Tag: music

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Creative Outlet

Posted on by Jinavie

A popular factoid (a popular piece of trivia that is actually false) is that the brain has two sides: the rational, logical left brain and the creative, emotional right brain. The human brain does have differences between the two hemispheres, but there is no evidence that there is a clear division of functions between the two. The factoid is meant to be a figurative description of the brain.

Although the factoid is medically wrong, we can still learn something from it. All of us lead very busy lives. We are overworked and have little free time and energy. Our minds are filled with facts and figures, as we have high expectations of being specialists in a given field. Our “rational” mind works in overdrive to plan our careers and schedules, while churning through data at work like a computer. On the other hand, our “creative” mind is neglected.

If you look at a child, they are avatars of creativity. They imagine entire worlds, they think outside the box and they are constantly singing and dancing and drawing. But the older we get, the more we lose this side. We lack the time to play our saxophones that we loved as a teenager. Our cameras gather dust in the bookshelf. Our notebooks yearn to be filled with poems, lyrics and stories. All because we “don’t have time”.

Creative outlets are extremely important as they provide balance. Our rational mind provides logical intelligence, but our creative mind is the source of emotional intelligence. If it is neglected, it atrophies and withers away like any muscle that is not used for a long time. We lose our ability to regulate our emotions, to empathise with one another and we forget how to be happy.
Having a creative outlet gives you a chance to enter flow state and escape the stress and dreariness that comes with modern life. It strengthens your emotional intelligence so that you become more mindful of your own emotions.
In short, it is key to enjoying a happier, more balanced life.

But even if you understand the importance, there is the practical problem of not having enough time. The solution is simple: make time for it. Why is it that we set aside time to go for a run to improve our physical health, yet we cannot spare any time to improve our mental health? Whether it be singing a song in the car during your commute, or doodling a sketch while you drink a cup of coffee, there is always time to indulge your creative side.

The best part of having a creative outlet is that it does not have to be for an audience. It can be for your own enjoyment. Even if you make mistakes because you didn’t have time to practise, no one will judge you. What is important is that you dedicate some amount of time every week so that you can get back into forming a habit. Feel free to make mistakes, to be silly and to just enjoy yourself.

If you feel more confident, you could try carefully sharing your creativity with your friends and loved ones. It may be ignored, but it may strike a chord with someone who shares your passion. You may learn about a deeper side to them and it may strengthen your connection. It might even inspire them to foster their own creative outlets. Furthermore, if someone happens to like your work and gives you positive feedback, it will fill your heart with pride and joy.

Creativity is more than just a hobby; it is a state of mind. If you feel that you lost it somewhere along the way of growing up, don’t worry. Just think back to when you were a little kid drawing with crayons and the pure bliss you experienced when you were “in the zone” with your instrument as a teen. You will realise that the creative spark still glimmers in your heart, waiting to burn brightly again.

(Image source: Puuung http://www.grafolio.com/puuung1)

Posted in Life & Happiness

Silliness

Posted on by Jinavie

When we play with children and babies, we become silly. We make faces, use made-up words and play make believe. It seems that we have an innate drive to make as much of our interactions with children positive and fun. Perhaps this stems from a protective instinct; we wish to shield the innocent from the harsh realities of life. So instead of teaching cynicism and negativity, we encourage children to enjoy life and to be happy.

Yet we see adults doing the complete opposite. Acting silly is deemed immature and unseemly. Many cultures even condemn smiling and laughter because they believe it is the sign of an insincere fool. So instead of breaking into song and dance like any child would, many of us put on our most serious face and try to look “mature” and professional. In fact, this is beaten in to us so much during our twenties and thirties that a significant number of people forget the joy of being silly.

Why is it that we can only be silly in the company of children? Why do we forget that deep inside every adult, there hides an inner child wanting to enjoy life? So many people lament that they are unhappy while they deny themselves the infinite source of happiness they hold within.

It takes a very deep level of unhappiness for you to be incapable of smiling at the sight of a laughing baby. Remember that we were all happy children at one point in our lives. That child still lives in on us as we age – all they long for is for you to play and be silly with them.

Try singing a cliché pop song in the shower. Pretend you are in a musical and put a skip in your step while you listen to your favourite song. Laugh at how ridiculous you look while playing air guitar in front of the mirror.

Life is so much more enjoyable when you see it through the eyes of your inner child.

