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Music is a beautiful thing. It can help with controlling your emotions at anytime of day. Don’t believe me? Have you ever listened to Sail Away by Enya? Or how about Dance With My Father by Luther Vandross? These are both sad songs, although “Sail Away” just gives out sad vibes and “Dance With My Father” tells a story about a boys father passing away and he has the best memories of him dancing with his father. They both just change your mood no matter how you are feeling before it. Through research we find that music stimulates emotions through specific brain circuits. Where sad songs will make you cry and happy song will lift you up. This paper is about the different things that music can do and the different types of music there are that make you change your mood.

“Listening to music can create peak emotions, which increase the amount of dopamine, a specific neurotransmitter that is produced in the brain and helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. We often feel emotions are experienced from our heart, but an enormous part of emotional stimulus is communicated through the brain.” I found this information from an article called Music and the Brain: The Fascinating Ways That Music Affects Your Mood and Mind by Barry Goldstein It is basically explaining why music changes your mood sometimes and why you are able to feel the music through you heart and able to send chills down your spine. One of my favorite songs growing up was a song by UB40 called Red Red Wine. A song when listening to, can make you want to dance wherever you are at. This song is a reggae song talking about how red wine takes him away but when listening to the song, the lyrics aren’t the reason why you want to dance but rather the rhythm of the guitar and keyboard in the background mix with the drums and also the voice of Ali Campbell and now Duncan Campbell who takes his brother’s place sometimes when singing in the group. Or What about the Song Smooth Criminal by Michael Jackson. With its up beat of a guitar and keyboard playing at a pretty fast paste, with the drums also playing pretty fast stimulating your senses almost. This song gets me so pumped, that I used to play it before my wrestling matches or football games to make sure I get my adrenaline rush right before playing. Music can play with your emotions even when your not really paying attention to it.

Music also helps with helping you focus while studying or driving. For me, when the room is full with people talking and laughing, I cannot focus on whatever I am doing in the room. People will whisper and if they say something interesting my mind will begin to wonder once and pretty soon I have read a full paragraph and won’t even remember what it was about. The reason for this is doing homework or something that you don’t want to do in a room with people, your mind will do anything and everything to make get you out of doing your homework. But have you ever tried playing some music, turned down and not blasting out loud, while studying and doing homework? Well If you are like me, Everytime I listen to music while doing things like studying, I usually get a lot done and it was more effective in a little amount of time. Rooms full of people aren’t the only things that can distract you and make you not want to focus, but aso rooms that are super quiet can be as distracting. When your in a quiet room you start to begin thinking out loud or your mind won’t focus as much believe me I have tried many times. Here is a message also from the Barry Goldstein talking about learning and neuroplasticity, “Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life, and can be greatly affected by the harmony of music and the brain. According to MedicineNet.com, “Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.” In other word when you brain is damaged it may try to find different ways to repair itself, and music can create stimuli to create these different ways to help the brain fix itself.

I believe that music can manipulate your heart and emotions and especially your soul. It can make you want to be on top of the world or even make you want to pull out the tub of ice cream and big blanket and have you reminiscing about old times or about what could have been. No matter what, without music I don’t know what would help us get pumped up or help us reminisce about our loved ones. Music just has the power of taking over your body.

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You ever wonder how much music has evolved in the last decade? It went from the good old oldies where Johnny Cash or Elvis Presley would sing and it would bring everyone out onto their feet, cheering and singing along with them. I don’t think there was anyone out there that didn’t like that type of music, I mean other than religious folks that thought that them sing was going against what they were listening to. Well now look at today's music? Where rappers like Lil Yachty or how bout 6ix9ine who in my own opinion are nothing compared to the old school rappers like Ice Cube and Eminem. Where has this generation gone wrong. I have been a huge fan of of rap form Biggie Smalls and Tupac rapping about real life, or Snoop Dogg and Xzibit rapping about how it is living in the ghetto and moving up in the world because of music. But now we have rappers like Lil Uzi Vert or Travis Scott talk about nothing but (excuse my language) drugs sex and money. The old school rapper were real gangsters and backed up everything they rapped about and if someone dissed them they would find come back ten times harder or even go up and confront them. Now a day rapper cannot fight, and get super hurt if someone were to diss them and they stay in the corners and don’t do anything. The worse of all rap I have ever hear was a song by Hopsin called no words, where it is him saying random things and not even saying real words but rather some made up language. Hopsin - No Words

Not all music has been all bad, Music if anything has been taken to the next level. If you have ever listen to Adele, John Legend or even Sam Smith, they are my favorite singers and they will make your day anytime you listen to them. Adele has changed music by her powerful yet soft soothing voice. Only at age 19 when she first started recording, and her first two albums, 19 and 21, earned her critical praise and a level of commercial success unsurpassed amongst her peers. Taking a break, she came back with another album called 25 and it went through the roof with “Hello being one of her songs that was on top for a while. She has 15 Grammy awards which she also received a song writing Oscar for the James Bond track “Skyfall.” Other songwriters like Sam Smith have won a total of 4 Grammy awards and John Legend has won 10 Grammy awards. They all have something in common when they sing, not only do they sing with all of their heart and soul but they sing with compassion and they sing about real life and heartbreaks which appeals to people nowadays.

