Sonntag, August 26, 2007

 

Zen-Piano

posted by nadia 6:00 AM

Montag, Oktober 09, 2006

 

Piano-Garten

Wintergarten oder eine Orangerie - kombinierter Blumen-, Buch-, Noten-, Klavierladen.
Denkbar auch ein Lesecafe, Konditorei, Bibliothek, Kunstsalon mit Park/Gartenthematik, Handarbeit-Cafe.
Das Ganze wäre auch in Form eines Klosters möglich - christlich oder Zen-Kloster mit einem Piano-Klostergarten (Steingarten - entsprechend). In einigen schallisolierten Zellen könnte man auf Wunsch individuelle Musikheilungen und Unterricht für Pianoheilungen durchführen.
Bei einer besonders großen Anlage könnten sich darunter auch private Wohnräume der Piano-Gärtner befinden.

posted by nadia 11:20 PM

Sonntag, November 06, 2005

 

Was für ein Wunder!

posted by nadia 6:07 AM

Sonntag, Dezember 26, 2004

 

Electromagnetic Theory Of The Paranormal

Dateline: Friday, December 17, 2004
By: BY RANDALL FITZGERALD


We humans live in a thick, invisible smog of electromagnetic (EM) field pollution produced by radio and television transmitters, computers, telecommunication towers, and power lines.
These artificial fields are in turn enhanced by the Earth’s own natural geomagnetic and geoelectrical fields created by geological faults, atmospheric disturbances, and lightning, and by our Sun’s geomagnetic storm influences. The intersection of these artificial and natural fields may well coalesce into ‘hot spots’ that can affect human physiology, especially the brain.
British scientists have accumulated evidence that these hot spots, or rogue electromagnetic fields, can induce some EM sensitive people to hallucinate the appearance of angels, aliens, ghosts, and a range of other visionary perceptions. Such electrically driven visions and mystical experiences might the a direct result of electrical currents in the body being translated into images in the visual cortex of the brain.

Electromagnetic hypersensitivity has been found to be enhanced for persons who have previously been in close proximity to lightning strikes, ball lightning, or who have suffered electrocution. The resulting symptoms for these people include food allergies and chemical sensitivities. It is important to note these are the same symptoms reported by many experiencers in the aftermath of what they report as angel or alien encounters.

Frequent and prolonged irradiation of the brain by EM fields has been medically shown to induce a range of seemingly paranormal effects, including a sense of ‘missing time,’ trance states, vivid visual halluciantions, paralysis, deja vu, sudden and intense fear, and feelings of an invisible presence and of being watched. It is probably no coincidence that combinations of some or all of these effects are reported by persons experiencing angels, alien, and poltergeist encounters. Electrical stimulation of the brain’s language centers can also produce disembodied voices that intrude into the experiencer’s thoughts as if from an external entity.

An Australian study of 40 experiencers of alien and angel events found 70 percent of these persons lived near power line pylons. This study also found a correlation between allergies and the aftermath of paranormal experiences. The frequently reported symptoms--asthma, or chemical and environmental sensitivities--are effects of prolonged EM field exposure.
During hauntings and poltergeist phenomena, British researchers have used magnetometers that recorded power surges and sharply fluctuating magnetic fields within the rooms where these events are reported. The respected British scientific journal, New Scientist, in its Dec. 19, 1998 edition, contained a report with this observation: “By examining records of hauntings since the mid-1800s and comparing the dates with records of fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field, a link has been demonstrated between ghostly sightings and sunspot cycles that can trigger magnetic storms on Earth.”

