Note: Since this posting, I have evolved Facebook picture tagging memes on my own ideas far beyond this concept I saw. My ideas involve real world and life actions rather than just associating ideas. They are listed under the Action memescategory, involving what I call Facebook 2.0 tagging memes.
The pictorial Facebook tagging memes that have been going around in many variations seems to have evolved into that common high school year book feature, the Most Likely To… page. I saw one just hours ago, but it was so poorly done (mostly due to almost unreadable small type) I went and created my own, text, picture compilation and all. Here’s how to get it:
Click on the picture below to get it at full size.
Right click on that picture and save to your computer.
Daniel J. Levitin wrote an absolutely brilliant book called The World in Six Songs, supported by a great website with the many music samples referenced, among other great related material.
My basic paraphrasing of the concept is this. All the songs in the world could be fit into at least one of six categories providing an evolutionary benefit to humanity, often ultimately tied to our social nature.
The book and website offer far more detailed interpretations, of course, but I will expand on my paraphrasing with each post and the associated topic.
In a series of posts, I will describe each of the six categories in brief, one at a time:
I will describe what the categories are about because they are not as limited in scope as the category names suggest. I will then supply one of my choices and ask all readers to do the same if they so wish. In the seventh post of the series, I will offer the chance to put the song choices all together so readers can read the entire set on one post. I do this because it would be a long post to describe all six categories at once, but to have all the answers in one place might be nice.
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This post focuses on Songs of Comfort
July 30th add-on in italics, from Dan Levitin in a summary article
This category of song provides comfort in times of loneliness, stress or heartbreak, along with the classic comfort song, the lullaby. Music written about loneliness and stress can provide us with comfort by assuring us we are not alone in our grief or misery, aiding the recovery process. Lullabies mutually calm mother and child, and may release prolactin, while at the same time providing a bond between the two, which is beneficial for the child.
These songs make us feel more comfortable, whether by easing us into more comfort or relieving us of discomfort. Often, it is the latter, and often through letting us know we are not alone in whatever predicament the songs are trying to relieve us of, that we have a place in the greater whole. Sometimes, songs of Comfort may overlap with Friendship / Bonding category, but should only be considered as such if they were also motivating one to bond or forge direct relationship. If one truly wanted to fit a song into only one category, should the encouragement to bond be present, then consider the song a Friendship / Bonding song, not a comfort song. Encouragement to bond in a way related to “love” will be dealt with later but that also trumps the Comfort category if there were two possibilities and one only wanted to fit a song into solely one category.
Sad songs are the most common form of Comfort songs, but so are lullabies and blues. Comfort songs’ benefit to our evolution is that they cause the release of prolactin, a tranquilizing hormone that comforts us, among many other purposes. Obviously, comfort during times of stress, or even just more comfort in good times, benefits our survival.
Audio sample of songs from the Comfort chapter in The World in Six Songs can be found on the website. No direct link was available, but click on the Songs menu option and appropriate page number range link carrying pages 111 to 136. Please note that not all songs are meant as samples of Comfort songs. Some are just referenced material in the book text.
Written by Eddie Delange, Irving Mills, Duke Ellington, this bluesy jazz standard talks about a person in solitude longing for her (or his) lover who has left her/him. However, because the singer sings it like it’s happening to her, the listener regards it as someone else going through the same situation. As for my insistence upon the Billie Holiday version, well, let’s just say there’s nobody who knows how to make a song sadder than Billie. She’s got an album titled Lady Sings the Blues, for which she wrote the title track, for a very good reason. I could actually listen to any Billie Holiday song, sad or happy, and I would feel better if I were feeling sad. She’s got that “honest signal” quality in her singing to persuade the listener she knows what she’s talking about rather than faking it. “Honest signal” is discussed by Daniel Levitin in the Love chapter as being regarded as superior to speech because it is more challenging to fake singing an emotion than talking about it.
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What is your choice for Song of Comfort?
Please leave your choice as a comment.
Lyrics and YouTube/audio link would greatly enhance your answer so readers can know more about your choice. They are not necessary, though, and not possible if no lyrics or version exist.
