# 22 year old listens to classical music for the first time



## violadude (May 2, 2011)

http://www.classicfm.com/music-news/videos/pop-fan-listens-classical/

Found this while browsing facebook.

Thoughts?


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

Reminds me vaguley of those "Brits eat American snacks" videos on YouTube, which are actually quite amusing. 

It's easy to mock this, but I'm pleased with his ulitmate response. I didn't watch every video, but it's interesting that he looks to turn Rite of Spring into a story. 

I actually never thought many people dislike Classical, so much as they aren't "into" it. They certainly don't give it priority over other listening. it's just one option of many.


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## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

With the exception of Stravinsky they played him some pretty archetypal classical stuff, but what can one expect from Classical FM? Contemporary selections (20th/21st centuries) would have made this a more interesting experiment. Imagine they'd blasted him with a Xenakis percussion piece? The old boy's head would have exploded.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Hey, if he keeps listening to it after this experience, it's a good thing. He seems to have enjoyed it a lot.

I do find it interesting that he mentions film music, because ClassicFM is telling us that he's never listened to classical music, and yet they play film music as if it were the same thing...


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## Flamme (Dec 30, 2012)

Lmao @ the comment bellow...''What a ****'':lol:


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

But at the end he says he *has* heard a few of the big hitters. Where really could you find someone hasn't heard classical on TV or in the movies? Neptune? I'm under the impression he's just going along with it for something to do, although he did imagine quite an interesting story with the Rachmaninoff.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

My theory is that there is an optimal readiness age for getting hooked on classical music; an age of maximum readiness for absorbing it and it's the same as the optimal age for learning a language, and that means very young, like three to five years old.

Once one becomes an adult, that facility area of maximum absorption in the brain has been pretty much closed and many people can no longer easily be sensitive to classical music. Not everyone, but the majority of adults. My SO is an example. No matter what I play, it doesn't matter. It always draws a blank response; no emotion. "I don't understand it." Never been exposed to it until she met me when she was 39.

You want to learn to speak fluent French. Your best bet is to be 3-5 years old. Same with becoming sensitive to classical music. It worked for me.


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

3-5 years old might be the optimal age for starting to perform music, but it sounds way too young for the optimal age to begin listening. I'm guessing most of us here didn't begin that young. I was college aged when I got to CM, but I was a huge Rock fan from childhood. Maybe you have to start interest in some kind of music while young, but can switch. 

A lot of it possibly social. The 22 year-old is mature enough that he doesn't worry about being picked on if he likes Classical. Then again, his social circle might still drag him away from it. Is he willing to take it on as a mostly solo interest? A lot of people aren't.


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

GreenMamba said:


> A lot of it possibly social. The 22 year-old is mature enough that he doesn't worry about being picked on if he likes Classical. Then again, his social circle might still drag him away from it. Is he willing to take it on as a mostly solo interest? A lot of people aren't.


Most of my biggest interests that make my life a satisfying one - classical music, German culture, books, pagan faith etc - are solo interests. Would I have exchanged them for endless conversations about clothes, hairstyles, boyfriend-related drama and who is going where with whom that seem to be the primary interest of most of my surroundings (the key word is _most_, not all) just in order to have a social circle? No way!


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

As far as I am concerned film music should be played more often as long as the score has classical foundations, such as pieces by the great John Williams. And if more 22 year olds even listen to film music, classical music today would be well received.


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## gHeadphone (Mar 30, 2015)

hpowders said:


> My theory is that there is an optimal readiness age for getting hooked on classical music; an age of maximum readiness for absorbing it and it's the same as the optimal age for learning a language, and that means very young, like three to five years old.
> 
> Once one becomes an adult, that facility area of maximum absorption in the brain has been pretty much closed and many people can no longer easily be sensitive to classical music. Not everyone, but the majority of adults. My SO is an example. No matter what I play, it doesn't matter. It always draws a blank response; no emotion. "I don't understand it." Never been exposed to it until she met me when she was 39.
> 
> You want to learn to speak fluent French. Your best bet is to be 3-5 years old. Same with becoming sensitive to classical music. It worked for me.


Im not sure on this one to be honest. Ive only started listening when i was 39 and i am lifted out of my chair regularly by the music. I think that a persons openness to it is very important, ive met very old 16 year olds in this respect, and incredibly young 60 year olds!