Natural fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic activity can induce altered states of consciousness in susceptible human brains, according to Professor Michael Persinger’s laboratory research at Laurentian University in Canada. By stimulating the temporal lobe areas with bursts of electromagnetic pulses, he has reproduced the “sensed presence” and other effects in his volunteer laboratory subjects.
Persinger’s research shows that electrical stimulation of the brain’s temporal lobe can increase hypnotic suggestibility, induce out-of-the-body sensations, floating, hearing strange sounds and seeing bright lights--all reported effects of both near-death experiences and alien abductions. Even meditation may play a role in manipulating a person’s predisposition to
paranormal experiences based on his finding that longterm meditators showed heightened signs of temporal lobe epilepsy effects such as sensed presence encounters with entities.
We have essentially electronically wired the nervous systems of our entire species with television, radio, and the Internet into an endless feedback loop that can almost instantaneously focus the attention of humanity. From that collective focus might come alterations in the sub-atomic realm, as indicated by The Global Consciousness Project at Princeton University, which has demonstrated group mind effects on electronic number generators.

If there is anything to the electromagnetic theory of the paranormal, we should see heightened levels of evidence over the next decade in the form of increased reports of all categories of paranormal phenomena, including UFO sightings.

posted by nadia 1:34 AM

Dienstag, November 30, 2004

 

The Piano Heals the Spirit and Soothes the Soul

For the past few years, pianos have had a presence at the yearly American Psychiatric Conference. Does Yanni entertain during intermission? Not exactly. The pianos are for the therapists themselves, explains Al Bumanis, communications director for the American Music Therapy Association. "A number of booths at the conference are equipped with pianos so therapists can take a break and relax by playing the piano or listening to piano music," he says.
"The idea," says Bumanis, "is that the psychiatrist can come by the booth to de-stress." Psychiatrists using the piano to de-stress? Not a bad endorsement for the instrument's effectiveness at soothing the troubled spirit.

"Playing the piano has always added joy to people's lives, but we're just beginning to understand the full range of its benefits," says Brenda Dillon of the National Piano Foundation. "When I play the piano, I am able to get away from the daily challenges. It's like taking a mini vacation. By the time I walk away from the piano, I am truly relaxed."

That's no accident, says Alicia Ann Clair, Ph.D., music therapist, board-certified professor and director of music therapy at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. "When it comes to making music, the piano demands an attention and focus that does not allow interfering thoughts that might be distracting or distressful, and in that way relieves the pressures and the stresses of the day," she says. "At the same time that we can use it as a way to provide relief, we have added bonuses. When you play and it's successful, it's extremely exciting and fulfilling. Relief, joy or fulfillment--all of those things add to well-being, which contributes to life quality which contributes to good health."

Just ask veterinarian Bill Porter. "When I was a kid, I played percussion. Then I dropped all that, and became a doctor. But when I was 44, I started taking piano lessons. I just love playing piano. It is a de-stressor for me in a big way, and for me, it fulfilled a creative side that I can't express at work."

In fact, the piano is being used across the world as an effective therapeutic tool. At New York's Nordoff-Robbins Center for Music Therapy, the piano is instrumental in helping children and adults overcome their emotional and physical problems. The clinic boasts centers in England, the U.S., Australia, Japan, Scotland and South Africa.

"In this approach, the therapist is usually at the piano," explains music therapist and New York clinic co-director Alan Turry. "The therapist and patient actually create music in a mutual fashion."
Therapists in the program, all of whom are trained extensively on the piano, work with autistic children, hospital patients, the developmentally disabled or emotionally disturbed, "as well as self-referred adults who want an alternative to verbal therapy," says Turry. In fact, he says, these adults make up about 10 percent of the clinic's client roster. "What happens often with self-referred adults is that they are aware of issues they're working on, but they're looking for a new way to grow, exchange, explore themselves," he explains. The idea is "setting up a situation that's not about skills, but expression--allowing someone to freely express themselves through music."

