down to personal preference are you able to feel those subdivisions in 4/4 or are you able to feel those subdivisions better if they're expressed irrationally and again I know that the term irrational means something different in mathematics but we're using the term irrational right now to mean non dyadic and music I'm just reporting on common practice I didn't invent these terms so please don't hate me in the comments section although I know everybody already will all right so that's why irrational time signatures should exist and yes there is a reason for them huija daegu rates sorry but I agree that this is middle-class hipster bull like all these middle-class white women and I want to play the ukulele I am middle-class by the way congratulations your middle class I think you think that gives you justification and feeling angry about the idea of a middle-class white woman wanting to learn how to play the ukulele you know you're not really making any argument you're just angry about it if you're making an argument about like say cultural appropriation and you know the exchange of cultures and whether or not that's right in all circumstances I could understand that but you're not you're just getting angry at this idea a sort of a visceral reaction a limbic system-- reaction and so much of youtube comment sections are this sort of reaction when I think what it just comes down to is you don't like it because it's not cool the idea of a middle-class white woman playing the ukulele isn't cool to you the idea of me trying to find a meaning in the limitations of the Casio ratman earnestly and without irony is not cool either so I just want you to understand what's going on here and what's going on in most YouTube comment sections you're not making any arguments you're not advancing the discourse you're not critiquing anything you're just reacting to it the same way that a ten-year-old boy might react to things he considers too girly it's not cool Nikolina kale writes I was wondering why almost all pop songs are about three minutes long jazz and classical music pieces are typically much longer so how did this development into three-minute pop songs begin from my understanding it comes down to the amount of time you could fit on a 78 rpm record so in the 1920s and the 1930s 78 rpm records were the way that most music was commercially released and so any music that was recorded had to fit within that three-minute time slot any Tin Pan Alley songs or jazz songs or operatic arias had to be fit within that three minute time frame it wasn't until much later where there was the technology to actually record that were longer than that but by that point people have come to expect popular tunes to be about three minutes in length there's an article on wired.com called wire songs on the radio about the same length that goes into all of this and I find it really fascinating how technology has shaped our expectations of musical form it really can't be overstated how important recording technology has been on the development of pop music over the past hundred years Gabriel via sciutto writes makes me wonder if it's possible to teach synesthesia like intentionally crossing sensory inputs over while teaching an infant to try to give them an association which would carry on for life so there's never really been a scientific study on this but based on what we know with the developing infant and toddler brain it might be possible to teach synesthesia I mean it's definitely not possible to teach synesthesia to adults who might develop synesthesia later in life due to brain injuries but you can't really teach it or at least true synesthesia the thinking here goes that for somebody like me who has grapheme-color synesthesia somebody who pairs letters and colors is that sometime when I was an infant or a toddler when I was learning my ABCs and also my colors I got the two of them kind of confused in my brain the way I got them confused was maybe there was colored kitchen magnets so the same time I was learning the concept of red I was also learning the concept of say s because there are so many connections in the brain being developed at that age the two concepts got crossed in the brain and others forever a link between the two of them so if you're trying to teach synesthesia to your child you would really go hard on this colored kitchen magnet idea but there's a big big problem with this for me and other people with grapheme-color synesthesia the colored kitchen magnets that we had as children do not correlate with our own individual synesthetic responses so for me a is red but my colored kitchen magnet when I was growing up is green so there's so much to learn about what actually goes into it and it also brings up an interesting question why would you even want to learn synesthesia like what is the practical application of it and for me there really hasn't been much practical application other than just kind of a cool thing that adds a little bit to my understanding of the world but it's not like I can play music any different or write words any different I mean there is evidence to suggest that synesthesia does aid in memorization so there's that reason and you might want to learn synesthesia because of that but honestly it it's just a cool thing but I'm not sure if there's any real practical advantage I have as a synesthete over anybody else shrapnel rights will atonal ever be the new tonal isn't tonal music a bit overdone already so composers have been thinking about this for over a century now Arnold Schoenberg developed his 12 tone system just for this reason he wanted to completely throw off the shackles of tonal music get rid of it completely and embrace a new world of atonal music he envisioned that it would become the new popular music of the west and that mothers would sing a channel lullabies to their children and there are a lot of people who are on board with this there are so many people trying to make a tonal music the new tonal music and it just never happened it turns out that although a lot of harmonic and melodic choices are engrained culturally there might be something a little bit more Universal about the idea of consonants that we previously might have thought now the questions of what things are constant and what things are dissonant and what we prefer that is very complicated but there does seem to be the strain that resists completely throwing away tonal music in the favor of atonal music just didn't lean right why is it that so many non musicians and even some musicians refer to all art music baroque classical and romantic as classical music as a general term as long as people have been making music people have objected to the labels put on the music that they're making for example Duke Ellington really didn't like the term jazz the term had too much of a low class association with New Orleans bordellos and the ruckus music of Jelly Roll Morton and so he wanted a different term to describe the music that he was making which he felt was more elegant and refined the problem is what is that word how would you actually describe Duke Ellington's music without using the term jazz some people have suggested terms like black American music or black American classical music but those terms have problems with them also so no matter what terminology is going to be flawed so if you have a problem with a particular term and you want to suggest your own term be prepared to defend your own term because your own term the one that you suggested our music has quite a few problems with it the obvious one here is that it suggests that all music that's not from the Western European tradition music of the past couple hundred years is not worthy of being analyzed or interpreted as art nevermind the fact that a lot of the music from this particular tradition that you're calling art music was never intended as some sort of grand artistic aesthetic experience rather a lot of it especially from the Baroque era was dance music another term that I've heard used to describe classical music is serious music which is even worse than calling your music art music for obvious reasons of course the obvious one is the implication that anything that isn't that style of music is not serious I've also heard music from this tradition called concert music or concert hall music and this one doesn't necessarily denigrate other styles of music but in a way it denigrates itself it says that anything that's not actually being performed in a concert hall is not worthy of being called concert music so you can't play classical concert music in a bar or outside or anywhere else that's not in a stuffy formal setting if you did need to use a term you could use something like aristocratic music from the Western European tradition which would cover most of your bases but even still that one is not the greatest either so instead like with most terminology we stick with whatever the common parlance is because that's the thing that most people understand and in this particular case sorry to say it's classical music [Music]

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 177,214

Rating: 4.9577055 out of 5

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: YEJ61gSwE3c

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 26 2018