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

gHeadphone said:


> Im not sure on this one to be honest. Ive only started listening when i was 39 and i am lifted out of my chair regularly by the music. I think that a persons openness to it is very important, ive met very old 16 year olds in this respect, and incredibly young 60 year olds!


The same as with foreign languages. "I am too old to learn to speak fluent French" is a cop-out.


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## Dedalus (Jun 27, 2014)

SiegendesLicht said:


> The same as with foreign languages. "I am too old to learn to speak fluent French" is a cop-out.


Well... Brain plasticity is a thing, and we lose it as we get older. I'm not saying it's exactly an excuse, but it's just a fact that it's much harder for a 60 year old to learn a new language than a 10 year old.


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## Dim7 (Apr 24, 2009)

Dedalus said:


> Well... Brain plasticity is a thing, and we lose it as we get older. I'm not saying it's exactly an excuse, but it's just a fact that it's much harder for a 60 year old to learn a new language than a 10 year old.


Much harder? I doubt that. Acquiring a perfectly native-like accent is usually difficult in adulthood, but not fluency. When people think of "a child learning French", they think of him actually being immersed in the language due to necessity - when people think of a adult learning French, they think of somebody studying it formally because it sounds so cool and sophisticated. In former examples the child is more likely to succeed, no question about that - but it's not like the adult's brain is so denegrated that it can't learn new words. 95% of language learning is actually very boring straightforward rote-memorization. We memorize enormous amount of facts during adulthood whether we learn new languages or not. Dementia would certainly be a significant hindrance, but not old age per se.


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

Dim7 said:


> Much harder? I doubt that. Acquiring a perfectly native-like accent is usually difficult in adulthood, but not fluency. When people think of "a child learning French", they think of him actually being immersed in the language due to necessity - when people think of a adult learning French, they think of somebody studying it formally because it sounds so cool and sophisticated. In former examples the child is more likely to succeed, no question about that - but it's not like the adult's brain is so denegrated that it can't learn new words. *95% of language learning is actually very boring straightforward rote-memorization. *We memorize enormous amount of facts during adulthood whether we learn new languages or not. Dementia would certainly be a significant hindrance, but not old age per se.


Is it? That's often how it's taught in schools and (especially) learned as an adult, but that's not really how children learn languages.

I think the evidence suggests Dedalus is right. But the analogy would be with learning to play music, not listening to it.


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## Dim7 (Apr 24, 2009)

GreenMamba said:


> Is it? That's often how it's taught in schools and (especially) learned as an adult, but that's not really how children learn languages.


In a sense yes - but on the other hand formal language learning often involves complex grammatical explanations, careful details of various nuances of words etc.. "Rote memorization" was perhaps not the right expression, and I wasn't necessarily talking about learning words from a list or something like that, but my point was that the most large part of language learning is about fairly straightfoward memorization, as opposed to something complicated or intellect challenging. I definitely recommend making this process more interesting by learning the words in a meaningful context.


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## Dedalus (Jun 27, 2014)

Seriously, read this article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

It's a fact that we lose the ability to change our neural network to a vast degree as we age. This is just plain science. We get "ruts" in our brain and those are harder and harder to change as we age, and that's just plain neuroscience. It's gradual, that is 10 year olds have a better time than 20 year olds who have a better time than 30 year olds, and so on. But it's basically proven science that it's harder to learn new things as you get older. Truly it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks. As much as we might dislike the idea, it is borne out through study.


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## Dim7 (Apr 24, 2009)

Dedalus said:


> Seriously, read this article.
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity
> 
> It's a fact that we lose the ability to change our neural network to a vast degree as we age. This is just plain science. We get "ruts" in our brain and those are harder and harder to change as we age, and that's just plain neuroscience. It's gradual, that is 10 year olds have a better time than 20 year olds who have a better time than 30 year olds, and so on. But it's basically proven science that it's harder to learn new things as you get older. Truly it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks. As much as we might dislike the idea, it is borne out through study.


Where does it exactly support the claim that learning languages (or anything in fact) gets significantly more difficult as we age? On the contrary the first paragraph seems to suggest that in fact our brains retain a lot of their flexibility throughout adulthood. Moreover I didn't exactly deny that some things may become more difficult as we age (I noted that pronunciation may get significantly tougher to nail), just that I think the effect of this on learning languages is vastly exaggerated. IMHO the largest part of learning a language is quite straightforward memorization.


