Listening : Music

Extract 1 : The history of music ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am18ZxKgi_g )

It’s almost inconceivable to write a prehistory of music because Edison invents the (1)___________ in 1877 and prior to
that, we have no record of any sound. In terms of the evolution of instruments, the very oldest instrument we have is
the human voice. We also have (2)_____________ instruments made of rocks, such as (3)___________ or the famous
“rock gongs” in Tanzania. But the landmark is a discovery of bone flutes, flutes made out of the bones of (4)__________,
and they’re dated about 40000 years and they were found in the South German caves. One of the problems with
instruments is that the materials (5)_______________. So we have to work (6)_____________ by mapping from what
we do know. If you’re looking at the broad picture of the evolution of (7)______________, then the epochs are hunter-
gatherer, farming community, and then the founding of cities and city-states. Each of these epochs is associated with
mentalities. So, hunter-gatherers tended to be (8)_______________. And if you’re essentially journeying through a
landscape, what you don’t do is carry heavy instruments. Music has to be (9)______________ ideally, just a voice or if
not, a very light flute or a small (10)__________________ instrument. And if you look at the music that is played by the
Cameroon (11)__________, every time they play a piece, it sounds different. It’s very much music of the moment. Now,
what changes when you invent farming? You settle down. And your whole mindset becomes (12)__________ on the
circle of the seasons, the circle of life. And you invent (13)___________ work. And the structure of the work becomes as
(14)____________ as life itself. You invent a circle in music, invent musical (15)____________. And once music migrates
from the farm to the town, certain changes happen. Instruments can become heavy because you start to set quite
permanent (16)_________ into the town. You create heavy instruments like bells and gongs, but also very delicate ones
like (17)___________ and (18)______________ which would be damaged over a journey. And music’s function now also
changes with the growth of social (19)______________. The job of music is to be a (20)_________________ to serve the
power, the power of the prince or the church.

Extract 2 : Concerts ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am18ZxKgi_g )

Musicians become professionalized and their job is to create music to be listened to for people with leisure. And this is
the origin to what we call concerts. To have a concert requires leisure, requires money, and often times, it’s the
(1)____________ or the upper middle class who had the time to sit back and enjoy music performed for them. For most
people over millions of years, that doesn’t happen. So, the rule is that most music was performed functionally, as we
say, “Whistle as you work”. Also, it was performed in a participatory way so there was no distinction between those who
create the music and those who listened to it. It was the same people. The idea that we have a composer, we have a
listener is purely a modern invention. 1000 years ago in 1020, an Italian monk called Guido invents staff notation. And
life was never again the same for Western music. Why is that so important? Staff notation was a tool of church control.
And through writing (2)________ down, the church could ensure literally, that monks singing at the furthest (3)_______
of the empire of Christendom literally sang from the same (4)____________ sheet. And then, once the empire expands
beyond the (5)____________ basin and Cortes invades Mexico in 1519, he takes notation with him. 10 years after Cortes
decimates the Indians in 1519, by 1530, you have Aztec musicians singing Spanish (6)____________ in Mexico Cathedral.
So music notation becomes the sharp end of the stick of globalization. Now, there are various consequences to staff
notation, many of them are frankly bad. By pinning notes down to a page, it’s almost like capturing a butterfly. You’re
taking a note away from the voice, making it very precise. If you look at the way most people speak or sing, the pitch
slides. It fluctuates. It doesn’t stay still. Notation freezes a note. It becomes rather cold and mechanical. It also freezes
music as an object, which is actually quite (7)____________. Music isn’t an object. It’s an activity. It’s a thing you do, like
dancing or jogging. But once you turn it into an object, you create a division between the composer of the object and
those who (8)__________ mechanically reproduce it. We’re regaining the participatory condition of music, which was
the norm thousands of years ago, where we all had an equal (9)_____________ in creating and enjoying music. Greater
(10)________ with technology has served to accelerate a cultural change and we see that in the extraordinary role of
the Internet. We can both create music in our homes and share it. The original bone flute was a piece of technology. It
serves to extend human capacity. It extends the voice, which extends our imagination. I think it’s fair to say that just as
what Stockhausen or Beyoncé is achieving today would’ve been completely out of the comprehension of a Mozart or a
Beethoven a few centuries ago. We can’t even begin to imagine the possibilities awaiting us in the future.

