Say What?! Musicians Hear Better : NPR

Musical training can improve your hearing, according to several studies presented in Chicago at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
The studies found that serious musicians are better than other people at perceiving and remembering sounds. But it's not because they have better ears.
Sounds come in through the ears. But they travel through the nervous system and get interpreted by the brain.
That means your hearing can change even if your ears don't, says Nina Kraus, who directs the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University.
"Your hearing system becomes tuned by the experiences that you have had with sound throughout your life," Kraus says.

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Say What?! Musicians Hear Better : NPR

Stop the Cuts

Some local Vancouver artists take a  creative approach to getting the message out about cuts to the arts.

Speaking out against the BC arts cuts

This website brings us the voices of famous Canadians who are speaking out against the cuts to Arts and Culture in the Province of BC.  Margaret Atwood, Douglas Copeland and others give us their opinion of what is happening right now in British Columbia.

Speaking out against the BC arts cuts

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What he said

Comments made by Mitchell Kreiger to the BC Select Standing Comittee on Finance and Goverment Services in Victoria about the Provincial Budget - from the Orchestra Canada website - link is at the bottom.

Good morning. My name is Mitchell Krieger, and I’m Executive Director of the Victoria Symphony. I’m here with my colleague Michael Shamata, Artistic Director of the Belfry Theatre. We speak directly for our colleagues in the Pro Art Alliance, and indirectly for the thousands of artists and arts workers that work so hard to make the cities and towns of British Columbia culturally rich. We are here to implore the government to reconsider the series of actions that threaten the viability of the sector – a sector which, make no mistake, more than earns its support from the government and community by giving back culturally, socially and economically on a daily basis. In fact, throughout this discussion, one statistic is inescapable: for every dollar invested in the arts by the province of British Columbia, $1.36 is returned to the Treasury in taxes. Where else could the government (or anyone else) get a 36% return on investment? For that reason alone, we hope the Members here and the Ministers of the Cabinet will take a breath and realize that they are making a mistake in cutting funding to the arts.

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Socio Economic Impacts of Arts and Culture

There has been much ado in recent weeks about the notion that a $1 investment in the arts in BC generates a $1.38 return on that investment. This statistic has been quoted in quite a few places as being from the BC governments own ministry. This statistic seems to have come from this report, which was somewhere on the province's website, but has at this point been taken down.

The report is entitled "Socio – Economic Impacts of Arts and Cultural Organizations in BC:: Grant Applicants to the BC Arts Council" and the report was written "for Business Research Tourism  Development Section Tourism Policy and Development Division Ministry of Tourism, Sports and Arts, BC" by G. S. Sandhu & Associates. December 2006. It is an economic impact study that was completed about 3 years ago. I am posting it here if anyone cares to have a look at it.

Socio Economic Impacts of Arts and Culture

If Rich Coleman is the real arts minister, Derek Sturko is the key arts bureaucrat | Vancouver, Canada | Straight.com

If Rich Coleman is the real arts minister, Derek Sturko is the key arts bureaucrat | Vancouver, Canada | Straight.com

From the Georgia Straight, October 3, 2009. 

In a previous post, I mentioned that Housing and Social Development Minister Rich Coleman has become the de facto minister of arts and culture in the B.C. Liberal government.
That’s because it appears that all provincial funding for arts organizations in future years will come from gaming revenues—for which Coleman is responsible.
People who lobby on behalf of the arts and those who protest cuts to the arts should keep this in mind because it appears as though Tourism, Culture and Arts Minister Kevin Krueger has become irrelevant to the funding of arts organizations.

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