On the car ride home from Stonehill today for Easter break, I began wondering to myself about my Learning Community (LC) for next year. In the fall, I'll be taking an Intro Musicianship course (A++), and in the spring, I'm taking Research Methods in Psych, and a seminar called The Making of Musical Minds, taught by both professors from each of the other two courses.
My internal dialogue consisted of how we fall in love with certain genres of music. It would seem similar to learning language after birth, where we take in our environment and use that to learn vocabulary. Kids are involved with music at young ages - driving in the car with Mom and Dad listening to the radio, singing songs to learn their alphabet, and I'm sure a lot of other places, too. But what about the music we listen to today? My parents told me that when my mom was about 7 months pregnant with me, her and my dad went to an Allman Brothers concert, and incidentally enough, they're one of my favorite bands. But that could be a result of growing up with them too, since my dad listened to them a lot (and still does). The same goes for the other classic rock I like, like Eric Clapton and what have you.
So that was pretty interesting. One thing psychologists love doing, however, is wondering what happens when you completely remove something from an individual's environment. Alright, so what happens if you go, say, the first year or two of your life without music? Is "music" biologically innate? What about 5 or 6 years? Is it nurture as well as nature? Try to think of a point in your life when you didn't know what music was. Pretty tough, right? Try to imagine your life right now without music.
Yeah, I didn't like it either.
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