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Posted in History & Literature

Keys To Music

Posted on by Jinavie

On a piano, the simplest key is the C major key. The C major scale starts from the middle C key, then the seven white keys to the right are pressed in order. The notes are named as follows: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. This is known as the diatonic order of the piano. There are various other keys, but every one involves the black keys as sharp and flat notes are used.

Why does the diatonic order – the simplest scale – start at C instead of A?

When the modern system of written music came to be, the lowest available note was named “A” for simplicity, then each note above it was named alphabetically. However, at the time the notes were not matched to any specific scales. Furthermore, they started by only using seven letters, but later agreed on a 12-note octave. To make room for the extra five notes, they invented accidentals – the flats (b) and sharps (#). When the piano keyboard was invented, they made the white keys play natural notes and black keys play accidentals (flats and sharps).

As Western music developed, people became fonder and fonder of major keys (the “happier” sounding keys, to simplify things). This created a problem, as the simplest major key to only use natural notes was the C major key, which starts at C. The notes return to alphabetical order in the natural minor key, as the A minor scale plays as A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A.

Posted in History & Literature

The Devil’s Interval

Posted on by Jinavie

(See below NB for a simple guide to musical notes and tones)

In music, depending on what notes you use in a single chord, you can produce beautiful harmonies as the tones complement each other. The opposite of this is called dissonance and it results in a harsh, unpleasant sound. A famous example of this is a tritone – a chord made from two notes exactly three whole tones apart. In a standard C major diatonic scale (which doesn’t involve any flats or sharps), there is only one tritone per octave: F and B. But on the chromatic scale (all keys), any number of tritones are possible.

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Historically, the tritone has been the black sheep of music theory due to its dissonance crashing any harmony of a song and being difficult to sing. It sticks out like a sore thumb among the sea of beautiful harmonies that other tones make. The tritone was hated so much so that it was named diabolus in musica (“the devil in music”) or the devil’s interval since the Middle Ages, even being banned in the production of music prior to the Renaissance. To this day, the tritone is suggested as an “evil”, “scary” sound.

Over time, composers worked around the tritone until they realised that thanks to the connotations, the tritone was a useful way to express “evil” in a musical way. The cultural association was exploited freely in works such as Franz Liszt’s Dante Sonata, where the tritone is used to depict Hell. The association is found in modern music as well to produce an unsettling feeling, such as the opening notes of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze. The tritone is a common feature of heavy metal bands such as Black Sabbath.

Even though these songs use the devil’s interval, they are not at all inferior to “normal” major scale music. They are still beautiful in their own, interesting way. Perhaps the notion of good and evil have no place in judging whether something is beautiful or not.

NB: Musical tones are noted using the alphabet: C, D, E, F, G, A and B, with a flat(b) to denote a semitone lower, or a sharp(#) to denote a semitone higher. This is easy to visualise on a piano keyboard, where a single tone interval involves a white key, a black key in between and another white key. The interval between a white key and a black key is a semitone.

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(Image: Portion of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights depicting musicians’ hell)

Posted in Simple Pleasures of Life

Simple Pleasures of Life #12

Posted on by Jinavie

Air banding like crazy in your room because no one is watching.

May have rocked out to Are You Gonna Be My Girl for a little while… Anyway, singing/lipsyncing and dancing and playing air guitar to a sweet tune is most definitely a simple pleasure I cannot live without~

But I am nowhere near as cool as the Cool Cats:

Posted in Simple Pleasures of Life

Simple Pleasures of Life #16

Posted on by Jinavie

Being in flow state.

If you don’t know what flow state is, I urge you to learn about it:
https://jineralknowledge.com/flow (yes I’m linking you to an ARK post as always).

For me, the things that put me in flow state include playing my guitar, writing ARK and obsessing about a topic and reading everything about it. It’s so hard to describe, but in that state you feel like nothing else matters. It’s just you and whatever you’re doing. The moment.

One of the best advice for having a happy life I’ve found so far is to discover what your flow is. Whether it be playing an instrument, engaging your creativity or sweating it out through sports, if you find even ONE hobby that will put you in that state of mind, trust me, it’ll change your life.

Of course, one of the best flow states to be in is when you’re so engaged in a conversation with a person that time becomes infinite and you never want to leave that conversation.

Posted in Life & Happiness

Good

Posted on by Jinavie

Good food.

Good wine.

Good coffee.

Good dessert.

Good song.

