Music Banter - View Single Post - The Evolution of Music: Accident, or Adaptation?
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Old 12-11-2011, 01:17 PM   #110 (permalink)
Calm
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rubato View Post
To me music is just a series of coherent patterns that we've been conditioned to associate with our emotions. So I believe music to be more an evolution in communication than anything else. Whether we use maqams or western scales if they fail to form a coherent structure according to their own axioms we find it difficult to relate to them.
Yeh there's a lot of truth in that, though I doubt either of us are experts when it comes to the psychology of music.

I would say that it is a lot more indirect than you tend to suggest: our association of sounds with feeling probably has a lot more to do with our understanding of emotions in standard communication. So instead of learning from music itself we learn from elsewhere: be it verbal/ visual or whatever.

None of this does anything to belittle the effect of music, of course, everything we encounter is seen in the context of what we are used to/expect.
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