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Saturday, June 18, 2011

Characteristics of musical sound

PITCH
Pitch is that characteristics of musical sound which depends on its frequency.A musical sound having high frequency is called high pitch sound.It is also called shrill sound.But a musical sound having two frequency is called low pitch sound and also called flat or grave or hoarse sound.For eg: The voice of children and women have higher pitch as compared to that of adult or a man.

LOUDNESS
It can be defined as the magnitude of hearing sensation produced by a musical sound.It depends on the intensity of sound.Higher the intensity of musical sound,higher will be the loudness and vice-versa.The intensity of musical sound at a point is defined as amount of sound energy received per second per unit area.So all the factor which attract the intensity of sound will also affect the loudness.For eg:1)The ampliude of vibration of source. 2)Surface area of a vibrating body,density of medium. 3)Distance between source and observer.

QUALITY OR BIMBER
It can be defined as the property of musical sound by which one can distinguish between two sounds or same loudness and pitch.It can be determined by the number of harmonic or avertone sound.A sounding body may produce waves of different frequency; 2f0,3f0,4f0,5f0....... where f0 is the fundamental frequency i.e lower possible freqency 2f0,3f0,....etc are called avertones.
Analysing the quality of sound,we can recognize the sources of sound without seeing.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Music of Nepal

Music of Nepal refers to the various musical genres of Nepal. With more than fifty ethnicities, the music of this country is a highly dispersed phenomenon. Although genres like pop, rock, folk, and Classical music exist, a huge number of such genres are yet to be cataloged. Many musical bands exist in Nepal, with a huge number in Kathmandu - most of the recent ones focused in pop and rock. Rap has been known to emerge on the charts from time to time.

History
Medieval era
    Newari Music developed and flourished during this era. The Malla kings were known for their interest in arts. Drama created during those era are accompanied by music. Many of the guthis of Kathmandu valley have their origin in this era. These guthis maintain the musical genres established during that era. Dāpā music, a type of Newari bhajan is believed to have originated in this era.

Modern history
    The modern history is a very short one. At times when big and private music companies where mushrooming the Western cities, Kathmandu got its first radio station, Radio Nepal in the year 1952. Since then Radio Nepal has expanded to become the dominant radio station all over the country, which helped in the uprising of many key figures in the field, notably Shiva Shankar, Natikaji, Narayan Gopal, Arun Thapa Magar (also known as Arun Thapa) , Dharma Raj Thapa, Jhalak Man Gandarva, and in the female arena Koili Devi Mathema, Tara Devi, Aruna Lama.

Association of independent music(AIMS)

The Association of Independent Music (commonly known as AIM) is a non-profit trade body established in 1998 by UK independent record labels to represent the independent record sector, which constitutes approximately 25% of the UK market.

AIM currently has over 800 record label and distributor members.

Most recently AIM have featured in the press over their contract negotiations with Apple for rights to distribute their labels' content on the iTunes service. AIM label tracks were not available on iTunes UK at launch, but contract terms have since been agreed with many of the independents, although negotiations are understood to still be on-going with others.

In September 2008, AIM became a founding member of UK Music which represents all aspects of the UK music industry.

Music popularity

There are some popular songs that will not down no matter how tiresome they become. Therefore it is glad news to some ears to hear the following statistics : Beautiful Ohio, a waltz of the
1919 vintage has the world's record for sales, 3,500,000 copies. Next comes another waltz, Missouri, which ran about 3,000,000 copies. But only about 2,000,000 copies of the so-called Banana Song were exchanged for the public's cash.
Yet this fruity song will not down. A member of the firm which published it declared recently:
"It was the first American song hit and the first American jazz piece that ever caught on in Italy. It ran like wildfire through Germany and Austria, making the biggest popular hit in years in Vienna, supposed to be the home of catchy music. It is also the first American song to be popularized in Greece."
There is more than mere music which counts in making a song popular. Energy and persistence are large factors. Long after Bananas was the rage of the East, the West did not take to it. The publishers were determined, however. They changed managers in their Chicago branch, and notified their San Francisco and Los Angeles branches that a hit must be made at any cost.
The artificial means of stimulating popularity is chiefly that of "plugging," and this requires the service of a staff of experienced and expert "pluggers." Restaurant and orchestra bands are usually glad to play pieces published by firms with a high average of success. It is more difficult to induce vaudeville performers to use a song in their acts in big-time houses. In vaudeville houses the publishers furnish their own vocalists to sing a song, while slides illustrating it are thrown on the screen. If the piece has any merit, this sort of "plugging" will put it across. The people, hearing it often, get the idea that the song is popular.
And when they think it is popular it is popular.

