59-05-032 Proceeding

13 Proceedings of the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Congress MUSIC AND MAN Sriprasit Boonvisut, Anothai Nittibhon EdgardVarèse, a composer andmusic philosopher once said, “Music is an organised sound”. As we know today, music comprises of many different basic elements of sound which are loudness, pitch, contour, duration (or rhythm), tempo, timbre, spatial location and reverberation. When we hear music, nearly every region and neural subsystem of our brain process the sound and bring together information to form a coherent representation of what we’re listening to. Similar to language, how we make sense of music depends on our listening experience, our neural structures learn and modify themselves with each new song we hear, or even with new listening to an old song. Our emotion towards music starts when our brain’s computational system creates the perceptual illusion in which it imposes structure and order on a sequence of sounds and thus combines what it thinks it ought to be hearing, and what to be expecting. The auditory system of the fetus is fully functional about twenty weeks after conception, as in Lamont’s study, children recognise and prefer music they were exposed to in the womb. Once they grow up, music contributes to the development of mind in preparing for complex cognitive and social activities, such as language and social interaction, and vice versa, musical development also proceeds through social experience. In expose tomusic, we develop our behaviour which include competence and contribution as our neural system do in our brain. Competence, means that we need an ability to observe, think and reason about musical ideas, to understand others’ musical choices and make decision. In contribution, it is about finding the purpose and meaning of music-making in relation to oneself and others, in a way that it will involve diverse groups of people and benefit for the common good of society. As a music institution of today’s, the Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music expands our projects and activities to cover different dimensions of music, not only making music as the art of professional, but also promoting music as a part of human development, ranging from our SerotoninDrumClub’s project which emphasises onmusic as a developing tool for social interaction in high school students, to community choir which involves children in their musical learning experiences.