How to Find the Magic in Music

so here's the thing YouTube kind of has some really serious problems like for starters their copyright system doesn't work for example while I'm working on this video I have another video that was claimed and they gave me the option to mute the audio for that part of the video which I did but now YouTube is claiming the silence that used to be the music that UMG is claiming and they're running ads on the video that contains that silence that used to be the music and they're saying that that entitles them to the entire video so that's a thing and when it's not copyright be as YouTube's dealing with the three monkeys in a trench coat it calls the algorithm for a multi bajillion dollar company you'd think they'd get this stuff figured out by now like right now everyone's talking about this Elsa gate Horror Show but it feels like no matter how they switch up the algorithm there's always some freaky pocket on the platform that takes advantage of this system like remember when all you had to do is make a 10-minute video and then people just started leaving blank space to reach that time limit there's always something or someone cashing in on the algorithm and I guess that's just like the name of the game right minimum effort for maximum gain but from the very dawn of YouTube there's been a small collection of videos this algorithmic pocket that's always been successful no matter how YouTube changes things up they seem to have found this way to always slip through the cracks and make tons and tons of money for effectively no effort it's kind of tough to group these channels together but if I had to give it a name I'd call it magical music and the deal with magical music is that you basically put together a 10 hour video of long drones and held notes upload it with some crazy clickbait title like remove all negative blockages erase subconscious negative patterns release unwanted thoughts and then wait around to get insane views and subscribers I don't know how the copyright systems supposed to deal with this because so many of these videos are just OneNote being held on for a really long time but I guess it's only a matter of time before one note gets copyrighted right but I can't stress this enough these videos are just hours and hours of this but as soon as you click one of these videos the algorithm becomes more aggressive than that ant trying to sell you essential oils at Thanksgiving dinner and they just fill your recommended page which I feel like keeps happening like everybody has that one youtuber that you're afraid to click on their videos because you know that for the next month your entire recommended page is gonna be nothing but their stuff but as soon as you click on one of these videos you recommend it page starts getting stranger and stranger really quickly like you start getting a lot of these baby boomer bait videos that basically rely on like racism to sell their videos 3 hours of the best traditional Japanese music like listen I'm not an expert but first no and - it's not really that specific like Japan's a big place with a lot of history you just see the video on it like you saw that one video right all those people had a lot of time to have a lot of thoughts on music so I'm just gonna take a pass on this one or like check this one out Tibetan meditation music healing music blah blah something-something SEO exploitation like check out that text yin yang next to those numbers that's totally not a serial number for some company I'm not looking up and like I want to stress that I'm not an expert so if I'm wrong and this is actually like really significant music go ahead and leave a comment and I'll pin it and I'll kind of like totally acknowledge that I'm wrong here but since I'm a youtuber and a musician I just so happen to have access to an extremely accurate and exclusive musical database called go ugly so do this you're going you type ins in then you go to that Wikipedia page then you go to the chant part then you go to that page click on the first thing you see put then YouTube and oh would you look at that it's not even close to our magical healing music I but the recommendations on these helium magic channels get really weird really fast like for whatever reason there are a lot of videos that try and advertise a specific frequency like that's gonna do something hell we should stop telling our students to worry about playing in tune and one of them might find the frequency that cures cancer which like he just really and believe me it's not me trying to misrepresent these videos some of them claim to be able to repair your DNA yeah screw you lymphoma this six hour YouTube video is chemo and radiation all rolled into one and the best part is that I can do it without leaving this padded room and I know what you're thinking and yeah it gets worse they make these videos for babies like initially you're like okay that kind of makes sense a 10 hour video of lullaby music that you leave on while the baby's asleep fine whatever but some of them use the damn Mozart effect to try and sell themselves which if you want to know more about how it's just one giant scam I already made a video about that but from these baby and lullaby videos you start finding these monstrosities that try to convince you that by listening to them you're going to somehow develop perfect pitch