Or at least I am delighted by finding synchronicity where I least expected it:
“The stopping of sounds and rhythms,” he added, “it’s really important, because, you know, how can I miss you unless you’re gone? If you just keep the thing going like a loop, eventually it loses its power.”
An insight like this may seem purely subjective, far removed from anything a scientist could measure. But now some scientists are aiming to do just that, trying to understand and quantify what makes music expressive — what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another.
[snip]
In an interview, the singer Rosanne Cash said the experiments showed that beautiful compositions and technically skilled performers could do only so much. Emotion in music depends on human shading and imperfections, “bending notes in a certain way,” Ms. Cash said, “holding a note a little longer.”
She said she learned from her father, Johnny Cash, “that your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.”
“You’ve heard plenty of great, great singers that leave you cold,” she said. “They can do gymnastics, amazing things. If you have limitations as a singer, maybe you’re forced to find nuance in a way you don’t have to if you have a four-octave range.”
What the NYT article calls "those goose bump moments" - it describes the reaction I've always had to the Bard:
... how is poetic language different from normal language? Consider these examples, in which Shakespeare grammatically shifts the function of words:
An adjective is made into a verb: 'thick my blood' (The Winter's Tale)
A pronoun is made into a noun: 'the cruellest she alive' (Twelfth Night)
A noun is made into a verb: 'He childed as I fathered' (King Lear)
As Davis's experiments have shown, instead of rejecting these "syntactic violations," the brain accepts them, and is excited by the "grammatical oddities" it is experiencing. While it has not been fully proven that we can localize which parts of the brain process nouns as opposed to verbs, Davis says his research suggests that "in the moment of hesitation" brought on by the stimulative effects of functional shift, the brain doesn't know "what part to assign the word to."
... we need creative language "to keep the brain alive." He points out that so much of our language today, written in bullet points or simple sentences, fall into predictability. "You can often tell what someone is going to say before they finish their sentence" he says. "This represents a gradual deadening of the brain."
It even explains the magic of a baby's laughter.
Maybe it explains why I so often prefer the company of friends who have the grace to disagree with me. Who knows?
Wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful.
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