Yennodu Vaa Vaa - NEETHANE EN PONVASANTHAM
Vaayamoodi Summa Iru Da Mugamoodi Song.mp4
Makayala | Naan | Official Video Song | Crystal Clear HD
Attakathi HD Song Aadi pona
Kalakalappu @ Masala Cafe Ivalunga Imsai - HD video song
Naan Ee video song
Musical melodies
Roll over Beethoven: you're no longer needed. From now on, the great unwashed masses can evolve their own compositions – no composers, songwriters or musical training required.
Since 2009, a website has allowed visitors to evolve their own preferred music using Darwinian principles. Some 7000 people have so far visited "Darwin Tunes".
The site began by offering listeners a selection of raw sounds generated at random by a computer. Listeners rated each for its appeal on a scale from 1 to 5, and the "winners" were randomly mixed with one another by the computer to create a second generation of tunes, with the "losers" dropping out.
Hear the tunes: Original, 1500 generations, 3000 generations
"All we did was generate series of notes lasting 8 seconds on a standard, 12-tone scale with a standard tempo," says co-leader of the project, Armand Leroi of Imperial College London. "We just let the computer generate random songs until we had groups of them, but with no structure whatsoever."
With each successive generation, the survivors became more and more recognisably rhythmic and tuneful, demonstrating the evolution of music driven purely by the most widely shared preferences of the masses.
Leroi's team's analysis includes the first 2513 generations, although the project has continued since then. He says the effects of evolution have now begun to plateau out – but by getting listeners to rate songs taken at random from different generations, they demonstrated that the most likeable songs were those that had undergone the most evolution.
"Whether they would make the charts I have my doubts," says Leroi. "The songs are only 8 seconds long, but if you had them in a medley, you get something that sounds quite good, perhaps a really good ringtone, or an OK piece of electronica."
Leroi admits that the selection process is inevitably driven by the listeners' preconceived musical tastes and preferences. The only way to avoid that would be to play the tunes to babies naive to prevailing musical tastes. And to find out how universal the evolved preferences are, the experiment would need to be repeated in cultures where western music is not the norm, says Leroi.
But for now, the experiment continues, and Leroi invites New Scientist readers to listen to all tunes evolved so far, and to continue the experiment by visiting the website. "It's the democratisation of music," he says.
Leroi says that the experiment is one of the first to investigate how culture evolves, and it demonstrates that preferences of audiences are a huge driving force in how cultures, music and arts evolve. "It shows that inevitably, all composers play to the gallery, and I think it has underestimated the power that the gallery exerts on cultural evolution," he says. "In the cultural world, we forget that, and give all the credit to genius composers."
Most people have had the experience of singing the wrong lyrics to a song in the car with other people present, or perhaps an even more vulnerable position, like during a karaoke performance. Sometimes you can pull it off and no one notices. And of course, the embarrassment-proof situation is when nobody knows the actual lyric, so it’s not even cause for discussion.
We decided to take a look at some commonly misheard song lyrics and what the incorrect lyric would look like if illustrated. Turns out some of the incorrect lyrics are actually pretty catchy—maybe even better than the originals.
Click an image to see it full size. To move to the next image, click on the image or use the right arrow key. Music, more than any other art form, can raise the human spirit to the heights of joy or plunge it into the depths of sorrow. Yet, the power of music to influence our emotions, regardless of age or cultural background, has left philosophers, scholars and musicians baffled; perhaps unsurprisingly, given the inevitable subjectivity of the phenomenon (Fig 1). In the late twentieth century, biologists finally joined the fray to try to identify and decipher the molecular mechanisms that define music as a creative and cognitive activity. Indeed, music raises a range of challenging biological questions. For example, why is our brain apparently ‘hard-wired’ for music, for both its perception and creation, despite the apparent absence of any obvious evolutionary benefits? Why do we like some types of music and dislike others, and why does this differ between individuals? Is there a genetic component to musical aptitude and how might it work? Such questions now bring together researchers from diverse fields including genetics, developmental biology, neuroscience and music cognition, in an attempt to divine the intimate nature of music.
A handful of recent studies have found what could be evidence of a genetic predisposition for musicality. Irma Järvelä and her colleagues at the University of Helsinki, Finland, tested more than 200 members of 15 families for musical aptitude by scoring their ability in auditory temporal structuring—which gives an indication of whether they ‘have a sense of rhythm’—and pitch and time discrimination. The results revealed a substantial heritability of musical traits. “Using molecular genetic studies of 1,113 microsatellite markers in 15 families, we were able to find genetic loci that may contain predisposing genes for musical aptitude,” Järvelä said. “Our results show that the identified regions contain genes that affect cell extension and migration during neural development.” In particular, their analysis revealed significant evidence of linkage for chromosome 4q22, and further linkage evidence for 8q13–21 (Pulli et al, 2008). “Interestingly, an overlapping region previously associated with [the] genetic locus for dyslexia was found on chromosome 18q, raising questions about [the] common evolutionary background of music and language faculties,” Järvelä commented.