and I can't tell if it's for babies or adults or what but they are nightmarish to listen to I'm warning you it sounds like somebody threw a Speak & Spell into a blender flat a frat just oh no that's no that's not how this works but by far I think the thing that got me was when I found this this ladies and gentlemen boys and girls and everyone in between is music for your dog it's music that's for your dog to listen to while you're away to help with separation anxiety and initially I figured this whole thing was more of a nitch corner of the internet and that these really weren't that popular and it was just like view manipulation or something that was until I got this request from Eric Osgood you've covered information about how we as humans respond to music and like certain things in music but what about with other animals how does human music affect animals especially pet animals like dogs and cats what research is out there and what musical motifs are there for animals that are used widely so here's the thing right off the bat you can kind of get a good idea as to how and why these videos get so many views it's the exact same concept as lo-fi anime hip-hop beats - study - which I actually mentioned in my Mozart video that can help you out in the right situation all these videos are basically designed to be left on in the background somewhere and get played on basically a daily basis no matter what the algorithm is built to focus on that's just gonna look like a successful video that gets a lot of plays and as I'm sure this comes as no surprise to you is that basically all this is horribly horribly wrong now just to have all my cards in the table I haven't looked this up but in everything I've ever looked up I've never found anyone that said that music can rewrite your DNA the fact that I have to say that out loud makes me scared for the future of the human race there isn't some magical frequency that heals you again I think we might all be doomed I've already talked about the Mozart thing and it's infuriating how common of a misconception that is and getting perfect pitch requires really specific and accurate training at a very specific time period of your life you aren't gonna leave a video on overnight and omelette du fromage yourself and a having perfect pitch that's just that's just not a thing and the dog thing the dog thing is kind of the best way to explain why everything I've been saying up to this point isn't actually a hundred percent true no really there's a twist here the biggest problem with these videos isn't that it's all garbage meant to trick the algorithm because on some level it is the problem is that all of these videos play on people's misconceptions about music and reinforce an unhealthy outlook on the field of neurologic music therapy see there are some significant healing properties of music and I'm not kidding here I talk about it all the time on my channel but the emerging field of neurologic music therapy has to do with using music to help people it helps nonverbal autistic children to speak in fact I've met people who have written songs specifically designed to help a child learn to speak their own name it helps stroke victims regaining strength and speech and motor functions there are all kinds of insane applications of music as a therapeutic tool that help people on a daily basis you can even use it to help a Parkinson's patient walk again and with new advances in technology and research new applications are being developed every day but the problem is that with videos like these people tend to look at something like music therapy figure that's a bunch of people in a drum circle singing Kumbaya which side note if your stroke victim or a victim of a TBI that can actually help in a really specific situation and I'll link some sources for that in the description but they'll look at this kind of practice and dismiss it research grants won't get funding my friends don't get jobs but most importantly people who could improve their quality of life are left to suffer so the thing is that people see these videos and then they tend to react in one of two ways they either look at it and think its clickbait garbage or they completely believe in everything that it advertises and in both cases there's a large number of people missing out on something that could really benefit them I think the spaceman puts it best here you realize it's just as intellectually lazy to believe everything you see as it is to deny everything you see so if you take anything away from this it's that there's nothing Universal about music people keep trying to say oh this music will release cortisol that music will release dopamine something something dancing and as much as that may be true in that very specific situation you couldn't just pick up anyone from anywhere and have that be true with just one piece of music your personal experience of music is extremely important in understanding how it affects you I think Daniel Levitin one of the leading minds in the cognitive neuroscience of music summarizes it best here now the interesting thing here people always ask me what music should I listen to and the interesting part of it is you probably already know as music therapy evolves as a field I don't think you're gonna go to a doctor a music doctor and have them say oh depression take to Tony Mitchell's and call