My husband sent me the TED talk posted below re: sound and health a couple of days ago, and I have been “saving” it for when I had the time to pay proper attention to it. The days since then have come and gone, but this bit of email marketing for LOUD (the scent and the sound mixed by Tommy Hilfiger?!?!) pushed me to conclude that the time to consume it was nigh, er, now, um, whatever. I watched it. I think you might like it, too, so if you care about sound and haven’t caught this yet, you now have lunch plans if you want ’em.
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Wow, this seemed frighteningly anecdotal. Suggesting that some music is healthy to listen (if it’s made with love?! really?) and everything else is unhealthy makes no logical sense. He also completely misunderstands how compression on MP3s works. You’re not working to make imagine these missing sounds any more than you would if you were listening to the same thing live as those sounds that are removed to compress the file are the ones you don’t perceive anyway. He even seems to be disregarding the fact that MP3s are more often than not encoded at 256-320 these days which is easily in the realm of CD quality. He also doesn’t explain how he knows any of this at all. For instance, claiming that playing music will cause your brain to get larger. I would like to know even a short description of an unnamed study that actually proved this. A short Google search pulls up a couple inconclusive studies and at least one that suggests that good musicians are simply born with certain parts of their brain enlarged.
He may be completely right on everything but he gives me no reason to believe him. It just sounds like some crazy guy shouting his own personal scripture in the streets only he’s been given a microphone and a stage.
Sorry for the rant but this is the kind of thing that convinces people who don’t critically examine what they’re told to believe all sorts of nonsense.