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INTRODUCTION
While I have played on some creative servers, I met people again and again who were listening to music while they were building. I have to say, I listen to music very often either, but the question I gonna deal with today is: Is that actually useful or not? Can listening to music really help to build better? And if so, then why and how you can use music as good as possible?
PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
While I have played on some creative servers, I met people again and again who were listening to music while they were building. I have to say, I listen to music very often either, but the question I gonna deal with today is: Is that actually useful or not? Can listening to music really help to build better? And if so, then why and how you can use music as good as possible?
PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
First of all, to answer this question, I will dig good old psychology up to explain what actually happens in our brain when we listen to music.
You will probably all know this special feeling if you listen to a specific song and then you get these goosebumps. Through a test where subjects brought their favorite music with them and listened to it, scientist Valorie Salimpoor from the McGill University in Canada found out what happens when we get these goosebumps. The nucleus accumbens, a part of our brain, is getting filled up with dopamine. This region is mainly used as kind of a reward system. So if you feel good, just because of a good grade or food or whatever, it’s probably the nucleus accumbens which is working in your brain at the moment.
So you see, if you listen to the right music, you are getting happy, right? Well, doesn’t sound bad, although the definition “right” is impossible to generalize because every person has his/her own taste of music (for example, I’m listening to this at the moment while I’m typing this article). It seems that we can get happier with the “right” kind of music (of course, while building you should be definitely happy, else you shouldn’t do it, but music can help to amplify this happiness).
But there’s also another psychological reason why you could listen to music while building. For this, you have to know that our brain is learning the whole time. When we walk, when we eat, when we sleep, when we learn for school (haha, obviously), when we sit in front of our computer, when we meet friends, etc.. Every second, your brain is getting bombarded with thousands of information. Luckily, we can also use this “learn function” to help us build a little bit better, maybe.
It’s mainly about the complexity of the song or soundtrack you are listening to. Unless it is something like “All my little ducklings”, it has a relative amount of complexity with more or less scores and/or instruments. The first times you listen to this song or soundtrack, your brain will automatically try to learn as much about it and its stylistic devices as possible, even if it’s actually irrelevant for our own survival. Of course, it won’t be able to keep all this information for that long, but that doesn’t matter. The thing is, your brain tries to learn it, and as a result of that, you will get a little bit more concentrated while you are building.
There is only one thing which makes this technique really hard. If you listen to this song/soundtrack for too long, your brain will be like: “Uhh, that’s boring, c’mon give me new stuff”. And if you just keep listening to this piece of music, your brain won’t learn anything new, so there’s no boost of concentration, too. The only way to make the brain still learning things about an old song/soundtrack is to deliberately analyze it. But as you want to build and not to think about the music, the best option would be just to look for other pieces of music. You see, if you want to this method, you have to get a big palette of music, and I really mean BIG. That’s the point why it’s maybe a little bit unpractical.
Also, another point is that you can motivate yourself if you have the right kind of music. Although there’s no real explanation for this, there are many examples where people got ambitious by listening to music. Like, you love Heavy Metal? You get ambitious if you listen to it? Then listen to Heavy Metal while building and you can see, this ambitiousness will help you rising!
Another opinion that I have is that the right music helps you to get ideas for your build. The music will affect your building as you associate specific pictures with the sound you hear. And you will automatically try to implement these pictures in your build. Of course, there is again a negative point about this method. People could say that you want to transport feelings with your build. But if you listen to music that inspires you, it may causes problem just because your own feelings are getting confused with the music, and the guys who will have a look at it won’t listen to the same music probably. So there’s the problem that you think your build is great because you listen to great music, but without the music, the feelings aren’t that intensive.
But people who could say that would be probably wrong, as the aim of this whole method is to put the intensive feelings you get from the music into your build and to get inspired. It’s not spirit and purpose to try to intensify the feelings with the help of music, if you understand what I mean.
One thing that is noteworthy: it’s not ascertained if music is able to increase your intelligence. There are both tests which confirm and disprove this statement. So don’t think that you’re getting a genius because you are listening to music while building, just to be sure ;).
TUTORIAL
Now, these were the facts. But, if music really helps me with building, how do I use it perfectly? Well, sadly for this topic I haven’t found any other opinions than my own, so I have to give you mine :D. Here I have subdivided my own way how to use music.
- Thinking about the theme: In some ways, I think it’s important that the music you use fits into the theme. So don’t listen to polka while building an Irish-orientated map. But usually, there also many “independent” pieces of music which you can listen to for any project, just as epic or action music for example.
- Getting the music: Now, where do I get the music from? Easy question, I usually use three sources to get my music: good old youtube, incompetech and jamendo. The last two (which are both mostly creative commens by the way) have functions so you can find your ideal kind of music pretty fast. I usually just use Youtube if I want to listen to some songs, which are normally not depending on a theme.
- Getting it sorted: If you use incompetech or jamendo, download the soundtracks and sort it in a new folder. Or make a Youtube playlist.
- Have fun with building!
- If you recognize that you already listened to your current songs/soundtracks for too long, then just look for new junk you can use.
This is the way how I get my music.
Résumé:
In some ways, listening to music can help you build better, but these improvements are all pretty small and not necessarilly noticeable, although you can definitely get inspired from music. In general, it's more about if you want to listen to music or not while building on MC.
Résumé:
In some ways, listening to music can help you build better, but these improvements are all pretty small and not necessarilly noticeable, although you can definitely get inspired from music. In general, it's more about if you want to listen to music or not while building on MC.
I really hope you found this article useful. I myself have good experienced with listening to music while building, but now it’s your turn. What do you think about these theories? Do you use music and why you do/don’t?
Credits
I mainly got my information from this page, but it's german, so you are unlikely to understand it ... just wanted it to be complete.
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Update #1 : by Chiefcrafter2000 05/04/2015 2:36:31 amMay 4th, 2015
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