Music Poetry

The last 4 weeks I am trying to learn this magnificent music for piano by Ludovico Einaudi – Oltremare.

Ludovico Maria Enrico Einaudi  (Italian: born 23 November 1955) is an Italian pianist and composer. He trained at the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan and under composer Luciano Berio in the early 1980s. Einaudi began his career as a classical composer, and began incorporating other styles and genres—including pop, rock, world music, and folk music.

Einaudi composed the scores for a number of films and trailers, including The Intouchables and I’m Still Here, the TV miniseries Doctor Zhivago, and Acquario in 1996, for which he won the Grolla d’oro for best soundtrack. He has also released a number of solo albums of piano and orchestra, notably I Giorni in 2001, Nightbook in 2009, and In a Time Lapse in 2013. Taranta Project, a collaborative album, was released in May 2015, and Elements was released in October 2015.

How music affects our lives

We generally assume that learning a musical instrument can be beneficial for kids, but it’s actually useful in more ways than we might expect. One study showed that children who had three years or more musical instrument training performed better than those who didn’t learn an instrument in auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills.

 

They also tested better on vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills, which involve understanding and analyzing visual information, such as identifying relationships, similarities and differences between shapes and patterns.

 

These two areas in particular are quite removed from musical training as we imagine it, so it’s fascinating to see how learning to play an instrument can help kids develop such a wide variety of important skills.

 

Similar research shows this correlation for exercise and motor skills in the same way, which is also fascinating.

Classical music can improve visual attention

It’s not just kids that can benefit from musical training or exposure. Stroke patients in one small study showed improved visual attention while listening to classical music.

 

The study also tried white noise and silence to compare the results, and found that, like the driving study mentioned earlier, silence resulted in the worst scores.

 

Because this study was so small, the conclusions need to be explored further for validation, but I find it really interesting how music and noise can affect our other senses and abilities—in this case, vision.

 

Source Buffer Blog