There is an interesting college degree that has been around for a while now (since 1944) called Music Therapy. In theory it is used to work with behavioral-emotional disorders and how different sound waves affect the brain. However, while music therapy may not be every ones cup of tea, everyone still does it without even realizing. Music can affect people for better or for worse.
Music is technically just organized sound that people interpret as something enjoyable, in turn, sound is just a vibration of a specific frequency in the air that our ears pick up in a certain way. After we have detected a noise, the electrical impulse that represents the sound is sent to our brain to be processed almost instantly. Now here is the part where the magic happens: this vibration that has traveled all the way to our brain will now have an impact on the way that we feel. Everybody has heard a loud sound and been scared, and everybody has heard a calming song and been relaxed by it. It just depends on how a specific sound will make a specific human feel. Just last night I held an experiment on how music can affect performance. While some friends were playing a game of pool I was feeling rather bored, and started to whistle a random tune I was hearing in my head. In the song I was whistling was a slower part that had much less energy, and a faster, cooler, suave sounding part that had high energy. Of course in movies, when something awesome is happening, there is usually a soundtrack accompanying , so when someone was about to shoot the cue ball to make a point I would change the feeling of the song and see how it affected their shot. Of course there is never a guarantee that someone will hit a ball, but judging on how I have seen them play in the past, I knew what to expect from each individual player. The cool part where the song progressed yielded the most number of shots and the low energy part yielded many mistakes as well as poor shots.
Obviously music manipulation is easy, it is as easy as picking out a song and playing it on your iPod or whatever else, but knowing what you put into some one’s mind is a different story. Saying something as simple as “I think this is stupid” can be put into some ones head as negativity, yet if you say it in a happy tone, sarcasm arises. Do our words carry more weight than we may imagine, and can we change the world with words alone?
I think you do a very good job of explaining music and what it does with our brain. I do think that our words carry more weight than we may imagine, but I am not sure about changing the world with just words. I believe it may take more than that. You doing your own experiment helps the credibility of the story.
ReplyDeleteI like the way you wrote this and how you took a different route. Instead of describing something strange and unusual with a ghost or spirit that you had an encounter with you did a great job showing how you try manipulate others minds. You did a really good job describing how music therapy works too. Nicely written.
ReplyDeleteThis story completely caught me off guard! I loved it because it is so different from the other stories. I thought the way you incorporated a sort of factual side to your descriptions that made the story seem very credible. Maybe you could add a scientific research study about music and the brain to your story by actually quoting the facts. Overall a fantastic read!
ReplyDeleteThis story was so different from other stories; i really liked it! B talking about how you manipulated people with music therapy and got results really established credibility as well as your knowledge in music therapy. You really knew what you were talking about! It was also just very very interesting to read about how you can affect someone with music like that.
ReplyDeleteThis story is a nice change of pace. It's very well written and organized wonderfully. You seem very knowledgeable of music therapy which makes it realistic. I'm not entirely sure what the argument would be, or if I didn't see it, but still very good paper!
ReplyDeleteGreat story! I never thought that much in depth with music before. You were very detailed on explaining how people react with music and your experiment was very clever. I didn't really see the strange and unusual aspect of the story, but that just might be me. Great job!
ReplyDeleteChange of style from the other stories. It was really good and interesting. I have never really thought about music in that way before. There was a lot of detail put into this story which made it even better. Great job and I like the change of pace.
ReplyDeleteThis was a very different and interesting story. I liked it . You gave a lot of great descriptive fact , which added to the credibility. Your paragraphs flowed well and you had nice transitions into. Overall I enjoyed it!
ReplyDeleteVery interesting story! The fact that its not a scary story really gets the readers to think differently. I believe that music can change the way someone feels, great examples.
ReplyDeleteDeep and thought provoking essay. The phenomena of music therapy is fascinating. Scientific fact will strengthen your essay, as will personal experience with it. Logical arguments will be your strong points.
ReplyDeleteThis is a pretty funky idea here. I like it though, playing pool should always have some kind of music to go along with it. Im not sure how much whistling could affect people though, it seems like no matter how you do it it would just be distracting to the people playing. So i cant really see how you could analyze it to mean you affected the game either in a good or bad way.
ReplyDeleteReally good topic, I personally liked this story very much. Your facts were great, you really knew what you were talking, which strengthen your credibility.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed your story for what it was, but i almost felt like it was a little off the topic of the paper. The part about the vibes and how simple changes in song can effect the way people think in certain situations was dead on, but didnt feel quite like it was all that strange an unusual. I really enjoyed reading the story however, and the writing style was great!
ReplyDeleteyour story is definitely different from all the other stories i red. the credibility of it is there just because this has been proven that music can change people and of course if you can change people with music you can manipulate them
ReplyDeleteGreat story! Very interesting twist to the assignment compared to other’s interpretation. I liked how the story was still very strange and unusual but not about ghosts or spirits. It was very well written and you add a lot of credibility to the piece from your definition of music/sound and your explanation of how our brain interprets this. The story flowed well and was an easy read.
ReplyDeleteI like the way the story is written with few to no grammar mistakes. The flow of the story is very thought out and really easy to follow and understand. Your understanding of the music that you are talking about makes the story very believeable. Only thing is that you kind of got off topic but over all great stories!!!!
ReplyDeleteThis story is very unique compared to everyone else stories. The fact that you gave a lot of background and details about music therapy made it a much better story. It had me really thinking into it.It seemed a little off topic when you just switched from pool to movies, but good story.
ReplyDeleteThe facts at the beginning about music therapy boosted your credibility immensely. When you start with "Just last night" in the middle of the second paragraph, you need to separate that into a new paragraph. Though it was well done and credible, the story didn't seem "strange" nor "unusual."
ReplyDeleteFirst off cool name! Great job though. I really love music and the way you described it was just amazing. It was different from the other stories i have read but thats why i enjoyed it so much. It flowed very well and i didnt see any huge errors. Good Job
ReplyDeleteThis story was very well written, but it seems to be more an argument to inform rather than an argument for the supernatural. Your clear writing style and to the point explanations of sound and music were beneficial to your credibility, making the paper easy to believe. The concept of certain sounds making someone’s emotions change isn’t very strange and unusual, it just seems scientific. That aside, the paper was very well written and if your intent was to get me to think about the power of words, I would say you accomplished such.
ReplyDeleteI like the way you wrote this and how you took a different route. i really liked it. It was also just very very interesting.
ReplyDeleteI am not familiar with the concept of music therapy, so the way you give a detailed explanation of how it works really helps a reader to have background and enable them to understand the story. I also thought your last paragraph was really strong. You really made me question how the mind works, and got me thinking about how music affects me. Nice job!
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