Music
Listen to it, absorb it, digest it.
Let it become one with your thoughts and flow through your body and exit your mouth with a breath of air from your lungs.
What do you listen to? Pop? Classical? Rock? Country? Maybe a little bit of everything or nothing at all. Why? What is it that pulls your heart strings when you listen to your favorite genre?
Speaking of favorites, what is your favorite song? Don't have a favorite song or can't choose? What song resonates with you most at this time in your life? Why?
Why music?
What about it makes us want to cry or laugh or scream or run or fight or worship?
Sounds surround us at all times, even in the silence. Still yourself for a moment. Close your eyes and just listen. Listen to the sound of your breathing, feel its rhythm. Study the sound your saliva makes when you swallow. Hear the sound of your skin as it rubs against the cloth on your shirt or the desk you are sitting at. Meditate on the way the chair creaks as you shift your weight or the floor squeaks when you shuffle your feet. What else can you hear, beyond yourself? Are there other people? Wind? Clocks ticking? Air conditioner running through vents? Using only sound, describe where you are.
Here is the music of life.
It is chaotic, unorganized, restless, unusual, bothersome, and frustrating, among many other adjectives. But it is also joy-filled, peaceful, relaxing, organized, poetic, rhythmic, and astounding in every way.
Imagine for a second a world without sound. There are those of us who experience this world and live in it daily, and this I cannot comprehend. Sound tells me that my brother is lying by the tone of his voice, that my car is breaking when it begins to screech at me, that my best friend doesn't really believe that I am the worst, (at least, not always.) that my mother truly means it when she tells me she loves me. It tells me when other human beings are terrified or broken or frustrated or surprised or delighted or disbelieving.
Of course, sound is not the only way to come to know these things, but it is one of the most beautiful.
I once spent a day googling "why does music evoke emotions in us the way that it does?" Trying to understand the role that music plays in the world of sound. The most definitive answer that I could come up with was "We don't know."
I started from the top:
What is Sound?
Sound is, as far as I can tell, a range of vibrations traveling through the air that our ears pick up and interpret into information that your brains can understand. It is a rough definition, but it is sufficient for now. I moved on.
What is Music?
Dictionary.com defines it as "an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color." Music, then, is an art that is crafted from sound using the tools of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color to create and expression of ideas and emotions. Like a potter uses clay and a sculptor use marble, music artists shape the waves in the air that our ears pick up in order to share themselves and their emotions.
Then I really got in trouble, because I asked, "What is art?"
What is art, really? I tried finding an answer, but there were too many and yet not enough. Art is anything from Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa to your brother's latest burping contest. It is pride and pain and beauty and frustration.
Art is the physical representation of human emotion, thus, the answer to "Why music?" is because we all feel, think, experience emotions, and because we are communal beings, we desire, no, we need to share those ideas and emotions with those around us. We are also creatures created to love pattern and rhythm and flow and order and structure. Music embodies our emotions and organizes it, shapes it into something that is controllable, relatable, and understandable.
But I think music is even more than this.
Music is something within us, within everything. It is in and created by everything surrounding you, excluding the black void we call "space." But is there not music even in the silence? Even if you could not hear anything else, you have the thoughts in your head, the emotions in your heart. Music, art, is not simply a physical thing, but one that exists within us and is expressed in a physical way.
And it all started with a voice, speaking over a void, creating the stars and the sun to outshine them, the moon and the waves to be led by it, the land and the creatures to dwell on it, creating perfection, creating Us. That sound was the most pure, beautiful music ever to exist and the moment it stops we would cease to exist.
So,
Music.
Listen to it, ponder it, create it.
All the while, remember that by the voice of the creator of music, you were made.
And then, rejoice, preferably with music.
Listen to it, absorb it, digest it.
Let it become one with your thoughts and flow through your body and exit your mouth with a breath of air from your lungs.
What do you listen to? Pop? Classical? Rock? Country? Maybe a little bit of everything or nothing at all. Why? What is it that pulls your heart strings when you listen to your favorite genre?
Speaking of favorites, what is your favorite song? Don't have a favorite song or can't choose? What song resonates with you most at this time in your life? Why?
Why music?
What about it makes us want to cry or laugh or scream or run or fight or worship?
Sounds surround us at all times, even in the silence. Still yourself for a moment. Close your eyes and just listen. Listen to the sound of your breathing, feel its rhythm. Study the sound your saliva makes when you swallow. Hear the sound of your skin as it rubs against the cloth on your shirt or the desk you are sitting at. Meditate on the way the chair creaks as you shift your weight or the floor squeaks when you shuffle your feet. What else can you hear, beyond yourself? Are there other people? Wind? Clocks ticking? Air conditioner running through vents? Using only sound, describe where you are.
Here is the music of life.
It is chaotic, unorganized, restless, unusual, bothersome, and frustrating, among many other adjectives. But it is also joy-filled, peaceful, relaxing, organized, poetic, rhythmic, and astounding in every way.
Imagine for a second a world without sound. There are those of us who experience this world and live in it daily, and this I cannot comprehend. Sound tells me that my brother is lying by the tone of his voice, that my car is breaking when it begins to screech at me, that my best friend doesn't really believe that I am the worst, (at least, not always.) that my mother truly means it when she tells me she loves me. It tells me when other human beings are terrified or broken or frustrated or surprised or delighted or disbelieving.
Of course, sound is not the only way to come to know these things, but it is one of the most beautiful.
I once spent a day googling "why does music evoke emotions in us the way that it does?" Trying to understand the role that music plays in the world of sound. The most definitive answer that I could come up with was "We don't know."
I started from the top:
What is Sound?
Sound is, as far as I can tell, a range of vibrations traveling through the air that our ears pick up and interpret into information that your brains can understand. It is a rough definition, but it is sufficient for now. I moved on.
What is Music?
Dictionary.com defines it as "an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color." Music, then, is an art that is crafted from sound using the tools of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color to create and expression of ideas and emotions. Like a potter uses clay and a sculptor use marble, music artists shape the waves in the air that our ears pick up in order to share themselves and their emotions.
Then I really got in trouble, because I asked, "What is art?"
What is art, really? I tried finding an answer, but there were too many and yet not enough. Art is anything from Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa to your brother's latest burping contest. It is pride and pain and beauty and frustration.
Art is the physical representation of human emotion, thus, the answer to "Why music?" is because we all feel, think, experience emotions, and because we are communal beings, we desire, no, we need to share those ideas and emotions with those around us. We are also creatures created to love pattern and rhythm and flow and order and structure. Music embodies our emotions and organizes it, shapes it into something that is controllable, relatable, and understandable.
But I think music is even more than this.
Music is something within us, within everything. It is in and created by everything surrounding you, excluding the black void we call "space." But is there not music even in the silence? Even if you could not hear anything else, you have the thoughts in your head, the emotions in your heart. Music, art, is not simply a physical thing, but one that exists within us and is expressed in a physical way.
And it all started with a voice, speaking over a void, creating the stars and the sun to outshine them, the moon and the waves to be led by it, the land and the creatures to dwell on it, creating perfection, creating Us. That sound was the most pure, beautiful music ever to exist and the moment it stops we would cease to exist.
So,
Music.
Listen to it, ponder it, create it.
All the while, remember that by the voice of the creator of music, you were made.
And then, rejoice, preferably with music.
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