"Art is how we decorate space and music is how we decorate time" - A random YouTube comment
What a brilliant thing to say! Of course, music is also art. Best one, actually. No wonder how we travel through time when we come across good music. Good music is not rare. Actually, it is not a thing. Everyone has their own tastes. And accordingly, they vibe to it. But the more interesting thing is how it all started? What made humans come up with something like music? Let's listen to this written symphony together...
I don't believe that there was a discovery or invention of music. Of course, earlier homo sapiens were dancing around a fire on music. Nowadays, we believe music is a social and cultural construct. But John Blacking an ethnomusicologist, who studies music, proposed that singing and dancing preceded homo sapiens by several hundred thousand years. There is musicality in our brain. There is a unique recognition for music. It has always been there in the rustling of leaves, flowing water of a river, birds chirping and all-around in nature. No matter, it is quite evident that there is a strong connection between music and human brain. Which makes us groove on the beats. Dancing mindlessly, okay not in public, but who doesn't dance to their favorite song in the shower. You are sort of high when you listen to good music. What is this thing?
You are in a flow state when you are listening to your favorite song. Your mood shifts by music. Music is hands down the best mood shifter in the world. It has the power to change your emotions by making you feel a certain way. You can feel all kinds of emotions by listening to music. Literally all kinds of emotions. You listen to music when you are feeling something. Sometimes, music makes you feel something when you’re feeling nothing. And sometimes it shows you feelings you once had, but lost touch with. Giving you emotions and feeling to the extent of coping with anxiety and depression.
Even from all of our personal experience music can change moods for all of us. Music is there for us like a comforting parent, in times of despair. Many artists have come up in public to say that their music helps people who are in depression. Many people come around to say that someone's music helped them to go through tough times. The same kind of thing is your mood making you listen to certain kinds of music. And music making you feel a certain way. Not only in just one physical sense but many more like smell.
Music has fragrance. I certainly believe that. Musicians have said once in while that they remember the fragrance of the music when they wrote it. Sometimes when you hear an old song, you must have remembered how it felt when you heard it the very first time. I have also heard, people associating colors with music. They see certain colors which are unexplainable when they listen to or produce music. How goddamn interesting it is!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a German poet said that ****"Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music". Nature is chaotic, music is audible order. Talking about order, national anthems are songs uniting the whole country together. The fact that there is around 2 hours of music on Golden Record on Voyager 1 but the whole science on spacecraft could be summarized in just 10 equations. Music is tied to our motor system. I mean, it is possible that you can remember nothing but music.
Clive wearing was a musician, who had his memory erased because of a brain infection. He remembered everything in past but he was left with only 30 seconds of short-term memory. In an attempt to regain control, he started keeping a journal. But that turned into havoc because after writing something he used to forget that did it actually happened or not. His wife tried a lot to help him with his problem. The only thing that was normal in his life was music. His symptoms disappeared while playing music. The momentum or the flow state makes him forgets about his disease. His brain tricks itself while he is playing music. He played each and every note perfectly. That's the wonderful power of music. But what if you can't hear music?
It is physically impossible for you to hear music. Not like you had the senses but lost it, but you never had it in the first place. Basically, someone who is deaf from birth. Now here's the interesting part: those who can't hear it, can feel it. Yep, the information of music is processed same in the brain of a deaf person & normal person. Even without the physical ability to hear something, they can actually neurologically feel it. Babies don't understand words or language initially. But they sleep to lullaby, they have tonality in the calling 'ma-MA' or 'da-DA'
It ensures that there is no language in music. Best example of this is that a Spanish song, Despacito has 7.4 Billion views on YouTube. Even the first song in my playlist is an Italian/French song. You don't have to actually understand something, in order to feel it. No barrier of language in music brings all the humans on the same page. Still, It's super hard to find people who have the same music taste as you. Interestingly, you mostly vibe with people who have the same music taste as you. Personally, I haven't found myself vibing with a person, who likes music which I do not. And if I meet someone with the same music taste, we'll instantly vibe and vice versa. As long as you have music, you cannot be alone.
Music can make you imagine scenarios that have never happened, or to be exact which you want to happen. There are some songs that are close to us at some point in time. And when you go back to them after a while, you are most likely to feel all those emotions again. That's the nostalgia of the music. Sometimes, music makes you feel things you have never felt before.
Some songs hurt...but in the best way possible.
Update: This is another piece I wrote for my another newsletter Psych, enjoy :)
Thanks a ton to Angel and Srushti for providing feedback, honest thoughts, and improvements on drafts of this.