Isha's blog

  During the last two decades, Bollywood, India’s film industry has become the biggest worldwide film industry in terms of film production size. With more than 27 thousand films, and around 1000 films per year, Bollywood’s movies have spread all round the world. Bollywood first appeared around 1912 in Bombay, India. Its history abroad can be traced to small screenings in college rooms and movies watched by expatriate Indians during the late 1960’s and 1970’s. During those years, in both the U.S. and the UK, it was very rare to find Indian community centers and even less common, any media related to India’s cultural values. The future development of Bollywood and the Indian film industry wouldn’t have been the same without these spaces where people from the community could wear traditional clothes and take part in activities that reminded them of “home” (Bouka, Merkouri and Metaxas, 2015, p. 4). During the end of the 1990’s India’s presence in the media grew. Bollywood’s movies, bro...

  During the last few years, music psychologists have realized the importance of cross-cultural research when investigating the different kinds of musical thoughts. In general terms, cross-cultural research in music studies tries to join methods from different disciplines such as ethology and ethnography to better understand the diversity and richness of music, human responses, context and the cultural conditions in which music is experienced (Stevens, 2004, p. 433) Cross-cultural research in music cognition is still growing. There is much to be studied to identify unique or universal features in different musical environments. But so far, studies have proved that a common feature of practically all of the world’s musical systems is the use of stable pitch levels in a scale (Stevens, 2004, pp. 433-434). Over the last 20 years, music cognition has studied the reactions to different sequences of musical tones or melodies. Proposing that a piece of music in a familiar genre creates ce...

  Music in India: An Overview The music of India compares to its incredibly diverse population: it can range from classical music called Ragas to the hyper-pop music produced for Bollywood, the Indian film industry. So, why is music so important to the development of Indian culture? In Indian philosophy, sound in its purest form is the absolute truth. Before written language developed, the higher powers would spread their teachings, or truths, orally, allowing sound to be the only form of "knowing and understanding the truth" (Evans, 2). The significance of sound translates to music. According to Indian philosophy, the truths perceived in the universe are not rigid, not universal, and inarguable. The truth is construed as the smaller subsets of individual or communal beliefs that vary depending on the circumstances. The truth is a penetrable boundary that we can easily cross with logical criticism. The universe was created from the initial sound, "Aum." It is said t...