Good show.

Good laugh.

Good company.

The simpler your demands, the easier life can fulfil them and give you happiness.

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Posted in History & Literature

Silence

Posted on by Jinavie

“Listen to the sound of silence.” ~ Buddhist saying

The anechoic chamber at Orfield Labs in Minneapolis is the quietest room in the world. It records a staggering sound level of -9.4 decibels (humans can only detect sound levels above 0dB), thanks to its special walls, floor and ceiling design that absorbs all sound instead of echoing it. The room is so quiet that the only sound you will hear inside is the sound of your own organs: the sound of air drifting in and out of your lungs, the blood being thumped out of your heart, the digested food gurgling in your stomach… Even your ears generate a tiny amount of noise from the tiny blood vessels in its walls. The absolute silence is so disturbing that the longest anyone has ever spent alone in the room is merely 45 minutes.

The disturbing power of silence is also demonstrated in the infamous musical piece 4’33” (4 minutes 33 seconds) by John Cage. When it was first premiered in 1952, the audience watched in anticipation as the pianist David Tudor entered the stage. Tudor calmly approached the piano and sat down with a graceful demeanour. Then, he closed the piano lid. For 4 minutes and 33 seconds, the pianist did not play a single note. His only actions were opening and closing the lid to mark the end of one movement and the start of the next one. After the 4 minutes and 33 seconds, he stood up, bowed to the (stunned) audience and exited.

The audience was confused, bewildered and angry. How dare they be mocked with such an outrageous performance? By definition, silence is the absence of music, meaning that the audience were not given the musical performance they expected. However, the audience simply did not understand the “sound of silence”. Outside of the anechoic chamber mentioned above, there is no such thing as absolute silence on Earth. For example, that concert room would have been filled with the noise of the unsettled audience shifting in their seats, the raindrops pattering on the roof and the sound of the footsteps of those who walked out in rage.

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Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Flow

Posted on by Jinavie

Have you ever had a moment of pure passion, where you are so immersed in what you are doing that everything around you does not matter and you are in a state of total bliss? In that moment, you feel fully alive, present and completely engaged with what you are doing. When the happiness and creativity expert Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi was studying how painters work, he noticed an odd thing. When their painting was going well, they did not care about getting tired, hungry or uncomfortable. They just carried on. But when the painting was finished, they rapidly lost interest in it.

Csíkszentmihályi described this state of mind as a flow state: the experience of being fully engaged with what you are currently doing. When in a flow state, an hour can pass in the blink of an eye, action and awareness merges and the experience is intrinsically rewarding. You feel that what you are doing is important, in full control and not self-conscious. Flow state does not just involve ultimate concentration. It is a complex state of mind where you are solely driven by focused motivation, operating at your peak level of mental and emotional engagement. Essentially, your mind uses 100% of its capacity for the task at hand, rather than wondering what is for dinner or peeking at the beautiful girl across the road. Because of this, a person in flow state not only works with great efficiency and creativity, but they also feel positive, energised and happy. In fact, the intense spontaneous joy brought on by flow state can almost be considered the mental equivalent of an orgasm.

So how can you achieve flow state? Flow state is not something that one chooses to go into. It is only attained when certain criteria are met.

  • Flow state can happen with any activity, but it is more likely to occur if you are internally motivated (i.e. you are doing the activity mainly for its own sake).
  • You should have clear short-term goals for what you are trying to achieve. This adds direction and structure to the task.
  • An important aspect of flow is that the activity must be challenging enough to stretch your skills almost to the limits, but not more. If it is not challenging enough, you will get bored. If it demands more skill than what you are capable of, you will become anxious. That being said, the balance only has to be between “perceived” challenge and skill. In other words, all you need is confidence that you can take on the challenge.
  • The activity should provide immediate feedback on how you are doing (e.g. seeing how a painting is turning out, hearing yourself sing). This allows you to adjust your performance in order to maintain flow state.

Flow is an incredibly useful thing. Through flow, you can forget about your worries and your strife, reach a state of pure happiness and inner peace and produce something truly great. The key to happiness is knowing what allows you to reach flow state and routinely entering flow state. For example, I know that the three things that give me flow are: music, humour and obsessions. Ergo, I play my guitar and sing, watch television shows that make me laugh and write an entry for the Encyclopaedia of Absolute and Relative Knowledge every day. All of these activities allow me to be truly happy, no matter what the situation may be.

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