Musicians From The United States

"For language to be generative, children must not be learning by rote. Music is also generative. For every musical phrase I hear, I can always add a note... to generate a new musical phrase."

"Cosmides and Tooby argue that music's function in the developing child is to help prepare its mind for a number of complex cognitive and social activities, exercising the brain so that it will be ready for the demands placed on it by language and social interaction. ...Mother-infant interactions involving music almost always entail both singing and rhythmic movement..."

"Primates, some birds, and humans have mirror neurons... that fire both when performing an action and when observing someone else performing... We've found mirror neurons in Broca's area, a part... involved in speaking, and learning to speak. ...our mirror neurons may be firing when we see or hear musicians perform ... in preparation for being able to mirror or echo them back as part of a signaling system."

"The argument is that there may be a cluster of genes that influences both outgoingness and musicality. If this were true, we would expect to find that deviations in one ability co-occur with deviations in the other, as we do in WS and ASD."

"When a musical piece is too simple we tend not to like it, finding it trivial. When it is too complex, we tend not to like it, finding it unpredictable—we don't perceive it to be grounded in anything familiar. Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity..."

"The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human."

"I think we will see personalized music stations in the next few years... controlled by computer algorithms... I think it will be important that... listeners have an "adventuresomeness" knob that will control the mix of old and new, or the mix of how far out the new music is from what they usually listen to."

"The brain's synapses are programmed to grow for a number of years, making new connections. After that time, there is a shift toward pruning, to get rid of unneeded connections. ...Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to reorganize itself. ...the amount of reorganization that can occur in most adults is vastly less than can occur in children and adolescents."

"Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found. ...Music predates agriculture in the history of our species."

"The six types of song that have shaped human nature—friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love songs—I've come to think are obvious..."

"A gene that promotes nurturing behavior postcopulation could... spread throughout the population, to the extent that the offspring of people with the nurturing gene fare better, as a group, in the competition for resources and mates."

"Myelin is a fatty substance that coats the axons, speeding up synaptic transmission. Myelanation... is generally completed by age twenty. Multiple sclerosis is one of several degenerative diseases that can affect the myelin sheath..."

"It is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity—the thought of a musical concert in which a class of "experts" performed for an appreciative audience was virtually unknown throughout our history as a species. And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized."

"Miller and his colleague Marty Haselton at UCLA have shown that creativity trumps wealth, at least in human females."

"The multiple reinforcing cues of a good song—rhythm, melody, contour—cause music to stick in our heads. That is the reason why many ancient myths, epics, and even the Old Testament were set to music in preparation for being passed down by oral tradition across generations."

"We can say that speaking French "runs in families," but I don't know anyone who would claim that speaking French is genetic."

"On average, successful people have had many more failures that unsuccessful people."

"So much of the research on musical expertise has looked for accomplishment in the wrong place, in the facility of the fingers rather than the expressiveness of emotion."

"Mozart had extensive training from his father, who was widely considered the greatest living music teacher in all of Europe at the time."

"Joni uses a lot of alternate tunings; that is, instead of tuning the guitar in the customary way, she tunes the strings to pitches of her own choosing. ...Joni will talk compellingly and passionately about alternate tunings for hours, comparing them to different colors that van Gogh used in his paintings."

"Paul McCartney may be the closest thing our generation has produced to Franz Schubert -- a master of melody, writing tunes anyone can sing, songs that seem to have been there all along. Most people don't realize that "Ave Maria" and "Serenade" were written by Schubert (or that his "Moment Musical in F" so resembles "Martha My Dear"). McCartney writes with similar universality. His "Yesterday" has been recorded by more musicians than any other song in history. Its stepwise melody is deceptively complex, drawing from outside the diatonic scale so smoothly that anyone can sing it, yet few theorists can agree on exactly what it is that McCartney has done."

"Music moves us because it serves as a metaphor for emotional life. It has peaks and valleys of tension and release. It mimics the dynamics of our emotional life."

"Memory strength is also a function of how much we care about the experience. ...If I'm playing an instrument I like, and whose sound pleases me in and of itself... caring leads to attention, and together they lead to measurable neurochemical changes. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with emotional regulation, alertness, and mood, is released, and the dopaminergic system aids in encoding the memory trace."

"Joni's genius is that she creates chords that are ambiguous, chords that have two or more different roots. ...Joni's music is as close to impressionist visual art as anything I've heard. ...harmonic complexity born out of her strict insistence that the music not be anchored in a single harmonic interpretation."

"The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes. It involves a precision choreography... between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems. ...it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times of our lives. Your brain on music is all about... connections."