Music has evolved so much that musical instruments and not even needed anymore to be able to make a song. No guitars, no drums, no piano, or no bass either. As a matter a fact music has changed so much that all you need is pretty much a studio to record various sounds and maybe a couple of background singers. The way this is done is people either recorded various sounds such as these different instruments and put them continuously making a beat for the singer to use. I mean it makes it easier for singers to travel and still make good money because they wouldn’t have to pay for the members of the band who play the instruments but they would just pay the background singers and also the people who make the beat as well. I have even seen a one-man band, who has all instruments need on his body and plays and sings on the street for people.

Music has definitely changed, some of it for the worse but most of it for the best. We now have millions of songs to listen to, with many different genres or artists. Music is probably the best thing that has happen to us and I hope it continues to push forward to become even better than this genre.

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Technology is definitely a hot topic, so hot that I had to add more about why it is harmful to us and why it must keep pushing forward on development or we will not succeed. By success I mean for us to prosper. But what has technology become in the year 2018. If we take a look back to when our parents were in school, the whole school had to share the same computer lab, which was filled with about 3o or more computers. These computers would have many functions such as simple games, painting and it even had a part where you could type if you wanted. Now looking back at when I was in school, we students each were given an IPod generation 4 (the newest version at the time) and we got to take it with us home and used it to help us with school work. The best thing was when you graduated from that high school we were given the IPod for a gift, and that was way back in 2010. Now I go back to the school and they each are given IPads to use instead. I can honestly say that even though these IPods were given to us for school, I used it for other purposes for the majority of the time. Such as various social medias and to listen to music. Even though the school gave us these IPods, most of the students didn’t use it for school purposes and a lot of students lost these IPods and some were even stolen. Although we were given this opportunity to help us learn more with the technology, we took it for granted and that is why our generation we have some who don’t use technology for the right reasons.

I personally own a laptop in which I use for school, but I end up watching movies and also have my facebook account linked up to it. A Television in which I spend about 4 hours almost everyday playing video games. I also watch sports and netflix on it using my PS4. A telephone where I have Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Snapchat, and a bunch of apple store bought games I use daily. A IPad, in which I watch film for football, and continue to have all the same apps as I do on my phone. To make things worse, almost everywhere I go has a TV streaming live sports and TV ads.

The Washington Post say teenagers spend about a third of their entire day on the media. That includes music, videos, online gaming, and even social media. That is about nine hours spent on phones, laptops, and television. Nine hours! You are telling me that teens spend more time on media than they do sleeping. In which 8 to 10 hours of sleep is recommended for adults. I see a lot of changes in this generation than the my generations or even the generation of my fathers or his father's, if you don’t notice it then you must be blind. On Roo Girl website, an article was posted about 25 negative effects that technology causes, especially in this generation, but I will only be sharing a couple. First and foremost, lack of social skills is the number one problem on my list. Kind of like the photo above, when people get together in a group you always have somebody who instead of talking and interacting with the other group, is on his/her phone. I know that when I meet up with my younger siblings they are always on their phones and when the conversation starts to die off, then they pull out their phones again and get to scrolling on social media. Depression would be next on my list, because the rich and popular love to post pics on the many trips they like to take. I don’t know about you but I get so jealous because I can’t afford taking the trips they do. Lastly, one of the bigger problems that we as a nation are faced with is bullying. Bullies usually find a reason to pick on a random person, and one of those reasons is that one person doesn’t have money so they can’t afford the nicer phones such as IPhones and even Galaxies. I know that I had a problem with this while growing up because I had a flip phone while everyone had touch screen phones.

We Find ourselves using technology everyday and everywhere, some of us use it even more than others. But, the fact is that we think that we are in control of how we use our technology and when we want to use it but that is not true. Do you ever find yourself pulling out your phone so it doesn’t look like you are waiting on something or someone, or what about using the bathroom and pulling your phone out on instinct because you usually do that. Well this picture explains all of that. I really think that even if we tried, we couldn’t get ourselves out of this problem. The roots of this problem has run to deep into the ground and now we are suffering because of it. Our only solution is to get rid of all technology.