Yahoo! Research | churchill@acm.org
What do British neurologist Oliver Sacks and George Clinton, one of the godfathers of funk, have in common?
They both believe in the fundamental importance of music to humans.
Sacks believes that humans are neurologically wired for sound and tells us that music occupies more areas of our brain than language does. In other words, humans are a musical species. Movement to a beat is apparently exclusively human; despite their complex communicative abilities and rich social organization, apes and chimps are not going to set up discos anytime soon.
George Clinton is associated with the force of funk and its potential for cultural healing. In 1970 he and Funkadelic released a vinyl masterpiece that calls for “One Nation Under a Groove.”
That said, I have been known to wish harm and maiming upon neighbors who play death metal at three in the morning.
Designers, filmmakers, and marketers know all about the emotional power of music. Music sets the psychological and affective tone for scenes in films. Music can motivate and deflate. It can get you running faster on a treadmill, and when combined
with monitoring technologies (as with the brilliant Nike shoes plus iPod combination), it can literally change the way you relate to your body. Equally, a dirge can suck the life out of you. Music can make you cry when a long-forgotten bittersweet memory is pricked. Given we are wired for music, it is not surprising that tiny children bop around to anything with a beat.
Interior designers routinely employ music for social-engi-neering purposes: to make us hurry up a meal, shop longer in the mall, or pump more iron. Most dramatically, the playing of classical music apparently correlates with a reduction of hooliganism in railway stations and bus terminals—although at the other end of the spectrum, Stanley Kubrick’s film “A Clockwork Orange,” famously coupled Beethoven with scenes of ultra-violence.
The effect of music is not all unconscious, visceral, or neurological. Like Clinton, cultural theorist Theodor Adorno believed that music can foster critical and political consciousness because it can challenge assumptions and normal ways of thinking (clearly Adorno did not listen to most pop lyrics, which are anything but revo-
lutionary). For adolescents and for “grups,” those grown-ups who can’t quite admit they are no longer 18, or as the New York Times described this demographic, “hipsters who breed,” the music you like is a sign of cool— a sign that you have a finger on the cultural pulse.
Perhaps the people who know most about music and its cultural and social power are DJs. The craft of the DJ as human jukebox has evolved over the course of decades. DJs have been selecting and playing music for mood since the beginning of radio, but they’ve evolved into musicians and performers who create new genres of music and new forms of musical performance.
According to the DJ History website ( www.djhistory.co.uk), the first in-person, live, at-the-venue DJs were folks who entertained the troops in W WII. Although perhaps some were known for their personalities, these DJs were not stars like the DJs we know today—DJ Shadow, Chris Cox, Sasha and John Digweed, Armin van Buuren, or Tiësto. In terms of these modern DJs, consensus has it that the cult of the DJ as artist-performer started in the 1970s with a guy called Francis Grasso. Grasso was the first to use headphones,
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