Saturday, December 01, 2007

Words and Music: What's the Right Mix?

Was thinking a bit more about my question below on the ideal mix is between audio with words (just called "words" below) and audio with music ("music") to stimulate productive thinking. I realized I started with the assumption there is a right answer. That assumption is probably ridiculous for a boatload of reasons, but one in particular got to me: Reasonable people won't agree on what "productive" is. Let's pretend all parties agree that words (rather than instrumentals) encourage small leaps in thinking--focused thinking that relates to the words in various ways. And let's even say that all parties agree that music allows a seed of an idea to grow in more divergent ideas. It ought to be a short leap to thinking about optimization of time spent listening to one and then the other. But optimization toward what? You hit an immediate wall that people will not agree whether short-leap focused thinking or long-leap divergent thinking is preferable. So you probably can't agree on what mix gets you the "furthest"--since you can't agree on what you're going "furthest" toward (I suspect there's a Myers-Briggs correlation in here somewhere.) Oh well.

I suppose I can still ponder it for my own idiosyncratic belief about the relative value of the contribution of stimulating these two types of thinking. Everyone else is going to have to optimize for themselves....

2 comments:

Yesha Gee said...

When i thought about "audio with words", it's the songs everybody sings; and when i thought about "audio with music", it's instrumentals or/and orchestral. hehehe.

*blog hopping*

http://simpleyesa.blogspot.com

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