me in the morning the idea is that music is regulating the hormones and the neurotransmitters effectively the way that draw do so the answer to music therapy is for doctors and patients or just any of us on our own to recognize that music has this power over us this influence on us and to use it so here's the thing as hippy as it sounds this magical music can have the healing effect on you like take this one specific frequency for example say that your dad was like Robin Williams from flubber and every morning during breakfast he'd hit his fork on his plate use it like a tuning fork and try to match the pitch if you went off to college and you were feeling homesick and you looked up a video that happened to focus on that one specific frequency which also happened to be the same frequency as that fork it might make you feel better now that's not a magical frequency that's gonna fix your soul or something like that but on some level it made you feel better it had a healing property and the most important aspect of this to remember is that you understood why it made you feel better that's what makes it effective like say that you're an athlete and you need to be in a state of controlled aggression before big game because you need a pin Efrain in your system without triggering a fight-or-flight response or something hormonal like that I don't know then you'd listen to music that would make you feel angry the same can be said for basically any of this music if it does something for you then great enjoy that's good but the thing is that you know why these pieces of music make you feel that way you consciously listen to that piece of music and think ah this makes me feel calm or excited or homicidal this explicit piece of music doesn't make you feel that way for some magical reason that went into the construction of this piece of music it's because you like the music or it reminds you of something where you have some other strong connection to it it isn't casting some kind of subconscious magical spell on you you're aware of what it does to you and how it makes you feel but in some sense isn't that the real magic this is the same even for your pets like yeah there's a study out there saying that cats like music that's written for cats but that's probably because they're talking about how different animals can hear different frequency ranges also who goes to college for eight years to study how their cat reacts to music something more practical might be what this vet said in this article talking about how you could use some kind of music as a safety cue for your dog which might help with separation anxiety like you associate the music with safety there isn't some magical combination of notes that will sub consciously hack your dog into chilling out like think about it in training dogs trainers associate the sound of a clicker with a reward like food and then use the clicker sound as positive reinforcement I personally prefer to play with a cap of a Snapple bottle but I imagine that a symphony of clickers would sound way better to a dog than anything by Mozart I also imagine that it's tough to get conclusive evidence on how music affects animals because it'd be really difficult to hold them still while you fire up the fMRI machine but in the end of the day a piece won't magically do something to you because someone says it was designed that way think about it if there is a specific frequency or even a combination of notes that had any kind of healing property for all of the human race I think we would have discovered it by now through sheer trial and error there have been a lot of people over the course of a very long time making lots of noise and even these music therapists go through years of training and have decades of research behind them and are only just now beginning to use music to help people and even then for the time being it's an extremely specific circumstances but at the same time you know what you have to listen to to make you feel happy or sad or angry or nostalgic or even make you feel connected to a group of people that you might not have ever met before now take a minute and try to think of anything else out there that could possibly do all of that at a moment's notice whenever you want and in the end of the day isn't that the real magic thanks for watching I'd like to thank our patrons who make these videos possible the very special thank you to Andrew Luke AF and Matt Billy Vazquez Clara tan dr. whoa Donovan Hodges Hayden Elsa Karen Rosen ow Who am I and Zoll boo come and umbrella with an extra special thank you to Eric Osgood and Mary Florence for requesting or I guess maybe indirectly requesting this video so as you saw here be sure to subscribe and check out my other videos follow me on Twitter twitch to come hang out and talk about music and if you really like what I'm doing consider supporting me on patreon but that's all I got for now thanks for watching

Channel: undefined

Views: 111,329

Rating: 4.9456391 out of 5

Keywords: Therapy, Music Therapy, Neurologic Music Therapy, NMT, Stroke, Rehabilitation, Dog Music, Relaxation, Healing, Drum, Separation Anxiety, Cat Music, Perfect Pitch, Mozart, The Mozart Effect, Zen Chant

Id: sFYmyqsY6wU

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Can’t wait until this shit passes, it’s been going for about two years as far as I can remember