The clinic offers patients a chance to use a number of instruments, including voice, though "about 40 to 50 percent" of them use the piano, says Turry. Some adult patients have gone on to study the piano after their therapy. "I've had several clients that got very interested in music after being at the clinic," Turry notes. "Some bought pianos, some took lessons. Often, a byproduct of music therapy can be someone becoming more interested and involved in music."
With the piano celebrating its 300th birthday this year and the 10th annual National Piano Month marked this past September, the instrument is getting more attention than usual. The second look is well deserved. Besides its incredible beauty and sound, the piano offers many gifts to the human spirit, through enhancing creativity, healing or relaxation.

posted by nadia 1:02 AM

Montag, Oktober 04, 2004

 

Unknown fire and jelly-like creatures live in Earth's atmosphere

On 11 September, 1948, the Empire State Building in New York was attacked with hundreds of birds of various species.
The hypothesis about the existence of little-studied forms of life in the Earth's atmosphere has been an attraction for scientists for quite a long time. Nations around the globe have numerous stories, fairy-tales and legends about such creatures, the most popular of which are sylphs, giant fire birds, fairies, flying snakes and dragons. This weird theory has been gaining more and more details lately to prove its credibility.
The mysterious creatures of the sky can be traced in the history of the Roman Empire. According to ancient manuscripts, giant red ravens were seen flying in the sky above Rome in the year 106 B.C. Ancient writings say that the birds were carrying red-hot stones in their beaks. The ravens dropped and stones down on the ground, having scorched a half of the city. Similar fire-like creatures reminiscent of birds were seen in France and Portugal, in Middle Ages. They were called fire elementalias, specters of fire. Fire-birds caused numerous fires in the middle of the 1980s in San-Juan, Puerto Rico. Eyewitnesses said that the birds were huge, with a wing-spread of about four meters.
Fire snakes and dragons were described in historical documents too. An outstanding incident took place in September of 1891 in the American town of Crawfordswille, Indiana. There is a story in the archives of the town about a 10-meter long fire snake, which appeared above the central square of the town. A lot of people saw the snake - they all said that it was a live creature. A local pastor vowed that the snake had red eyes of fire and the heat of its breath could be felt at a considerable distance. It is noteworthy that similar creatures could be seen in the sky above Indiana in the 60s and 70s of the current century. Film director William Gordon Allen used eyewitnesses' stories to create a colorful image of the fire snake. The illustration appeared in the documentary film "Overlords of the UFO," which was released in 1976.
Mass deaths of birds, or their sudden migration can also be considered an indirect evidence to prove the existence of an unknown form of life in the atmosphere of the planet. On 11 September, 1948, the building of New York's highest skyscraper, the Empire State Building, was attacked with hundreds of birds of various species. Eyewitnesses said that the birds were slamming into windows, as if they were trying to fly away from an imminent danger. Hundreds of birds fell down on the ground dead in May of 1917 in the US town of Baton-Rouge, Louisiana. A lot of them had strange burns on their bodies. A similar incident occurred in August of 1960 on the outskirts of Capitola Beach, when numerous birds fell down dead too. Ornithologists could never determine the reason of their death.
American researcher Charles Fort wrote in his work "The Book of the Damned" that there were weird, jelly-like beings living in the Earth's atmosphere. Medusa-like creatures, Fort wrote, had stings and tentacles, which they used to hunt for birds. The existence of such creatures seemed to be unbelievable for a very long time, until American scientists developed a special substance, aerogel. The lighter-than-air gel is a substance, the state of which is represents both hard and gas condition. Researchers proposed that the flesh of the mysterious creatures could be made of a similar substance. The theory can be partly proved with an incident, which occurred on 28 December, 1958, in Florida. Detective Faustin Galegos found a strange object outside his house. The detective said that he took the object in his hands, but could not feel that he was holding it. It was a translucent ball, the size of a soccer ball, and it was practically weightless. The detective did not manage to preserve it, because it virtually melted in the air several hours later. Faustin Galegos said that he had an impression of holding an unknown dead creature in his hands.
The most uneasy mentioning about the mysterious creatures of the sky belongs to researcher Robert Gardner. According to him, a transport aircraft of the US Air Force took off from an army base in San Diego in the summer of 1939. The plane, carrying 12 passengers aboard, returned to the base in about an hour, after it had sent an SOS. When servicemen opened the hatch, they saw that all 12 passengers were dead. The commander was the only person, who stayed alive, but he died in several minutes too. The dead military men had strange burns on their skin, but it did not become possible to find out their origin and what really happened on board the plane. Investigators determined that the crew and the passengers used their personal guns. The hull paneling of the plane was damaged with gunshots, as if the people were trying to kill a very fast enemy. Apparently, they failed to kill a mysterious creature.
Yevgeny Dmitriev

posted by nadia 8:46 AM

Dienstag, Juni 22, 2004

 

