Musical musings

I am always hard pressed to pick a favorite song, or even a favorite genre of music. I love music, and depending on my mood, will derive thorough enjoyment from anything from Cat Stevens to Chamillionaire, from Mozart to Metallica.

Why do we as humans do this? Create and enjoy music, I mean? We seem practically compelled. Every culture, every community makes music; even children constantly hum tunes to themselves while on the swings or in the sandbox. For as long as people have been talking to each other, they have been singing to each other. Why are we so weird?

Perhaps our basic attraction to rhythmic sounds alone isn't too surprising; after all, we spend the first nine months of existence listening to our mothers' heartbeat in the womb. In fact, most everything in nature has a beat: the pounding of feet during walking or running, the rhythm of chewing or breathing; and more abstractly, the cycles of life and the seasons themselves. It would only seem natural that some deep part of us responds to a good rhythm with a resounding "YEAH!" As for melody, perhaps some of the connection between sound and emotion is obvious: loud sounds may indicate danger, while soft sounds are soothing to both animals as well as people.

But think of Beethoven's 9th. This is clearly more than the mere collection of primitive noises that the above explanations alone would suggest. Why does it make me, I dunno, swell up somehow -- cry, laugh, want to gesticulate wildly in "conducting" my own orchestra, and afterward run out to hug my fellow speciesmates? There's a mathematical and emotional formula to music that seems to have nothing to do with evolutionary survival; and yet music can evoke such a visceral reaction. What else explains the almost universal nature of the major musical scales? Take Schoenberg, for example: around the turn of the 20th century, this well-meaning composer made a wholehearted attempt to "free" the musical world of the supposed creative shackles of the known scale, assuming that our adherence to it was out of mere convention rather than any kind of basis in natural truth. But as anyone who has listened to Schoenberg's "compositions" has noticed, one needs absolutely no formal musical education in order to distinguish between what we perceive as harmonious and what is just... cacophony.

And why sound? Why isn't it, say, smell that is so closely bound with emotion? True, smell evokes a whole range of memories, reactions, and associations. But why don't we create symphonies of smell that can guide an audience through a range of complex and universal emotions, regardless of language or background? Because outside of the simple identification of something as "smelling good" and "smelling bad", the associations evoked by a certain smell are learned. That is, only those with the same experiences will react to the same smell in the same way -- there's not much universal about specific scents themselves. Think of the inside of a pumpkin: most Americans will stick their noses into this orange gourd and immediately recall childhood; magic, mystery and costumes; impending treats and spooky stories. Most Europeans would probably think of making soup.

However, music is not just about learned associations. Music is the actual abstraction of certain sound wavelengths to stand for ideas, concepts, and emotions. You'd really have to exert yourself to find a "sad" smell; and yet everyone who hears "The Flight of the Bumblebee" hears nervousness. Things played in a minor key automatically sound creepy; but no one would identify "Primavera" in Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" as being anything but joyful. Why??? There's nothing inherent to the feeling of joy that automatically corresponds to high notes. In fact, people can also emit some pretty high frequencies when placing their hand on a hot tea kettle. And yet music is so universal -- an audience full of people with completely different temperaments, experiences, ages, even languages and cultures can derive a similar emotional experience from the same concert. What is it that's so satisfying about hearing that woody vibration from a cello?

Music appears to have nothing to do with survival or reproduction. We as a species already have language, not to mention countless other ways of expressing love, affection, and emotion. And yet we need music.

Animals don't. They might conceivably be affected by it; I think I recall reading about a study somewhere, where cows produced better milk when exposed to some relaxing muzak. But they certainly don't produce it, or pay any particular attention to ours. Sure, you could argue that birds and whales "sing", but this would be like saying bees "dance" -- we just anthropomorphize animal behavior because it looks on the outside like ours. Bees are not bopping to a beat any more than waltzing couples are showing each other where to find pollen. In the same way, birds and whales are communicating with each other, not arranging musical scores in order to sing praises to the heavens.

So again, music would appear to be evolutionarily extraneous. Perhaps, then, it speaks to our existence as spiritual as well as physical beings that we seem to have been endowed with an extra sense solely designed to experience transcendence. All evidence seems to point to it.

Whatever it is, please excuse me while I crank this song up, close my eyes, and remove myself from the world for a while.