Literature Quiz

4) The band Radiohead did not intend to start a revolution, but there is no way to deny that what they did has the definite potential to completely change the music industry. To release their album In Rainbows, the band decided to put the entire album up for sale online. The trick, however, was that the consumer could pay whatever they wanted for the album. For the first time, the band owned the master recording and didn’t have a tricky record deal that “strips you of all your digital rights, so that when you sell something on iTunes you get absolutely zero.” This little experiment worked for Radiohead because it had an eager fan following that appreciated the music that they made. People paid an average of $6 an album and the band grossed nearly $3 million. This really shows how corrupt the music industry is. Radiohead was able to break away from the trend where the record label gets more money than the band itself. Although this worked for Radiohead and there is possibility that it can work for other bands, “it’s hard to imagine the model paying off for Miley Cyrus- aka chart-topping teenybopper Hannah Montana.” With this in mind, what Radiohead did with In Rainbows can change the way we sell and buy music.


3) Many people know of the iconic “blind musicians” who have what can only be described as an enhanced sense of hearing and inclination to music. There is a large amount of blind musicians that have indescribable talents, including artists such as Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles. Oliver Sacks, writer of An Auditory World: Music and Blindness, says that this theory is very much substantiated. Adam Ockelford, a music teacher for the blind, has done several studies that show that blind and partially sighted children took much more of an interest in music than fully sighted children. Although, he noticed that only the blind children showed extraordinary musical abilities. Ockelford, as well as a separate study, found the 40-60 percent of blind children had absolute pitch, compared to the 10 percent among sighted musicians.

There is also evidence that the brain of a blind person who is blind adapts itself to focus on other senses such as hearing. Sacks says that, “a third or more of the human cortex is concerned with vision, and if visual input is suddenly lost…remapping may occur in the cerebral cortex”. Here Sacks is saying that when a person can no longer see, the part of the brain dedicated to sight is able to reorganize itself to concern different senses. The cerebral cortex, “…far from remaining functionless, is reallocated to other sensory inputs, especially hearing and touch.” This, Sacks claims, is hard evidence that the blind have the possibility to have better musical abilities then the sighted.