Extract 3 : The physics of playing guitar ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6EGyFAGpXU )

Hendrix, Cobain and Page. They can all (1)____________, but how exactly do the iconic (2)_____________ in their
hands produce notes, rhythm, melody and music. When you pluck a guitar string, you create a vibration called a
standing wave. Some points on the string, called nodes, don’t move at all, while other points, anti-nodes,
(3)_______________ back and forth. The vibration translates through the neck and bridge to the guitar’s body, where
the thin and flexible wood vibrates, (4)_____________ the surrounding air molecules together and apart. These
(5)_______________ compressions create sound waves and the ones inside the guitar mostly escape through the hole.
They eventually (6)_____________ to your ear, which translates them into electrical (7)_____________ that your brain
interprets as sound. The pitch of that sound depends on the frequency of the compressions. A quickly vibrating string
will cause a lot of compressions close together making a (8)___________ sound and a slow vibration produces a
(9)___________________ sound. Four things affect the frequency of a vibrating string: the length, the tension, the
density and the thickness. Typical guitar strings are all the same length and have similar tension but vary in thickness and
density. Thicker strings vibrate more slowly, producing lower notes. Each time you pluck a string, you actually create
several standing waves. There’s the first fundamental wave which determines the pitch of the note, but there are also
waves called overtones, whose frequencies are multiples of the first one. All these standing waves combine to form a
complex wave with a rich sound. Changing the way you pluck the string affects which overtones you get. If you pluck it
near the middle, you get mainly the fundamental and the odd multiple overtones, which have anti-nodes in the middle
of the string. If you pluck it near the (10)___________, you get mainly even multiple overtones and a (11)____________
sound. The familiar Western scale is based on the overtone series of a vibrating string. When we hear one note played
with another that has exactly twice its frequency, its first overtone, they sound so (12)_______________ that we assign
them the same letter and define the difference between them as an octave. The rest of the scale is squeezed into that
octave divided in to twelve half steps whose frequency is each 2^(1/12) higher than the one before. That factor
determines the fret spacing. Each fret divides the string’s remaining length by 2^(1/12) making the frequencies increase
by half steps. Fretless instruments, like violins make it easier to produce the infinite frequencies between each note but
add to the challenge of playing in tune. The number of strings and their tunning are custom (13)___________ to the
chords we like to play and the (14)__________ of our hands. Guitar shapes and materials can also vary and both change
the nature and the sound of the vibrations. Playing two or more strings at the same time allows you to create new wave
patterns like chords and other sound effects. For example, when you play two notes whose frequencies are close
together, they add together to create a sound wave whose (15)______________ rises and falls, producing a
(16)__________ effect which guitarists call the beats. And electric guitars give you even more to play with. The
vibrations still start in the strings but then they’re translated into electrical signals by pickups and transmitted to
speakers that create the sound waves. Between the pickups and the speakers, it’s possible to process the wave in
various ways, to create effects like (17)_____________, overdrive, wah-wah, delay and (18)_____________. And
(19)_____________ you think that the physics of music is only useful for entertainment, consider this. Some physicists
think that every thing in the universe is created by the harmonic series of very tiny, very tense strings. So might our
entire reality be the extended solo of some (20)________________ Jimi Hendrix? Clearly, there’s a lot more to strings
than meets the ear.

Extract 4 : Musical repetition ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lo8EomDrwA )