"Studies of violin players by Thomas Elbert have shown that the region of the brain responsible for moving the left hand... increases in size as a result of practice."

"Memory for playing a musical piece... involves a process very much like that for music listening... through establishing standard schemas and expectation. In addition, musicians use chunking... tying information together into groups, and remembering the group as a whole rather than individual pieces."

"The Harvard neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug has shown that the front portion of the corpus callosum is significantly larger in musicians than in nonmusicians, and particularly for musicians who began their training early. ...Schlaug found that musicians tended to have larger cerebellums than nonmusicians, and an increased concentration of gray matter... responsible for information processing, as opposed to white matter, which is responsible for information transmission."

"The emerging picture from... studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of master associated with being a world-class expert—in anything."

"Consonant intervals and dissonant intervals are processed via separate mechanisms in the auditory cortex."

"Contour refers to the pattern of musical pitch in a melody—the sequence of ups or downs that the melody takes—regardless of the size of the interval."

"One hundred years from now Beatles songs may be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people will have forgotten who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they've always existed, like Oh Susannah, This Land Is Your Land, and Frère Jacques."

"Music changed more between 1963 and 1969 than it has in the 37 years since, with the Beatles among the architects of that change."

"You can't gain one thing without loosing something else. You can try to catch time, but try to catch a moment, it's better. Days pass, and months go by And the years come, and a decades gone It always feels like times are ending But they go on, and on, and on, and on."

"The sound of Mintzer’s guitar in the track “On the Road”, is haunting. However in context, the sound develops sentimental and inspiring feelings. The vocal melodies and harmonies are similar to Mintzer’s playing in their original shape/color and light floating tone. Thoughtful and poetic lyrics accent the effect, serving as a conduit for the entirety of the aforementioned musicianship."

"Believe in yourself."

"Dream big, when you’re up against it all, when you’re standing on a narrow bridge and you’re about to fall. Dream big, when you're blocked by a wall, keep on saying in your head, nothing is impossible. Dream big, and when your moment arrives, look up to the stars and thank God you're alive. Dream big, the power is inside of you. You'll be love for whoever you are and for whatever you do."

"Playing music is something I would like to do my whole life."

"I came from a background of blues and rock based(music). I hadn’t listened to Jazz or even Classical Music until just recently. Listening to Stan Getz, you know, he is one of my favorite Saxophonists, so he’s influenced my sound and influences how I play this music. Right now."

"In 7th grade, I saw the Allman Brothers play at the Beacon Theatre. I also saw the Dave Mathews Band perform at Giant’s Stadium. Those concerts changed my life. I was inspired so much. In my heart, I knew that was the only thing I wanted to do with my life."

"It’s easy, it’s powerful."

"I think Bitcoin allows artists to be compensated for work in a more fair way."

"Hollywood is like high school with money."

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."

"He/she is the host, mentor and inspiration of RuPaul's Drag Race, the ultimate drag queen competition. RuPaul reigns supreme in all judging and eliminations of the race. However, RuPaul, the man, guide the contestants in preparin for each challenge. The Nation's most outrageous, cutting-edge, talented and stunningly gorgeous drag queens are generally the participants. Rupaul also is the fabulous judge on the tv show Skin Wars and Skin Wars Fresh Paint."

"You're born naked. The rest is drag."

"I’ve seen trends ebb and flow. I’ve seen progress and I’ve seen regression, not just in gay movements, but in all types of movements — whether it’s gender or sexuality or race. All kinds of different movements. And humans are fickle. Humans are very trendy. And they’re posers. If some economic change happens, it can all go to shit, honestly. And I’ve seen it happen in my lifetime. So do I trust that this is what it is and it’ll stick forever? I’m skeptical and I’m cautious."

"We had a very hostile period [towards drag] after 9/11, especially in America, that was very fear based. And right now, we are enjoying an open window, politically and culturally. But don’t be fooled – all of this is cyclical. I’ve seen the window open in my lifetime and I’ve seen it close."

"Like I said before, there are windows of openness in our culture. And then our culture closes those windows down just as fast. And I’ve seen it in my lifetime, time and time again. Right now I’m enjoying the freedom that we all have. But it could really all end. What happened in Germany in the early ’30s, no one could have imagined that — except for the people who had lived through that kind of thing before. And it’s all cyclical. So we have a certain freedom now. And I’m not just talking about gay people. I’m talking about everyone. We have a certain freedom now. But that could all change in a heartbeat."

"In a culture, you can choose fear or love. It’s been my experience and my observation that humans on this planet feel more comfortable with fear rather than love and openness... I do know what history tells us about humans. And humans, they actually don’t feel very comfortable with openness and freedom."