MUSIC AND ITS INFLUENCE

Music had always been a part of our daily life. Every day and in almost every place at anytime, you’d probably hear music. It doesn’t have to be a song. It can be simple things like school bells, car horns or ambulance’s siren.

So what is music anyway? How did it start? Does it have a very strong influence on human beings? These question were for me and Rizal to answer on 5^th May’s GIA. The presentation was based on both what we’ve read and our own experiences. Rizal and I we’re not professional musician though, we just happened to love music so much.

Before we get in deep to music, we shortly explained what music actually defined as. Well according to Oxford’s Dictionary was the art or science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.

As far as we knew, music was born at almost the same time human was born. Why is that so? It’s because human use sounds to communicate with each other. This makes them have the potential to develop music.

There was no exact date when did human came to earth. The earliest ‘human like’ fossil found was 2.5 million years old. So if the data were right then music would have been around 2.5 million minus a few years ago. At that time scientists believe human started inventing music from whistling and humming. Then they used animal bones to blow on. After that it evolved on to musical instrument until today. Electrical instruments were the latest ones around.

When coming to talk about music we would also think about notation. What is the function of musical notation? The earliest musical notation was found in Nippur Iraq around 4000 years ago. Musical notations work almost the same as writings. We use writings to express our language so that we don’t have to always speak. Writings are also used so that people can share thoughts. The same thing works for music notation. Of course making musical notation is not as easy as writing a sentence, except for Mozart. 

Music has many genres. We’re all familiar with pop, rock and classic but there are a lot more genres out there. Rizal and I showed the attendants some genres like reggae, r n b and blues. To make it more memorable we also played song samples for each genre.

To end the presentation, we made a simple game of guessing song. The audiences were to guess the song played by the two of us. By the end of the game we got four champions standing. A round of applause for them please! 

Last but not least, Rizal and I wanted to proof how music actually influences our mind. At first we wanted everyone to draw something while we play a song. But since we didn’t get to inform them to bring a piece of paper together with a pen, we changed the drawing game to imagining game. So the game works like this. People were going to have to close their eyes while we play the song. At that time each of them will have to imagine something.   

The result was amazing. People actually pictured things in their mind according to the music being played. When we play the traditional Sundanese song, most of the audience pictured it as a calm and peace situation. When we played reggae song, most of the audience imagined themselves relaxing at a beach.

We made our last experiment on the audience a little different. So we played a pop song and in the middle of the ‘imagining ritual’ we changed it into metal song. In the end we gathered completely different and astonishing stories. So what we learned from this GIA was...

“Music does influence human minds”