I love music. Who doesn’t? You? You there. What’s wrong with you? Why wouldn’t you like one of the very basic means of socializing? Sure, suggesting songs that alludes to what you are feeling for the one you love pre-flirt is indeed an example however what I mean tracks quite back in time – such that people and monkeys’ brains react in similar ways when their counterparts do certain things. In that sense, music exists within its own science, maybe even like spandrels, some say, they were not meant to exist in the first place however they formed as a result of other practical functions.
Music and data
Whole universe is a manifestation of data. A neuron star is the result of how neurons of certain elements act under certain conditions, a banana, 60% similar genetically to us humans, is the end outcome of its DNAs. Our means of absorbing, interpreting, relaying that data is through communication. And communication only exists because we as humans share similar references, anchor points that allow us to get each other while your cat yawns at your face as you are raining words of love upon it.
Like a bee “dancing” the way to the nice patch of flowers to show the flight path to others in the hive, we dance to music, making certain moves since it fires multiple regions of neurons in our brain. A study showed that when you listen to music the parts associated with playing those instruments fire up, although you do not actually play it – musician or not, that’s how your brain reacts.
This mirror effect facilitates communication among us as species as we only respond to music between our hearing range. Subtle implications, certain tensions in the rhythm or tones rollercoasting up and down convey us a message about what the authors of the music are on about – just like how some of us end up bursting into laughter in a comedy without an explicit command to make us laugh, when we grasp a portion of a song, we expect how it might go and what comes next.
Life in sounds
Another study also showed that we tend to find “life” in sounds that repeat at intervals, our hunter gatherer ancestors thought there might be a food or water resource nearby or somebody hitting a rock with a piece of wood even. This connects very well to John Cage’s piece, Silence, where he asserts that we are not made for absolute silence. When he experienced that in an anechoic chamber – a chamber that is fully isolated from any external sound source – he started hearing the blood rushing through his veins, and his nervous system firing around in his head. To surmise, although there is a thing called “the right to silence” and we need a break from the auditory hullabaloo around us, we are not exactly made to stand in total silence for it chips away from our understanding of life around us.
I did my best to talk about the science of music and I hope I could shed some light on why we happen to interpret outstanding meanings from rhythmically orchestrated tones around us.
Agit by Islandman was playing in the background as this post was finalized.
Take care
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