The Power of Music

[rysen]

Music is so amazing. I don't just say this as a composer and avid fan of all types of music, it's just every now and then music does something for me that makes me just stop and think...wow. What else in the world can do that

Comments

[tadan]

Yes indeed. But I wonder why. So here's my messy spurting of nonsense.

I thought at first that this is possibly because hearing--especially music--is highly serial, allowing it to go alongside thought processes and changes in emotion easily. But this can't really be the sole reason, because although paintings are static in time, experiencing a painting is not. If nothing else, we look at different parts of a painting at different times, uncovering news aspects of it as we go along.

Similarly, our sight is often used for tasks that we deem essential to survival. For example, we look at the road while we drive. Smell doesn't have enough sensitivity to time, I don't think. Touch and taste are very preoccupied with stimuli that stay relatively the same for a long time, though they both, in rarer cases, can also cause recall of emotions.

But it hasn't been until relatively recently that music has started permeating our environment. Since I've been alive it has, but you still read about this ability of music in older literature--like centuries ago. Now, we listen to it on the bus, while driving, while walking around, while talking to people, while eating, etc.

So now I think: well, I don't experience half as much meaningful visual art as I do music. A personal thing, really. Maybe it's just its prevalence that makes it have such strong recall ability.

So some questions. How does this relate to deaf people? What about the phonological loop--what about really musically inclined people who can hear a written passage in their head? I wonder, maybe, if we can actually control how much we rely on a certain sense for a certain task without completely disabling the sense. Like, maybe if we could learn to use sound more to get around and watch out for obstacles, we could use more of our visual sense for emotional response or something.

I don't know. It's really late and my mind is a fuzzy mess.

[rysen]

Ahh, that's a bit more into it than I'd care to try and figure out myself, though you do raise some interesting points.

But I do disagree with you on smells. Every now and then I'll smell something which brings me back to even younger days. I haven't quite figured out what it is, but there's a certain smell that reminds me of when I lived in Nova Scotia (and I left there when I was 4). Another distinct one, reminds of me when I was 13 and living in Shawnigan Lake (though, again, another that I haven't figured out yet.) It's definately not as strong, as music, but I'd say it's definately capable of triggering memories.

[tadan]

Yeah, agreed. But for me, at least, it seems smells tend to bring back general feelings of things and people, rather than specific events or moments in time. Dunno.

That's also more than I'd like it get into it myself. It's what I get for posting at like 4AM. :)