By The Rivers: Music Analysis

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By the Rivers are an up and coming six piece reggae band from Leicester. However, defining them as one genre seems somewhat disrespectful, as their melodic style takes influence from genres including pop, ska, reggae, soul and motown (Ellison, 2013). Whilst to the casual listener, "ska" appears to be nothing more than a speedy form of reggae. On the contrary, originating in the 1950's in Jamaica, ska was actually a pop-based precursor to reggae. The roles of both ska and reggae have evolved dramatically. From the first movement of ska, known as "the Old Jamaican Scene", where music expressed the underlying socio-political problems of Jamaica, to the "English Two Tone Revival" of the late 1970's, where the original ska rhythms were fused with…show more content…
These responses were clearly observed through whole experience, people clapped, moved, jigged, skanked and jumped. The complex web of rhythms that By the Rivers expertly produced gave the music a dynamic edge, causing the natural body rhythms, such as respiration and heart rhythm to harmonise with the musical rhythms produced by the band. Whilst these effects were seen within the audience, the band also seemed to absorb this energy as Will Todd bobbed and weaved through the crowd with saxophone in hand. These physical effects were seen to be accompanied with the basic emotion of happiness, and not a single person could refrain from absorbing the energy that reverberated the room. The pleasure elicited by By the Rivers was clearly seen in the faces of all those in the audience. Much research has been done on this feeling of euphoria and pleasure that is felt when listening to certain music, it's found that this feeling coincides with activation of specific parts of the brain, namely the reward pathways. "The chill", or "shivers done the spine" as most people describe it, is seen just as clearly in PET scans of the brain, where regions such as the ventral striatum, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex and ventral medial prefrontal cortex are all activated (Blood and Zatorre, 2001). Similar brain structures are also seen to be active during orgasms, food and drug
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