Music News
Psychologist Explores Hendrix Guitar Talent
While Jimi Hendrix was proficient in playing his guitar in myriad ways, a new study indicates that his six-string prowess might have come from the fact that he showed qualities of being ambidextrous.
In his new paper, "Eclectic lefty-hand: Conjectures on Jimi Hendrix, handedness, and Electric Ladyland," University of Toledo psychologist Stephen Christman ruminates on the possibility that the condition may be the cause of such creative leanings in musicians like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan.
"One of the implications of the increased interhemispheric interaction in mixed-handers is that it may give such individuals enhanced conscious access to right-hemisphere-based processing," Christman writes in the paper.
"It is well established that the right hemisphere is superior at processing nonverbal environmental sounds. This may help to account for the wide variety of nonverbal environmental sounds that permeate Electric Ladyland, from the sound collages of ‘… And The Gods Made Love’ and ‘Moon, Turn The Tides … Gently Gently Away’, through the use of a home-made comb-and-waxed-paper kazoo to augment the opening guitar of ‘Crosstown Traffic’, and the frequent presence of guitar and microphone feedback in songs like ‘Voodoo Chile’, to the mysterious underwater chime-like sounds during the guitar solo and bird-like sounds at the very end of ‘1983 … (A Merman I Should Be)’."
Image used with permission by Redferns.
