Ear training doesn’t have to start when you are in elementary school or college. Music activities like ear training benefit you no matter what your age, from eight months to eighty.

This article provides useful information for:

• Older adults who want to discover the benefits of music
• Music students and health professionals interested in creative ways of working with the geriatric population, and
• Family members who want to use music to communicate with elderly loved ones in their lives.

So, what are some ways that ear training and music help older adults? Does musical training increase mental capacity and overall quality of life? Can music increase happiness?

1. Music therapy techniques, such as listening to live music, significantly increase the quality of life in elderly patients. Benefits included more restful sleep and a need for less medication. [1][4]
2. Musical activities increase communication in patients with dementia and reduce overall anxiety. Activities like singing and listening to music lightens mood and help elderly patients suffering from dementia self-express. [2]
3. Exercising to music can help older adults maintain balance and reduce falls. In fact, exercising to music yields better results than similar exercises performed without music. [3]
4. Studies suggest that leisurely enjoyment of music increases psychological well-being in the elderly, allows for self-expression, and can “facilitate successful aging.” [5]
5. Even musical interactive video games like Nintendo’s Wii Music can benefit the overall health of the elderly in long term nursing home facilities by increasing balance and reducing falls. [6]

Geriatric music therapists have discovered that Click to read the rest…

Sometimes it can feel like the music world is just treading water between Radiohead releases. Yes, we’ll listen to tons of other bands and fully enjoy many of them, but Radiohead remains one of the only groups that can still stop everyone dead in their tracks, getting them to drop what they’re doing and run to their computers, scrambling to frantically download the band’s newest offering. Perhaps I’m exaggerating a bit here, but I’m certainly not the first person to posit that Thom Yorke and the boys really do seem to be our modern-day version of The Clash – The Only Band That Matters.

Radiohead makes it easy to be a fan of their music, because there’s so many facets to what they do: Their songs are sonically complicated, but still often melodic enough to get stuck in your head for days. Their lyrics are notoriously indecipherable, and even when revealed, seem to ask more questions than they answer. Each member of the band is highly proficient at his instrument, with madcap tinkerer Jonny Greenwood proving himself adept at gadgets a lot of us don’t even recognize. Yes, they’re the sort of band that bridges the gap between snobby musicians, music nerds, and passive fans who just like a good tune.

I was right there with all these folks in February, eagerly anticipating the release of the band’s eighth album, The King of Limbs. I’m having to restrain myself from diving into a full-on review of the record, because I could ramble on about it for a while. But I’ll keep it short, for our purposes here: at first, I wasn’t sure what to make of the LP. But after repeated listens, I’ve grown to love it. And one of my favorite tunes from the record is one of the more stark, airy compositions, and one that certainly didn’t click with me right away: “Give Up the Ghost.”

Give Up the Ghost

It was only when I watched a YouTube video of Thom Yorke performing the song solo that I put together its minimalist origins and its heavy use of looping. There’s one loop that runs throughout the entire song (the “Don’t hurt me” line), and even after I had listened to the track probably thirty times (before I had watched the vid), it never occurred to me that that part remained static throughout the course of entire five minutes. In the live version, it’s obviously tough to miss this – you can watch Yorke initializing that loop, as well as the others that chime in towards the end of the song. But on the album version, the band builds the composition so gradually and carefully that you never have a chance to get bogged down in any repetition. It’s really impressive.

The song starts with Click to read the rest…

Any mainstream American pop tune, Beethoven symphony, or British children’s song shares a common thread: Western harmonies. Why does Western culture center on specific chords? What is the link between memory, harmony, and ear training? Does music improve memory?

Growing up in Western culture, your ear and brain absorbed a specific “musical hierarchy” where the tonic of a scale had more importance than other pitches.[1] For example, in D Major, your ear automatically gravitates towards the pitches D, A, and G, and finds notes like C# dissonant. Even as an infant, you demonstrated a clear preference for specific Western harmonies. [2] Why is this?

Since childhood, the music you listened to impressed upon your long term memory a distinct preference for the tonic (D) and the dominant (A). Musical training affected your perception of music and your ability to recognize pitch. [1] The more musical exposure you experienced, the greater the impact on your brain and memory.

To recognize a pitch during ear training, your brain performs mental gymnastics. Click to read the rest…