music

You learn a lot eating three meals a day with artists, photographers, composers, poets, scholars . . . That's the Collaboration by Difference we HASTAC'ers keep harping on!

How does learning art, music, or dance impact our cognitive abilities?  

Here is a reposting from my TechPsych blog:

Seth Sandler is a university student who is finishing up his bachelor degree in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts, with an emphasis on Music, at the University of California, San Diego. His research and development work centers around multi-touch, multi-user musical interfaces. Seth Sandler is a member of the NUI Group, also known as the Natural User Interface Group.

Some preliminary and radical ideas for an upcoming sabbatical to study new media, social networks, knowledge community formation, and collaborative project-based learning

A beautiful podcast courtesy of RadioLab on Clive Wearing, the musicologist and composer who suffered massive brain damage twenty years ago resulting in the worst case of amnesia known. All that survives, love and music. Oliver Sacks has a new book, Musicophilia about this coming out soon.

Ben Crawford's exploring the edge of music and computers, and his background readings gave us a preliminary exploration of this emerging field. Perhaps the importance of music is best understood in relation to Andy Clark's the extended mind thesis. Normally, one can quite easily think of extending one's intellectual abilities out into the world, such as how everything from pencils and books to computer workstations extend our memory. Art, and in particular, music seems to allow us to extend our emotions into the world around us, allowing us to experience collective emotions?