Indian Music
American Music
I chose these two videos not to illustrate differences between our societies, but rather to show the dramatic similarities. These two videos show that once you remove the language differences, the music is very nearly impossible to differentiate. While it is very clear after these two videos that language is the main divider between our two cultures, I am certainly not saying that it is the only one. For example, as a musician, I have a pretty defined natural beat. I rarely find music, however, that grates against this and listen to nearly as much foreign music as domestic (Rammstein anyone?). However, when I turned on the top video, something about the way it was played and how the beats came together seemed to against everything that I found pleasing to the ear. Each note grated, no matter how perfectly it was harmonized. It is my opinion that it was the strange syncopation that caused this. However, even this did not prevent me from recognizing the massive similarities between the modern music of India and that of America.