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## Dedalus (Jun 27, 2014)

Dim7 said:


> Where does it exactly support the claim that learning languages (or anything in fact) gets significantly more difficult as we age? On the contrary the first paragraph seems to suggest that in fact our brains retain a lot of their flexibility throughout adulthood. Moreover I didn't exactly deny that some things may become more difficult as we age (I noted that pronunciation may get significantly tougher to nail), just that I think the effect of this on learning languages is vastly exaggerated. IMHO the largest part of learning a language is quite straightforward memorization.


You know you might be right actually. I was going off of what I learned in a psychology class a handful of years ago... But it does seem that even adult brains have a good degree of plasticity according to recent research. So I might have to retract my previous statements in light of newer evidence. My apologies, but I was clearly touting old "knowns" when that has been shown to be not so much the case. Heck, one learns something new every day.


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

Even if learning a language is a more difficult for adult brains, adults have other things that young children lack and that boost language learning results: motivation, understanding precisely what it is they are doing, abstract thinking and ability to understand general principles. You can tell an adult learner "The subject of a sentence always comes before the predicate", and he will understand that the rule is valid for an infinite number of sentences. These things more than make up for slightly less brain plasticity.


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## Dim7 (Apr 24, 2009)

Yes. Adults are better at long-term goal-oriented action and delaying gratification. Imagine that a 8-year old and a 55-year old are challenged to learn as much French as they can for a year for a price that motivates both equally. Neither of them are surrounded by the French language or in a situation where they must speak French in order to communicate. I'd say the 55-year old would "win".


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Dim7 said:


> Yes. Adults are better at long-term goal-oriented action and delaying gratification. Imagine that a 8-year old and a 55-year old are challenged to learn as much French as they can for a year for a price that motivates both equally. Neither of them are surrounded by the French language or in a situation where they must speak French in order to communicate. I'd say the 55-year old would "win".


I can't disagree with your first statement. But if these individuals aren't hearing French spoken around them and aren't compelled to speak it routinely, by what process are you suggesting they learn it? By sitting down with a book for an hour a day and memorizing vocabulary and conjugations? That certainly isn't the natural way to learn a language. Probably the adult would be better at doing that, since adults are more accustomed to the inevitability of boredom and can conceive of the drudgery of rote memorization being rewarding in the end, something 8-year-olds can't imagine (which is why we have to nag them to do their homework, accompanied by carrots and sticks). But what would that prove about the capacity for language acquisition?

I wouldn't underestimate the motivation of young children to learn language. It's a basic human function and an essential element in brain development; it's what the growing brain is programmed to do and is constantly ravenous and tuned in to do, and if nothing prevents it language acquisition happens with amazing rapidity, given that children begin with no sense of language whatsoever and learn vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation mostly by listening. Once we learn to speak, the brain never has the same need again, whatever other motivations we may have to learn a new language.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

GreenMamba said:


> But the analogy would be with learning to play music, not listening to it.


This is a good point. Personally, I suspect that most of us kind-of brain-freeze our musical listening tastes in our early- to mid-20s, after which only a little change is normal.

It'd be interesting to test how plastic listening tastes might be by giving subjects some kind of music that we can bet they'd never heard before - researchers could even commission something for the purpose, let's say some unusual instrumentation, some novel scale invented for the purpose, meters other than 2/4, 3/4 or 4/4 - and seeing how well they apparently enjoy it after listening to it, oh, an hour per day for a couple weeks or something like that.


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## Dim7 (Apr 24, 2009)

Woodduck said:


> I can't disagree with your first statement. But if these individuals aren't hearing French spoken around them and aren't compelled to speak it routinely, by what process are you suggesting they learn it? By sitting down with a book for an hour a day and memorizing vocabulary and conjugations? That certainly isn't the natural way to learn a language. Probably the adult would be better at doing that, since adults are more accustomed to the inevitability of boredom and can conceive of the drudgery of rote memorization being rewarding in the end, something 8-year-olds can't imagine (which is why we have to nag them to do their homework, accompanied by carrots and sticks). *But what would that prove about the capacity for language acquisition?*


Merely that in some situations adults have an advantage.


