07.+What+is+Intelligence+(February+2006) - Get a Free Blog

What is Intelligence? 54
throbbing beat which seems to penetrate our whole body from head to
toe.
Likely a sensitive person from a few hundred years ago, accustomed to
hearing only gentle music, and rarely at that, and otherwise just the
sounds of Nature, suddenly entering such a “den of iniquity” and
intolerable noise, would likely believe they had been transported to hell.
For example, even as recently as 1955, a London man was fined three
pounds and ten shillings (a huge some in those days) for creating in
public “an abominable noise”, which turned out to be a recording of Bill
Haley’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll”, now considered relatively tame in
comparison to much of our modern pop music.
And when we examine the rhythm and tempo of music as it has
developed over the past two hundred years, we see that it has become
more and more powerful in the rhythm section, from the first use of kettle
drums in the orchestra, for example by Beethoven, through to the
pounding “trance” rhythms of today.
Even in the latter half of the last century, we can see how the beat from
the gentle Glenn Miller type swing era gathered pace, to the percussive
rock and roll of the fifties, and then to the still faster “hard rock” of the
60s, 70s and 80s, until finally it became the hypnotic superpowered
“ghetto blaster” type pulsations of today’s disco and “rave” music.
This is obviously paralleling the disharmonious, drug ridden and violent
state of society in general, but people in general fail to make or care about
this connection, and ask themselves if this over loud ultra-stimulating
music is really good for them even medically speaking, bearing in mind
that listening to a music CD on one’s own hi-fi at 50 or 70 decibels or
whatever, is quite a different experience and effect to hearing it at well
over 100 decibels in some smoky, alcohol drenched, drug filled nightclub
or wherever.
And this is a principle generally speaking - we are hypnotised, in a sense
bullied into accepting all kinds of things in our lives, which again, no
sane person ever would.
The leader scientist or thinker in any genuine field of human enquiry
whose aim is to advance the cause of knowledge and understanding is
therefore like Professor Laithwaite, not generally speaking a conformist.