TED Community » Jan Freijser

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• A reply on Talk: Robert Gupta: Between music and medicine

  Oct 7 2012: Thank you for your reaction.
  
  You're right that it is all dependent on the listener.
  
  But also on the maker and player.
  
  To begin with, it's "unnatural" to be able to carry 1000s of pieces of music around with you on your iPod or whatever other device. I don't understand how people can go about doing stuff while listening to music.
  I can't do that, because music to me is a journey of discovery, and sometimes leads me into another universe. A "real" musical experience is one that you attend in real-time, interacting with the performer, or it is the act of playing music yourself.
  
  But our thwarted so-called hi-tech modern world is the result of an almost relentless abuse of technology over the last 200-300 years.
  That music is used to torture inmates is an utter abomination, and another example of such abuse.
  
  That some types of music are indigestible for some people is largely a matter of taste.
  I'm also aware of the fact that some people suffer from a neurological condition which turns any type of music into a jumble of unbearable noise.
  
  I can't help looking at music the way I experience it. I have always experienced it as a quest. A quest for some deep universal primal flow of humanness, creating movement, emotion, elation, connection, belonging, understanding, openness. I found that in the music of John Coltrane, but also in any type of deep folk music, from India to Ireland.
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  A comment on Talk: Robert Gupta: Between music and medicine

  Oct 3 2012: Thank you for this talk. I believe that music and dance are unimaginably more primal than language. At some point in human history, sounds and beats and movements gave birth to the first signs of human consciousness, awareness of being. I believe music is that primal. The pure physical effects of the vibrating sound waves, the resonating objects, including our own bodies, the rhythmic patterns, echoing our own heartbeat, all contributed to "us" being aware of being there, on this earth, forming a miniscule part of the cosmos. At the same time, neurologically, it helped form our mental capacities so that we could slowly develop language, an immensely complex task, of which we still don't understand how it works exactly. I learnt a lot about the subject from reading Oliver Sacks' lovely book Musicophilia. Sacks refers to Rodolfo Llinas as one of the main neurophysiologists investigating how the brain functions to achieve movement. To Llinas, movement is everything, in the context of human consciousness. This includes simple physical movement (walking, running), it includes games we love to play with balls, and it includes all mental movements we refer to as emotion. Llinas coined the word "motricity" to refer to this capability. He does not claim to have found out exactly the underlying neurological principles of how motricity works, but his very fundamental observations are fascinating. Recently I watched an amazing documentary programme on the BBC, about young aspiring musicians suffering from Tourette's. Through the programme they got the chance to perform to a larger audience, and they did perform magnificently. And each time they started playing, the magic was there: their tics disappeared, and the music was there, beautifully, freshly phrased. The wanted movement neutralized the unwanted movement. Again, we don't understand how.
  Music is universal, spiritual, divine, soul-defining, aspirational, and can also be great fun!

• A comment on Talk: Robert Gupta: Music is medicine, music is sanity

  Oct 3 2012: Thank you for this talk. I believe that music and dance are unimaginably more primal than language. At some point in human history, sounds and beats and movements gave birth to the first signs of human consciousness, awareness of being. I believe music is that primal. The pure physical effects of the vibrating sound waves, the resonating objects, including our own bodies, he rhythmic patterns, echoing our own heartbeat, all contributed to "us" being aware of being there, on this earth, forming a miniscule part of the cosmos. At the same time, neurologically, it helped form our mental capacities so that we could slowly develop language, an immensely complex task, of which we still don't understand how it works exactly. I learnt a lot about the subject from reading Oliver Sacks' lovely book Musicophilia. Sacks refers to Rodolfo Llinas as one of the main neurophysiologists investigating how the brain functions to achieve movement. To Llinas, movement is everything, in the context of human consciousness. This includes simple physiscal movement (walking, running), it includes games we love to play with balls, and it includes all mental movements we refer to as emotion. Llinas coined the word "motricity" to refer to this capability. He does not claim to have found out exactly the underlying neurological principles of how motricity works, but his very fundamental observations are fascinating. Recently I watched an amazing documentary programme on the BBC, about young aspiring musicians suffering from Tourette's. Through the programme they got the chance to perform to a larger audience, and they did perform magnificently. And each time they started playing, the magic was there: their tics disappeared, and the music was there, beautifully, freshly phrased. The wanted movement neutralized the unwanted movement. Again, we don't understand how.
  Music is universal, spiritual, divine, soul-defining, aspirational, and can also be great fun!
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  A comment on Talk: Scott Rickard: The beautiful math behind the ugliest music

  Jan 22 2012: I find this a perfectly beautiful piece of music. I appreciate the importance of repetition as a basis for setting up expectations and satisfying our sense of what we like or don't like in the next sequence of notes. But the striving towards patternlessness must be something which many modern composers have been after, I believe. The only things in music that I might qualify as ugly may be certain heavily dissonant chords, but even those can be beautiful when placed in context of the bigger composition. The underlying pulse of the piece is a slow flowing one, and my initial image was one of vast stretch of water in a beautiful landscape, round which the eye wanders to detect small details of natural beauty. So, in spite of all the mathematical pyrotechnics, you have quite beautifully failed to create the ugliest piece of music!

• A comment on Talk: Erin McKean: The joy of lexicography

  Oct 21 2011: I've often hugged my big old Webster's dictionary, although really I was probably hugging Mr. Webster's soul...

• A comment on Talk: Evelyn Glennie: How to truly listen

  Oct 21 2011: I could listen to those low notes on the marimba forever...
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  A comment on Talk: Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation

  Aug 26 2009: In addition to Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose (AMP model for intrinsic motivation), I would add Movement. The feeling of moving towards a goal, on your own or together with others, makes you feel alive, even emotional, when you're very successful in your "movings". I believe there is a parallel between the literal movement experienced by sports people and artists (dancers, musicians, painters, sculptors), and the movement experienced by workers, both craftsmen (like artists) and office workers, moving towards reaching a goal. Striving for the experience of movement is what our brain does for a living, as neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas says. Movement and emotion is the primary and fundamental intrinsic motivator for all we do.

• A comment on Talk: Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web

  Mar 15 2009: About who invented the web: TBL put together existing innovative ideas into a browser like programme that did the magic with hyperlinks in texts, tagged up in an SGML subset of tags, which came to be called HTML. The internet was already there, of course. But the web came alive with the birth of TBL's first browser application. The 'existing innovative ideas' came from Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, amongst others. So in terms of original thinking perhaps it wasn't his invention, but in terms of original tinkering, I believe it was.
  I was looking forward to this talk, but feel a bit let down. Linked data: yes there is a lot of unsorted and unconnected data out there that would help scientists greatly making sense of what's happening to the environment, or in the brain. But there is also a lot of personal data out there that I would not like to be messed about with, linked or otherwise. On what basis and to which purpose would personal data be linked? It's already being done, but I feel very uncomfortable about this. It would have helped if he had spent some time specifying and categorizing different types of data, and about different levels of protection. I thought the example of putting a name on a building on a map location was a bit of a non-sequitur. We've all been doing that since the arrival of Google Maps and Google Earth, or am I missing a point?