Järvelä and her team also studied several candidate genes associated with musical aptitude, social bonding and cognitive functions in a larger family data set that included professional musicians and active amateurs (Ukkola et al, 2009). “We hypothesized that humans are social animals that need each other and here music is a tool for social communication between individuals,” Järvelä explained. On the basis of participants' own reports of their creative musical abilities—that is, whether they composed, improvised or arranged music—the authors estimated the heritability of musical creativity and correlated this with the results of musical aptitude tests, such as those used in the previous study. The results showed a relatively high heritability for creativity in music, and a link between high scores in musical aptitude tests and creative functions in music—suggesting that composing, improvising and arranging music requires musical aptitudes that seem to have a genetic component. “We found an association [between] arginine vasopressin receptor 1A (AVPR1A) gene variants [and] musical aptitude,” Järvelä said, adding that in previous studies, AVPR1A and its homologues have been found to be associated with social, emotional and behavioural traits, including pair bonding and parenting. “The results suggest that the neurobiology of music perception and production is related to the pathways affecting intrinsic attachment behaviour,” she said. Other recent studies also suggest that polymorphisms in AVPR1A might be associated with short-term musical memory (Granot et al, 2007), or with creative dance performance (Bachner-Melman et al, 2005).
…the way we make and appreciate music is apparently rooted in the nature of periodic sounds that our own body creates and that form the basis of speech
Another recent study, by Jane Gitschier and her team at the University of California in San Francisco, USA, indicated that absolute pitch—the rare ability to instantaneously recognize and correctly label a note without using a reference pitch for comparison—might also have a genetic component (Theusch et al, 2009). On the basis of previous studies that suggested absolute pitch results from an interplay between environmental factors—such as musical training—and genetic ones, Gitschier and her colleagues performed whole-genome linkage analyses of several families with a higher incidence of absolute pitch. Among 45 families of European ancestry, they identified four regions with evidence of linkage, the most significant of them on chromosome 8q24.21. Intriguingly, when the analysis was repeated with 19 families of East Asian ancestry, only one of these four regions, 7q22.3, showed evidence of linkage. “Together, the findings […] provide strong evidence that at least one gene promotes the genesis of absolute pitch in individuals of European ancestry and that absolute pitch probably results from genetic factors that vary both within and between different populations,” the authors concluded (Theusch et al, 2009). Curiously enough, none of the top linkage peaks spotted by Gitschier's team fell near the AVPR1A gene, which is on chromosome 12.
A different line of inquiry into the genetics of music is to look at the nature and origin of so-called ‘musical disorders’. “Such deficiencies are termed congenital amusia, an umbrella term for lifelong musical disabilities that cannot be attributed to mental retardation, deafness, lack of exposure to music, or brain damage after birth,” wrote Isabelle Peretz (Peretz, 2008), co-director of the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research at the University of Montréal (QC, Canada). About 4% of the general population have congenital amusia, also known as tone deafness; these people have a lifelong deficit in melody perception and production and cannot, for instance, detect out-of-key notes, even in very simple melodies.
Peretz and her group tested several families of amusic individuals for auditory abilities and found that whereas only 3% of individuals in control families were tone deaf, 39% of first-degree relatives had this disorder in amusic families; moreover, congenital amusia is characterized by a deficit in processing musical pitch rather than musical time (Peretz et al, 2007). A few years ago, a study that analysed twins and their ability to detect pitch violations in popular melodies showed that identical twins obtained more similar scores than did dizygotic twins, with heritability estimated to be 70–80% and with no effects from a shared environment (Drayna et al, 2001). Together with Peretz's research, this finding seems to support the hypothesis that musical pitch perception in humans has a strong genetic component. “I think that the study of the genetic origins of congenital amusia will inform us about the origins of musicality in general. Much in the same way that the study of congenital speech disorders informed us about FOXP2 as critically involved in speech disorders,” Peretz commented. “As congenital amusia appears to be a pitch-based disorder, it might be a mirror form of disorders that can inform us about the neurobiological origins of music.”
However, unravelling the mysteries of music through genetics does not convince Dale Purves, a neurobiologist at Duke University (Durham, NC, USA). “I think the idea that music will be understood on the basis of genetics is nonsense,” he said. “To take absolute pitch as a relatively simple example—‘artistic creativity’ is of course vastly more complex—most researchers agree that nearly anyone can develop this talent with enough practise. Most people with absolute pitch whose native language is non-tonal (like English) are accomplished musicians, and a large percentage of people with no musical training in cultures where a tone language (like Mandarin) is spoken have absolute pitch,” he explained. “I very much doubt that there are any identifiable ‘genetic roots’ for music, although genes are of course involved in the expression of this or any other brain function. The genetics of language is mired in similar controversy and my view—along with many others—is that the controversy mainly reveals a widespread misunderstanding of the developmental biology that ties genotype to phenotype.”