Tunes create context like languageMaths shows why tonal music is easy listening.
19 June 2004
PHILIP BALL


Repitition of notes in music create semantic meaning.
© BrandX



Ever felt as though a piece of music is speaking to you? You could be right: musical notes are strung together in the same patterns as words in a piece of literature, according to an Argentinian physicist.

His analysis also reveals a key difference between tonal compositions, which are written in a particular key, and atonal ones, which are not. This sheds light on why many people find it so hard to make sense of atonal works.

In both written text and speech, the frequency with which different words are used follows a striking pattern. In the 1930s, American social scientist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of its frequency. In other words, a graph of one plotted against the other appeared as a straight line.

The economist and sociologist Herbert Simon later offered an explanation for this mathematical relationship. He argued that as a text progresses, it creates a meaningful context within which words that have been used already are more likely to appear than other, random words. For example, it is more likely that the rest of this article will contain the word "music" than the word "sausage".

Physicist Damian Zanette of the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina, used this idea to test whether different types of music create a semantic context in a similar fashion.

The key in which a piece of music is written is one factor that influences which notes are more or less likely to come next. The repetition and elaboration of particular melodic phrases is another.

From Bach to Schoenberg

To measure these effects, Zanette analysed four different compositions: J. S. Bach's Prelude Number 6 in D; Mozart's first movement from his Sonata in C (K545); Debussy's Menuet from the Suite Bergamasque; and the first piece from Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11. Each is a solo piano piece, but they all differ in style and period.

Zanette counted the frequency of different notes in each piece (taking into account both the pitch and the length of the note), and plotted that against their rank, as Zipf did with texts.

All of the pieces showed a text-like distribution, especially for the higher-ranking notes. But the strength of the relationship varied, as indicated by the slope of each graph, published on the preprint server arXiv1.

The pieces by Bach, Mozart and Debussy all produced a relatively steep graph, suggesting a strong relationship between rank and frequency, and therefore a high level of meaningful context. In other words, if you have heard part of the piece, it is relatively easy to predict what kind of thing will come next. Zanette adds that jazz pieces he tested showed a similar pattern.

But the Schoenberg piece, one of the first truly atonal works, had a much flatter graph. This means that the piece does not have a set vocabulary of commonly used words that keep appearing. Instead, the size of the vocabulary increases at about the same rate as the length of the piece; new "words" are constantly introduced, while earlier ones are seldom repeated.

Although all of the piano pieces have a text-like property, the atonal composition has less structure and less context; it is like a story whose characters are constantly changing.

Unfamiliar flux

Zanette says the finding implies that the reason many people find it unsatisfying to listen to atonal music is not simply because its harmonic and melodic structures are unfamiliar, but because the meaning or context of the piece is constantly changing.

"That doesn't mean Schoenberg's music is not comprehensible," Zanette cautions. Indeed, Schoenberg himself wrote that the goal of the composer is to produce comprehensibility. Zanette points out that the sequence of notes is only one of the ways to create context in music. It could also be produced rhythmically, for example.

He suggests that to appreciate atonality, we may need to look for coherence in different aspects of the composition.

"It's very good to start having these scientific bases for understanding music", says Brazil-based composer Heather Jennings. "They provide a fresh perspective on musical theory."


References
Zanette, D. H.. Preprint, http://xxx.arxiv.org/abs/cs.CL/0406015 (2004). |Article|

posted by nadia 8:53 AM