Tag: Fitzgerald Fortune

B. Lorenzo Buckinchere

Oct 20, 2024

Have you ever been in a generally happy mood on any given day, then suddenly find yourself feeling sad when a love song comes over the radio that reminds you of someone special? Likewise, do you find that you are rudely interrupted whenever an ad cuts into your music flow, or whenever you abruptly change the genre from something as relaxing as classical music to something as loud as rock and roll?

Well that is having to do with your brain, and how it processes music. You see, there are two sides of your brain, and each side processes things differently. In this article, I will be covering the power that music has over people and their emotions, and in order to get the full picture, I am taking it back to the beginning.

July 1518, Strasbourg, France. It was an ordinary medieval day under Roman rule, when a woman named Frau Troffea suddenly ventured out into the town square, and started dancing at random. Before long, other townsfolk decided to join in on the fun.

It wasn’t until after they realized that they were unable to stop themselves from dancing that they realized that what they thought would be fun was actually a living nightmare.

Hundreds of Strasbourgers danced until their feet were sore and bloody, but it didn’t stop there. Many of them danced themselves to death, suffering from hunger, thirst and exhaustion in the process.

This event came to be known as the dancing plague, a frenzy of inexplicable dancing mania that lasted day and night from July until September. No one seemed to know what really caused it. Particularly because everyone was dancing, but where’s the music?

This only further fueled the mystery shrouding the situation that led to numerous theories throughout the centuries, ranging from demonic possession, to the use of a psychedelic wheat fungus known as Ergotamine, similar to LSD.

The dancing mania of 1518 may be the most infamous account of a dancing frenzy taking place throughout history, but not the first. A few centuries before that in 1284, there was the tale of the pied piper of Hamelin, a mysterious nomad who was offered money by Hamelin’s mayor to help remedy a rat infestation.

His solution was to play some kind of magical silent flute that only the rats could hear to help lure them out of Hamelin. After he had gotten rid of all the rats, the mayor refused to pay him for his services, citing a number of excuses.

So out of revenge, the pied piper returned to Hamelin one year later on a Sunday morning while all of the adults were in church, and used his silent flute to lure their children away, never to be seen again.

The common theme of both stories is the hypnotic power of music on the human brain. A more recent example is a season three episode of The Twilight Zone, titled, “A Piano in the House.”

In this episode, a theater critic named Fitzgerald Fortune purchased a self-playing piano for his young wife on her birthday. The titular piano in question had the supernatural ability to bring out a person’s true character by putting them in a trance, depending on what tune it was playing at the time.

All of these examples may seem like fictional accounts of the power of music, but it alludes to the fact that we don’t fully understand the human brain, we barely scratched the surface. The brain is just as strong as it is vulnerable, and what makes us can also break us.

The dancing fever of Strasbourg suggests that the residents of that town were dancing to music that only they could hear. Likewise, the pied piper of Hamelin played a tune that only the children could hear, kind of like a dog whistle.

Perhaps the pied piper is immortal, and resurfaced in Strasbourg centuries later, assuming a different form. Perhaps he cursed the unsuspecting town of Strasbourg, same as he did Hamelin, using advanced knowledge of subliminal messaging that medieval surfs could not even begin to fathom, then mentally raped them with it.

Fast-forward to the present, and the youth of today are delinquent and disrespectful, all due to that ghetto rap music. Traditional African-American culture was a prideful thing, especially in the south. Ladies were classy, the gents were well dressed, and the music was respectful and evident of creative ingenuity.

But then, something tragic happened. Their culture was infiltrated, and they were sold a lie. The new order of the day is to be a “gangsta” and a “hustla,” and to envy one’s own brother for even his very potential to be prosperous.

Something similar happened in Jamaica during the 1980’s when reggae evolved into dancehall, following the untimely death of Bob Marley. Reggae was the conscious vibrations of the nation, but dancehall is the rebellious wild child, and all about the hype.

But here is what I am really alluding to. Did you know that dancehall is recorded on a 440 hz frequency, while reggae uses a 432 hz frequency? It is not just reggae versus dancehall, but all popular music is recorded on a 440 hz frequency, while traditional music, such as jazz and classical music are 432 hertz.

Each frequency has a different effect on the listener. Particularly because 440 hertz puts you into your left brain, which is useful for analytical thinking and reasoning, while 432 hertz puts you into your right brain, which is good for love and creativity.

The left brain may be good for critical thinking, but that’s all it is good for. The problem is when you stay stuck in your left brain, and allow that linear kind of thinking to cross over into your interpersonal relationships.

But if all you listen to is 440 hertz music, then it makes you more susceptible to suggestion without you even realizing it. And what if there really was an agenda to program the masses to be more narrow-minded, therefore easier to control?

So if there is a shift in the consciousness of post-modern society, it is most likely attributed to the fact that all mainstream tracks are being recorded on a 440 hz frequency. And though there are other factors to be considered outside of music, music is the main factor.

The good news is that indie artists tend to record their work on a 432 hz frequency, so there is an alternative that you can choose to listen to. Music is more than just entertainment, it is medicine for the soul, and definitely the mind. Under the right circumstances, it can also be weaponized against you, it is not to be trifled with.

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