Why do we love Music so much?
This is a question that I have considered for many years of my life. Mainly due to my own personal love and interest of music, something that is not uncommon amongst young people in particular.
Music is probably the most popular thing in the world. That is a bold statement, and you could easily argue that food and sex are more popular. Either way, what makes these three things so popular is that they all elicit some kind of spiritual alignment in us. They engage a part of us that we can feel on a deeply psychological and physiological level. They can move us into transcendent states of being and can take us out of ourselves for a period of time.
Music, Sex and Food all relate to life in one way or another. Sex, recreates life, food nourishes our own life and music mimics the journey and dynamics of life. The importance of the first two is clearly well known on a fundamental and scientific level; we understand how important reproduction and nourishment are to the survival of the human race.
Music on the other hand, is a little more complicated.
For the purpose of the blog I'm going to talk specifically about songs with vocals. This form of music is more appropriate for what I'm trying to outline.
Let's start of with some basic similarities. First of all, both life and music have a beginning and an end. A song usually has a gradual build up and either a sudden or gradual decline. These characteristics relate somewhat to childhood and old age in both intensity and dynamics.
Secondly a song is a multi-layered entity. In terms of musical components, you have: the bass, the harmony, the melody, the percussion and finally the vocals. Life is also a multi-layered entity in that there are a variety of aspects of a person's life. To name the significant ones: we have our family, friendships, partners, work and hobbies. All of these facets exist at the same time and arguably exist more ideally when they are all working along the same axis and towards the same goal. Which could be described as 'generalised life satisfaction', for lack of a better term.
Another thing to point out is that each section of a song isn't always of equal importance. For example, on a pop song the melody and harmony is quite often of primary importance, whereas in an R&B record the percussion section usually takes priority. Obviously all aspects are needed to create a fully developed and coherent song, however, similar to life we can chose which aspects we deem as more significant to us.
Human beings are highly driven by narrative and we also have an inherent ability to derive narrative out of nearly anything we are exposed to, despite how limited our knowledge of something may be. Therefore we can assume that narrative is an important part of our lives.
Just like a movie, a song has a similar structure. It builds to something contrapuntel (multiple parts together), then reaches a point of disonance/change, before it declines to nothing or it moves back into its contrapuntel phase. On an even deeper level, a song has a chord progression. This progression is a foundational part of the song, and the most popular progression is a I-IV-VI-V progression. Just like the heroes myth, the fundamental story of mankind, this progression starts off in a place of familiarity and progresses in a natural way until it reaches a point of tension and then releases back to a new familiarity.
It sounds somewhat fantastical, how the whole narrative of life can be encapsulated in a song and even a specific part of a song. Nevertheless I truly believe that the reason we love music is because of its attachment to life and its ability to convey reality in a meaningful way that transcends the literal world.
I'm going to research more into this and do another blog on the relationship between music and life. It's such an in depth subject and there is so much to discuss.
Once again, thank you so much for reading this blog. I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas, despite the obvious.
Until next time.
OxJ