Category: Music

We begin with our National Anthem, which officially became our National Anthem today in 1931:

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Today in 1977, John Lennon did not get instant karma, but he did get a green card to become a permanent resident, five years after the federal government (that is, Richard Nixon) sought to deport him. So can you imagine who played mind games on whom?

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Today in 1965, the Rolling Stones were to release “Beggar’s Banquet,” except that the record label decided that the original cover …

… was inappropriate, and substituted …

… angering one member of the band on his birthday.

The number one single …

… and album today in 1975:

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Today in 1964, the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” hit number one and stayed there for 14 weeks:

Today in 1973, George Harrison got a visit from the taxman, who told him he owed £1 million in taxes on his 1973 Bangladesh album and concert:

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Today in 1964, a member of the audience at a Rolling Stones concert in the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool, England, spat upon guitarist Brian Jones, sparking a riot that injured 30 fans and two police officers.

The Stones were banned from performing in Blackpool until 2008.

Today in 1965, Bob Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone,” which is not like said Rolling Stones:

Today in 1967, the Beatles and other celebrities took out a full-page ad in the London Times calling for the legalization of …

… marijuana.

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Today in 1963, high school student Neil Young and his band, the Squires, recorded in a Winnipeg studio a surf instrumental:

Today in 1965, the Beatles asked for  …

The number one single — really — today in 1966:

Today in 1979, Iran’s new ruler, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, banned rock and roll, an event that inspired a British band:

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Birthdays start with the indescribable George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic:

Rick Davies played keyboards for Supertramp:

Estelle Bennett was the older sister of Ronnie Spector, and both were part of the Ronettes:

Don Henley of the Eagles:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kslHr7_9Zac

Gizmodo begins:

Some songs stick to your soul like ectoplasm. Whether you’re at the club or Chuck E. Cheese, sometimes you hear a certain song that brings you back to a moment in your life you’d forgotten. Good music is fun but ephemeral—the best music stays with you forever, sometimes a little too long. Seriously, stop buying Phish t-shirts.

Obviously, all art—and taste—is subjective. But is there one song—or one kind of song—that’s generally more enjoyable? Recently, author Tom Cox tweeted some musings on the philosophy behind what makes the “best song ever.”

Cox tweeted:

There is no concrete best song ever. The best song ever is an ever-shifting concept, coloured by weather, hope, disappointment and the moon.

That got a large amount of response, including, bizarrely:

No it’s Africa by Toto

Personally, I think “Africa” isn’t even Toto’s best song; this is:

Toto’s Steve Lukather then tweeted …

No .I hate the song myself! lol But It has been VERY good to us $$ wise. We GET the joke guys! That song is a wild card song..

… followed by …

I mean how can you hate something that has been so good to you. I WILL say I never sit around the house playing it!

Cox then tweeted;

The best song ever right now is Cisco Kid by War but only here and only for a while.0

And then the entire Internet felt the need to chime on what they think is the best song of all time, blah blah blah. Or was it …

The flood of responses prompted Gizmodo to try to apply science to what is certainly unscientific:

This week on Giz Asks, we talked to neuroscientists and music enthusiasts about why our brains just can’t get enough of certain songs.

Scientists included King’s College’s Daniel Glaser …

Is there any way to scientifically determine what makes a “good” song? Why or why not?

The best way to test a song is still a human. We can measure how people respond to songs in a bunch of ways including brain scans, measures of chemicals in the the brain, including dopamine (which is associated with the internal reward system reward, perhaps you give yourself a pat on the back for selecting a great playlist). Actually measuring foot tapping or the smile muscles is probably just as good as most more ‘scientific methods.’

Are any chemicals released in our brains when we hear songs we enjoy (e.g. dopamine)?

We still don’t have good models to enable us to describe what makes a good song yet alone artificially create one. Deep learning networks may be able to develop an artificial ‘classifier’ that would learn what an individual likes and predict whether a new song would be a hit or miss for that individual. But I’m not sure if that would be scientific because in the end even the people who build the network don’t know what lies beneath its decision.

Do certain musical genres influence people’s brains differently?

On genres, the interesting thing is that how you hear music is determined by your early life experience up to two years or for some musical elements six months. Beyond that age your brain is kind of fixed for things like quarter tones or off-beats so if you want your kid to dig a particular style make sure they get exposed to it early.

… New York University’s Amy Belfi …

There’s some interesting research that shows that people fall on a spectrum in terms of their “musical hedonism.” A small group have what you’d call musical anhedonia, so these are people that don’t like music at all. It’s not that they get a viscerally negative reaction, it’s just that they don’t really listen to it, they don’t really get music, they don’t really respond in a viscerally positive way to it.

Most people in the world do respond positively to music. There are people on the other end of the spectrum who are hyper hedonic and really, really, really love music and get really jazzed about it. Part of it is an individual difference or a personality trait of how much you respond to music. So that’s a big part of it: people who respond to music more overall, and then people who respond less to music no matter what it is.

Are there any qualities that make a song “good”?

The challenge in psychology, but especially when we’re looking at music, is the fact that there’s individual differences. Taste is so varied in terms of music. In several studies about musical chills or really positive responses to music, they have the participants in the study bring in their own music to listen to. So you would have to have a comparison of highly pleasing music versus non-pleasing music. So the highly pleasing music is totally different from one person to another.

My research tends to focus on the response to music rather than the particular qualities of it, since it’s so hard to pick a song that everyone across the board likes, unless you pick a group of participants that have very homogenous taste which is also kind of challenging. If we knew what made the perfect song, someone would be making millions of dollars off it.

… and David Poeppel …

How fast is the typical song?

There are numbers about what’s on average how fast music is, whether or not you like it. Let’s say you take a whole bunch of music—classical, rock, single instruments and ensembles—you can calculate the mean rate. On average, the rate music is played at because is about two hertz—two cycles per second—which translates into 120 beats per minute. Across musical styles and eras, there’s a typical “mean rate” of music, which is kind of surprising. It’s faster than the heartbeat and slower than speech.

Why do certain songs tend to stick with us throughout life while others don’t?

One of the hard things from a scientific point of view is trying to figure out how taste works is to account for the huge range of taste across people and across, even, your own age. Songs from puberty are particularly well-remembered for some reason—like the first time you fell in love, or something. But then, maybe in retrospect you think, “Wow, what the fuck, I liked Blondie?” It shows that even your own aesthetic experience changes pretty drastically over the course of your lifetime.

So from an individual point of view, what makes you happy, stimulated or excited changes even within you over time.

Is the best song of all-time “Africa” by Toto?

Actually, Toto turns out to be remarkably good and sophisticated according to musicians. Toto was a group of hardcore, highly respected studio musicians. They crafted those songs pretty carefully and were incredibly successful with those four albums. And musicians actually really love Toto.

For one thing, “Africa” is slightly more about Africa than the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo” is about an Indiana town.

Today in 1968, Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-da-Vita” reached the charts. It is said to be the first heavy metal song to chart. It charted at number 117.

That was the short version. The long version takes an entire album side:

At the other end of the charts was South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela:

Quite a selection of birthdays today, starting with T.G. Sheppard:

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