I've spent the last several months in a deep study of music. I'm not only filming a documentary project that aims to dive into the how's and why's of the cultural movement of electronic music but I've been learning to compose in Logic and Ableton Live. Despite being a music fanatic all my life, the process has made me feel re-freshed as though I am a foreigner and the ways and customs of the musical world are alien. It's lead me into deep personal meditations that ask why? Why do we listen to music. How does it effect us? What is the point of dancing? Is there a biological explanation? What is the nature of emotion and why is it so closely entwined with the consumption of music?
I'm at work. I was bored. I opened spotify. Typed in M83 and started zoning out. M83 is named after a spiral galaxy, Messier 83 spearheaded by french musician Anthony Gonzalez. Often compared to Shoegaze or goth pop, I prefer to categorize it with the likes of Empire of the sun as Indie dream pop. Its epic out of this world sound is full of spacious reverb, passionate vocals, piercing high synths, and urgent low basslines were complex and freshly interesting enough to transport my mind to a distant mental state. While the new album "Hurry Up We're Dreaming's" unrelenting desire to be "epic" could be considered wearying, I personally found the pace pleasantly escapist. Hopefully the play Coachella in 2012, because if they do they could quite possibly be next year's "Empire of the Sun" experience for me. Or atleast they could have been if I don't over expose myself by then.
I am however not writing this blog because I'm in love with M83. I'm writing it because they happened to be the catalyst to a meditational epiphany.
The power of music to liberate the spirit is as universally understood as the enjoyable experience of warm sunlight or a cool breeze. Yet, the familiarity seems to leave us content with barely landing on the surface how music effects us. I propose a hypothesis. Music taps into our emotional centers because it requires sub-concsious aspects of the brain to process it. It is primal.
Visual information as in written language and visual art is uniquely human. Think about pictures and silent movies. Their full of detail and they instantly correspond to memories and ideas about what we are looking at. Instant isomorphic correspondence is unavoidable and takes place in the neo-cortex, the more evolved uniquely human part of the brain. So does language. Abstract ideas, image processing and language, live in the conscious mind and our memories.
Audio processing on the other hand is older. Back when we were mammals trudging through the darkness on the alert for danger, back when our ears could swivel, and we couldn't speak, we depended on the ability to process sounds. Our survival depended on determining the difference between a snapping twig or the harmless chirping of mating crickets.
In the case of music, we get hit in both places. Lyrics, especially poetic ones require higher abstract processes and they tell us about memories and experience that our conscious neocortex later tells us how to feel about. The instrumental sounds of music excites a more primal and subconscious sense of how we feel. The scale volume and pitch of a sound tells us about it's size and weight as in whether it is large and ominous or light and playful. The rhythm of the sounds tell us about its urgency and give us a sense of change over time, like a steady comforting heartbeat in the womb, the banging at a door, or the speeding build up of a house track. The pitch variation in music requires highly mathematical processes. But unless you're a composer or a dancer, you're never consciously counting, dividing, and adding 1/8ths and quarter notes into timescale mathematics. It is our subconscious that recognizes the dance steps of an instruments notes. The image of A person wearing a costume isn't silly or scary unless we have a preconceived notion about what they are wearing whereas we develop an emotional reaction to a series of notes regardless. You don't have to have heard a melody before for it to make you feel happy or sad, the mathematical configuration of the notes gives us that information instantly. That's why they say playing classical music for babies makes them smarter. It's like building muscles in a aerobics class for audio pattern recognition software of the mind. Classical music has a greater level of complexity and learning to recognize the motion paths of the notes upon the musical scale teaches the mind to process like a kid reading War and Peace versus reading twilight. The subconsious mind is much more closely wired to the emotional parts, the parts that are behind the guy behind the guy in our decision making.
Think of it like this. The sound of a heartbeat needs no intellectual context. A heart beat is calm or slow, excited and quick, angry and intense, or it flutters with amorous infatuation. But in a greater sense, the human spirit is behind those rhythms. Whether we long for love or we run in fear, the human spirit and the human heart share the same sense of rhythmic variation. One being physical, the other being metaphysical. Music just more directly interfaces with the parts of the brain that process and communicate this information. Images and language must go upstairs to the management team in the neocortex, but music goes straight to the people without management decisions and mental bureaucracy. It tells us how to feel, whether to fear, aspire, or love, it makes us feel strong or vulnerable or amorous. Its rhythms speak directly to the places that make us feel
Play that Funky Music,
-MM
I just thought of a counter argument to prove this entire entry to be pseudo intellectual drivel. If music is so primal and originates in primitive subconcious parts of the brain,f then why aren't more animals musical? Why aren't other animals effected by our music? There must be a lot more going on that is human specific.
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