Here are some more Facebook tagging meme pictures I haven’t been able to find anywhere else easily, so I’ve put them on my blog. I created the Family Guy version, with relatively few characters compared to others I created thus far. However, I was only able to find graphics of those 8 characters with white backgrounds and that’s enough work to assemble them, label them and such for me on one post. It’s for the Family Guy fans, which I don’t think are quite at the level of the other meme themes (see links below), but I’ll let the download stats speak for themselves. It’s also for people who don’t have time to tag 25 people, or daring ones who not only have their family as friends, particular Parents, but will also tag them! This is also the first time I created a pictorial Facebook meme with personality traits rather than straight character names.
The other two meme pictures here are Disney characters and Penguins (somebody need to enlighten me on the cartoon franchise from which they came). The first penguins version I created. The others I only slightly optimized ratios and edited out one extreme expletive that was simply gratuitous, and it wasn’t even funny. I’m glad someone did the personality labeling for Disney characters because I sure didn’t want to try. I had thought about a Disney set but passed it up due to too many characters without prominent distinguishing personality traits. As for the Penguins set, not knowing anything about it really, it’s just included. Here’s how you get any of these graphics for Facebook:
Click on the picture below to get it at full size.
Right click on that picture and save to your computer.
Noteflight.com is a music composition webware. It allows you to compose sheet music online in their website, play it and share it as a follow the music style video. Copying and pasting code is about as complicated as it gets for social bookmark style sharing, but the entire package is brilliant. This despite a few shortcomings still present in Beta 3 version.
Isn’t the free world wide web great these days? Everything is going on-line via webware, and “software is so passé” according to CNET and I can’t say I disagree. Their blog has like 10 entries a day on webware for crying out loud! Soon, we’ll only need to get the same scripts on our electronic devices (far more than just computers) and the browser will serve as the means for everything. We will only need the scripts on our electronic devices for when we don’t have a reliable connection and might lose data.
The latest webware I happened upon is sheet music composition software at Noteflight.com. I learned about it from Wesley Fok in his awesome weekly columns called Apps We Love in the Globe & Mail (Canadian paper). Being a bit of an amateur musician, who happened to have composed something like 15 years ago, I not only got to try the site, but I had personal vested interest.
I found the site to be fairly good, though not yet at the quality of expensive software like Finale. You can still do quite a lot with this software. I’m sure there are many things people wish it had, and it will with progressive versions, but this is great for now. The only thing I found on this first go that was disappointing was I could not change tempo in the middle of a piece. They’ll get that sorted out soon enough as it’s just timing and is a digital fix.
But more than just music composition, you can share the file and have multiple people work on it. Then you can share it on blogs and such. They give you some codes and you just throw it in somewhere. It doesn’t quite work for every platform yet. I can’t embed it in my WordPress.com post, for example. However, I can collect it with my VodPod account and widget to the right. I just put those codes from Noteflight.com into the collector, it gives me a page to view it, and I can link the URL to the text like here.
The computer “performance” is less than stellar without the ability for me to indicate tempo changes that were all over this piece. It loses a lot of its life without the appropriate tempo changes. However, I’ll take it just to be able to share it. When the better beta versions come out, I will update it.
As for my étude, it was something I composed to get around stupid and horrible sounding exercises. I was teaching myself piano, cowboy style, you see. Jump in and shoot. Ask questions later. I had no piano training, but I was teaching myself to play the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (video below) because there were many nights I needed to play it for therapy in the moonlight coming through my bedroom window.
Wow! That video link has over 6.5 million views!!! Talk about timeless! Beethoven gone majorly viral!
Etude in C, Op. 1 No. 1, by Minh Tan (original manuscript)
Anyway, there were some things about piano playing in that Sonata I was really being challenged by so to get around it, I composed aptly named étude style pieces. I only ever got around to completing one, but I have held on to it like a Beethoven original manuscript. Lo and behold, 15 years later, serendipity, synchronicity and karma had given it a better purpose and meaning in my life. I had it to try and share with the world. It did get a public viewing I never allowed it after all! Life really kicks you know what when you can have skeletons of this sort in your closet!
It’s instances like this, actually, which have happened frequently in my short life thus far that led me to write my six-word memoir as being
In a series of posts, I will describe each of the six categories in brief, one at a time:
Digital Citizen 