The 50th anniversary of the Moon landing on 20 July has awakened the fantasy of many. Here’s the perfect playlist of musicians who have let themselves be inspired by the universe and its celestial bodies.
Music helps cognitive processes, studies show
Music is one of the most mysterious arts that raised many questions and doubts among philosophers, scientists, and experts. Throughout the history, in different philosophical thoughts, people wondered about the real value of music, from Platoon and Aristotle, to Pythagoras, philosophers of the ancient Greece that focused on music’s importance, utility, functions, and real properties.
Music is one of the most mysterious arts that raised many questions and doubts among philosophers, scientists, and experts. Throughout the history, in different philosophical thoughts, people wondered about the real value of music, from Platoon and Aristotle, to Pythagoras, philosophers of the ancient Greece that focused on music’s importance, utility, functions, and real properties.
According to Kant, music was something “extraordinary”, to which people should not pay attention to though. In recent years (1997), Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist and psychology professor at the Harvard University, shared Kant’s vision, defining music as an auditory cheesecake: pleasant, but completely useless for man, biologically speaking. Some years ago, the scientific magazine Nature published a series of essays, which declared the proved impossibility to scientifically demonstrate music benefits.
However, in a recent article published by the magazine The Conservation, Leonid Perlovsky, cognitive scientist, brings to light a series of studies carried out by himself in 2013, where demonstrates that music is essential for human evolution indeed, as it “helps us navigate a world rife with contradictions”.
Perlovsky says that music can help people overcome the cognitive dissonance, i.e. unpleasant feelings when people are confronted with new information that opposes existing beliefs. The cognitive dissonance is one of the most studied phenomena of social psychology in the 20th century, as well as a condition that everyone experience several times during the day that also affects our decisional process and our learning capacity.
Music is the powerful mechanism that allowed our ancestors manage contradictory cognitions. It also made the decisional process easier and more natural: unlike the language that differentiates and divides things, music unites everything as one, communicating varied emotions, and helps us maintain a vital balance when we face ongoing challenges in our life, day after day.
There’s no doubt: music is unbelievably useful.
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Three years ago, after that his version of “Space Oddity” had been seen 26 million times on YouTube, Chris Hadfield’s popularity was sky high. The astronaut, the first Canadian to walk in space but also a talented musician, announced on Twitter the release of his first album entirely recorded in space. “Space Sessions: Songs From a Tin
In 1977, the twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched by NASA. Along with astronauts, a few records of gold-plated copper (Golden Records) containing sounds, music and images of the Earth were sent aboard of the spacecraft. All this was sent with the instructions for use and a record player. Today, it is possible to listen to and
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Three teenagers from New Zealand sing in the Maori language about abuse at the hands of British colonisers. Thanks to their thrash metal music, young people are being attracted to native culture.
There’s no room for anger, resignation, or desire for revenge in this playlist. There’s just the moral obligation of retracing and telling the stories that can’t go lost and forgotten all over again. We do so through music.
The most popular moments and sounds from space are available on NASA’s SoundCloud page. Let’s explore parallel universes!