How can music help you?

Listening to good and soulful music will help you attain self improvement and have a better quality of life. You can do your household chores after turning on some good music and you will never feel the strain. Also you can use music for motivation. Music can definitely change your state of mind and make you more relaxed and happy.  By listening to stimulating music you tend to become more relaxed.

You can also use music for intelligence. In this case music stimulates creativity by creating channels of neurons in the brain. Research has proved that music tunes the brain to higher planes of thinking.  Music therapy is an emerging arena of health care in which music is used to heal patients fighting cancer, children with reading/writing problems and others. Many health care facilities also make use of music to help patients fight depression, cope with pain and ease muscle tension. There are plenty of other advantages associated with music therapy as music impacts the mind and body in many ways that are powerful. Given below are some of the advantages of listening to soulful music which helps to reiterate the importance of music therapy.



With respect to brain waves, studies have shown that music with strong beats can help bring alert thinking and better concentration there by promoting calm and a meditative state. Also music can bring changes in brain activity levels which will enable it to shift speeds very easily on its own. This in turn can lead to a healthy state of mind. Music can also alter the heart rate and breathing functions and there by improve the relaxation response by causing slower and relaxed breathing. This is the reason why music therapy is largely used to counteract the damages caused by chronic stress and thereby leads to promotion of all-round health. Music helps to create a positive bent of mind and helps to stay away from depression. This can lead to better levels of optimism and creativity and a lot of other benefits. Because of all these advantages and positive effects physically, many view music as a crucial factor which helps the body to fight diseases and to stay healthy.

Is music a language?

The answer to this thought-provoking question relies on your ideas about exactly what a language is. If you consider a language to be a means of transmitting data about the external world from one person to another, then music doesn't seem to fit the bill. One can't find any information about the outside world purely from the music, although one can infer certain ideas if one knows some of the history behind the creation of a piece of music.
But if you think of language only as a way to share information in a way that many people can understand, then yes, music is a language. That is, written music is a language; the actual sounds of the music are purely artistic and abstract. (Composers can certainly evoke certain images or emotions through their music, but those evocations aren't universal and rely on the shared history and knowledge of the listeners.) Musical notation can be considered as much a language of music as mathematics can be considered a language of science.
Consider this: If a scientist in, say, outer Mongolia doesn't speak English, he won't understand what you mean if you tell him, "The square of the hypotenuse is the sum of the squares of the other two sides." But if you show him, "a2 + b2 = c2," he'll recognize the Pythagorean Theorem and know that it applies to right triangles. That's because you're speaking in a language that he understands: mathematics.
In the same way, if you describe a piece of music in your own language, someone from the other side of the Earth might not understand a lick of it. But if you write out the music using standard musical notation — with staves, time signatures, key signatures, clefs, dynamics, and all that — people around the world can instantly understand your "data," which, like mathematics, is essentially a set of instructions.
And like mathematics, there are many different levels of comprehension of musical notation, based on levels of training. A professional musician may be flummoxed by mathematical equations when Greek letters start to appear, but she can instantly read the notes in a C-clef, understand the markings for pizzicato, and build a fully diminished seventh chord without a second thought. A master mathematician, on the other hand, may be just the opposite — she may be able to deduce the speed of an electron with only a little information but just barely be able to read the notes in the treble clef. Nonetheless, both the musician and the mathematician have some shared vocabulary in both mathematics and musical notation.

Melodious music

Any Polish band playing on Melodious Music is a thing that is worth mentioning as I don't consider Polish music scene as particulalry melodious (to put it mildly). The occasion to write something about a Polish band is that a Polish actress Alicja Bachleda-Curuś is dating the Irish actor, Colin Farell. (Who knows, maybe they've even already kissed, God please forgive them). Their relationship and especially the status of the Polish film star brings to my mind a good Polish song "Farelka" (a Farell's girl), by the band named Kevin Arnold.

Farelka is kind of electric heater, very popular in Poland in the communist times, when there were frequent heating-systems' outages, so farelka was a priceless device. I like the concept of the song: the guy sings as if farelka was a girl ("spending evenings together", etc.). But the problem is that as there is no perfect girlfriend, there's also no perfect electric heater (farelka also used to break sometimes).