Quote:
Originally Posted by duga
What is it about music that is so...I don't know...amazing? It's hard to put any sort of description to the feeling that hearing exactly what you want to hear at just the right time can produce. It's transcendental. No drug can produce that feeling. I still remember the first time I truly felt that. The music was no longer just good, it was speaking directly to ME. It was as if the powers that be decided to bestow upon me magical sounds that could make everything all better. After that, I was a junkie in need of a constant fix. Eventually, the normal stuff didn't do it anymore. I had to go deeper. I had to go weirder. I wanted sounds I had never heard before and I wanted them as often as I could get them. How does music do this? What is it tapping into? Does it have to do with my life experiences and aural memories - all meshing to give me the taste in music that I have? Is it the need to relate to other people? Or is music somehow tapping into a universal consciousness - a communicative phenomenon that we simultaneously have a subconscious understanding of yet have no clue about?
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This is indeed an interesting topic and a question that every lover of art will eventually ask. It can be applied to all arts and is a question of aesthetics and by that I mean a philosophy branch. I find Skaligojurah's sort of anthropological view interesting and Musikwala mentioned genes and DNA. This scientific view of things can only get you so far, and it is my firm belief that this question is beyond its reach. But I won't turn this into a too general topic with such broad, but essential aesthetic questions like: what is beauty? or what is beauty in art? What is especially interesting to me here in duga's OP is: "What is it about music...?" and "it was speaking directly to ME"
Now, I love visual arts and having studied art history I should have some deeper understanding of them (well, I hope). I also LOVE films. But, never have any film, a painting, a novel or a poem had such immediate and profound effect on me like some pieces of music. Music speaks
directly to me. It feels more personal than other arts, our experience of it is more subjective. That doesn't mean it can't be valued objectively, of course it can like any other art, bit it's more than likely that our raw emotions will be the first judge of it. That's why when people fight (I mean debate
) over music they are very passionate.
Music is the only art that so easily skips our cognitive side and hits directly to the feelings, intuition, inner drives etc. Our perception of the world is also colored with emotion, but this emotional side of perceiving is much stronger connected to the sense of hearing than seeing. The very nature of music, operating with sounds, is that it spreads through intangible time. As such it's abstract and elusive, it doesn't have a subject or a theme like narrative and 'showing' arts have (I'm talking here about pure music). Another interesting thing, since music doesn't occupy space it's hard to 'see' it as an object, or to use spatial term, there's no distance between listener and music. That's why it's easy to lose yourself in music, to absorb it in such a way that it becomes a part of you, when you no longer distinguish between sounds and emotional response. This is a quality that every music has, except with truly good music you have to make a greater mental or spiritual effort in connecting between sounds and layers of musical structure. You become a part of a creative process and thus you feel a reward on much deeper levels.