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> I can't disagree with your first statement. *But if these individuals aren't hearing French spoken around them and aren't compelled to speak it routinely, by what process are you suggesting they learn it? By sitting down with a book for an hour a day and memorizing vocabulary and conjugations?* That certainly isn't the natural way to learn a language. Probably the adult would be better at doing that, since adults are more accustomed to the inevitability of boredom and can conceive of the drudgery of rote memorization being rewarding in the end, something 8-year-olds can't imagine (which is why we have to nag them to do their homework, accompanied by carrots and sticks). But what would that prove about the capacity for language acquisition?


Yes, there is no way around it. But only at first. Once you have acquired some basic vocabulary, the right thing would be getting yourself immersed in the language as much as possible: books, movies, music, conversations with native speakers - just about anything that would make your language learning fun. And besides, who says learning to understand the structure of another language has to be boring? It can be interesting and rewarding all by itself. When I was beginning to learn German at the ripe old age of 21, it was certainly fun for me to understand how it works. And maybe it is not the natural way, but if all we had was the natural way, the only people who spoke more than one language would be children of bilingual families.


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## Dim7 (Apr 24, 2009)

SiegendesLicht said:


> Yes, there is no way around it. But only at first. Once you have acquired some basic vocabulary, the right thing would be getting yourself immersed in the language as much as possible: books, movies, music, conversations with native speakers - just about anything that would make your language learning fun. And besides, who says learning to understand the structure of another language has to be boring? It can be interesting and rewarding all by itself. When I was beginning to learn German at the ripe old age of 21, it was certainly fun for me to understand how it works. And maybe it is not the natural way, but if all we had was the natural way, the only people who spoke more than one language would be children of bilingual families.


That's how I learned Japanese at the age of 20. And not at all different how I learned English during my elementary school years. A little bit of basics from school, and then lots of immersion in video games (helps if they are very story- and text-driven of course) and books. Also some converations on the Internet (but not very much) in both cases.


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## Open Lane (Nov 11, 2015)

neh, i don't buy into this. I mean, did the guy have no exposure to classical music through music education in grade school? OK, if not - at a bare minimum, isn't there a lot of classical and classically influenced music in television commercials? And isn't a lot of popular music influenced by classical as well (such as rock having the influence of stravinsky)?

IDK seems like a bit of a gimmick to claim it was his first exposure to classical music. I just can't imagine anyone being completely in the dark as to what any classical music sounds like, as if a light bulb is suddenly being turned on.

I don't buy into it that someone could be that much of a hermit


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

It almost certainly wasn't his first exposure, but more likely the first time he really listened to it.


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## Open Lane (Nov 11, 2015)

GreenMamba said:


> It almost certainly wasn't his first exposure, but more likely the first time he really listened to it.


good point. I just don't see what is so noteworthy about it though. I mean, people listen to new music they've never been too into all the time. some like it, some don't.


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## TurnaboutVox (Sep 22, 2013)

Open Lane said:


> neh, i don't buy into this. I mean, did the guy have no exposure to classical music through music education in grade school? OK, if not - at a bare minimum, isn't there a lot of classical and classically influenced music in television commercials? And isn't a lot of popular music influenced by classical as well (such as rock having the influence of stravinsky)?
> 
> IDK seems like a bit of a gimmick to claim it was his first exposure to classical music. I just can't imagine anyone being completely in the dark as to what any classical music sounds like, as if a light bulb is suddenly being turned on.
> 
> I don't buy into it that someone could be that much of a hermit


Ryan acknowledges that he's reminded of film music he's heard. But he's young and British - a similar age to my children - and it's quite plausible that he's had no exposure to classical music at either primary or secondary school in the UK. Sadly.


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Open Lane said:


> good point. I just don't see what is so noteworthy about it though. I mean, people listen to new music they've never been too into all the time. some like it, some don't.


It's not particularly noteworthy. It's just fun. Like when you show someone a tv series you really like for the first time and you can see their first reactions to the things you love so much.


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## Lyricus (Dec 11, 2015)

violadude said:


> It's not particularly noteworthy. It's just fun. Like when you show someone a tv series you really like for the first time and you can see their first reactions to the things you love so much.


I've seen a number of other similar videos, but I didn't feel that this one offered anything particularly interesting. Maybe that's just my expectations, though? I feel as if this could be done right, maybe with someone younger? Less into film scores? Not sure.


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