At 09:21 AM 1/6/2006, Donatella Galletti wrote: >Well, I don't care much whether it has been demonstrated or not, it works >for me and it's ok...
That's very important, as I tried to allude in my last note. >About the experiment below, did they care to check whether the people who >looked after the plants liked best rock or classical music, and if this >could have affected the plants growth? I mean , if these people were in a >different mood when watering the plants, this is an element which should >have been taken into consideration. I also read about Findorn, in Scotland, >were people seem to have grown huge plants using as fertilizer loving words. >I repeat it as I read it. If I recall, the plants were mostly isolated from people in at least some music treatments. I haven't seen the episode in a long time, and they didn't have any real replication, but they set up an experimental system that could have been tweaked very minimally to produce a defensible analysis of variance or the like. If I recall, the essence was plants subject to sound tended to do better than those without; what the specific sound was wasn't necessarily relevant. If anybody recalls better than I, please feel free to correct me. >I can tell an amusing experience I had with classical music and students: >years ago I was teaching students who did not listen to anything different >from hard rock, punk and the like, they were not very bright, neither were >they able to concentrate, and above all they were very aggressive. I did >something very daring: while they had to do a task, I had them listen to >classical music ( Mozart). [I'll bet they would have done even better with a Piccinini fix, eh?] >I expected some of them would have killed me >after a few minutes or yelled to switch the tape recorder off, but >unexpectedly for me, they became very calm and concentrated... This is interesting, but still anecdote. I listen to art music almost exclusively, medieval through today. I won't try to lay any claim to an abnormal degree of brightness. If I encounter a new bit of particularly intriguing and technically challenging (even if cacophonous) progressive rock, I am quite likely to pause and listen contemplatively. However, I suspect this is as much a function of my own lack of familiarity as of the music itself. What you observed probably was more affect than effect and might not have had much to do with the specifics of the music you mandated. ...It could have had as much to do with your expectations of the students as the music itself. ...Perhaps people who are predisposed to aggressive behavior find punk rock appealing; perhaps they select that music because of who they were to begin with. Without controlled experimentation, I can't put much stock in anecdote. Human perception is a notoriously bad quantitative measure of things. That's OK because we're pretty good at nebulous qualitative evaluations to serve our own well being. Most people are fans of popular forms of music, including rock (thus the moniker "popular"). Plenty of them (although maybe not quite enough) seem intelligent and productive enough to me. I'm particularly fond of this quip by Prof. Michael Linton (1999): > And the whole structure of his argument collapses > under simple common sense. If Mozart's music were > able to improve health, why was Mozart himself so > frequently sick? If listening to Mozart's music > increases intelligence and encourages spirituality, > why aren't the world's smartest and most spiritual > people Mozart specialists? >PS Happy New Year to everybody! ..And the very same to you and yours! Eugene -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