Music from cultures around the world shares a common (1)______________ of repetition. Its heavy reliance on
repetition raises many questions. This partially comes from a psychological term called the (2)_____________ effect. To
explain, people tend to shy away from trying new things. Let’s say a decent song comes on the radio in the car when
you’re driving to work, but if you’re exposed to it several times during the day, it will end up growing on you. The effect
applies for nearly everything you could imagine. However, this seems to show the most when it comes to musical
(3)______________. What’s the secret behind such prevalence? An experiment was conducted to dive deeper into this
psychological phenomenon. People were ordered to listen (4)_____________ from musical (5)__________________
which were not exactly identical. One is the original version and the other is a digitally edited version that includes
repetition. While the original was considered as state-of-the-art composed music by 20 th century top (6)_____________,
the altered version through brute force audio editing was deemed better and more likely to be a product of human
creativity. Musical repetition is rather deep. The infamous “Mahna Mahna” is almost impossible not to be followed by
“do doo do do do”. Repetition forms a pre-written pattern of music in your brain so when the first few notes is played,
what’s coming next is very much expected. Research has shown that repetition also associates with movement of the
body. This opts for more active listening. Attention (7)__________ have also been seen across musical repetitions, as
songs were interpreted more deeply and detailed every (8)______________. On the first time, you may notice the
combination of various instruments to create a melody, but when it’s repeated, you might notice how each instrument
contributes to the whole song. This also has a linguistic term called (9)_________________. Repeating a word like atlas
(10)_________________ can make you stop thinking about what the word means, and instead focus on the sounds: the
odd way the “L” follows the “T”. In this way, repetition can open up new worlds of sound not accessible on first hearing.

Extract 5 : Earworms ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NE_OoO-N54 )

Have you ever been waiting in line at the grocery store, innocently (1)___________ the magazine rack, when a song
pops into your head? Not the whole song, but a fragment of it that plays and replays until you find yourself unloading
the vegetables in time to the beat. You’ve been struck by an earworm and you’re not alone. Over 90% of people are
(2)_____________ by earworms at least once a week, and about a quarter of people experience them several times a
day. They tend to (3)____________ in during tasks that don’t require much attention. Say, when waiting on water to boil
or a traffic light to change. This phenomenon is one of the mind’s great mysteries. Scientists don’t know exactly why it’s
so easy for tunes to get stuck in our heads. From a psychological perspective, earworms are an example of mental
imagery. This imagery can be visual, like when you close your eyes and imagine a red (4)________ or it can be auditory,
like when you imagine the sound of a baby screaming or oil sizzling in a pan. Earworms are a special form of auditory
imagery because they’re involuntary. You don’t plug you ears and try to imagine “Who let the dogs out”, or, well, you
probably don’t. It just intrudes onto your mental (5)______________ and hangs around like an unwanted house guest.
Earworms tend to be quite (6)_______________ and they’re normally made up of a tune, rather than, say, harmonies. A
remarkable feature of earworms is their tendency to get stuck in a loop, repeating again and again for minutes or hours.
Also remarkable is the role of repetition in sparking earworms. Songs tend to get stuck when we listen to them recently
and repeatedly. If repetition is such a trigger then perhaps we can blame our earworms on modern technology. The last
hundred years have seen an incredible (7)________________ of devices that help you listen to the same thing again and
again. Records, (8)_____________, CDs or streamed audio files. Have these technologies bread some kind of unique,
(9)_______________________ experience, and are earworms just a product of the late 20th century? The answer comes
from an unlikely source, Mark Twain. In 1876, just one year before the phonograph was invented, he wrote a short story
imagining a (10)______________ takeover of an entire town by a rhyming jingle. This reference, and others, show us
that earworms seem to be a basic psychological phenomenon, perhaps (11)_________________________ by recording
technology but not new to this century. So yes, every great historical figure, from Shakespeare to Sacajawea may well
have wandered around with a song stuck in their head. Besides music, it’s hard to think of another case of intrusive
imagery that’s so widespread. Why music? Why don’t (12)______________ get stuck in our hear or the taste of cheesy
taquitos. One theory has to do with the way music is represented in memory. When we listen to a song we know, we’re
constantly hearing forward in time, anticipating the next note. It’s hard for us to think about one particular musical
moment in isolation. If we want to think about the pitch of the word “you” in Happy Birthday, we have to start back at
“Happy” and sing through until we get to “you”. In this way, a tune is sort of like a habit. Just like once you start tying
your shoe, you’re on automatic until you tighten a bow, once a tune is suggested, because, for example, someone says,
“my umbrella”, we have to play through until it reaches a natural stopping point, “ella, ella, ella”. But this is largely
(13)___________________________. The basic fact remains we don’t know exactly why we’re susceptible to earworms,
but understanding them better could give us important clues to the workings of the human brain. Maybe the next time
we’re struck by a Taylor Swift tune that just won’t go away, we’ll use it as the starting point for a scientific
(14)______________ that will unlock important mysteries about basic (15)______________. And if not, well, we can just
shake it off.