the way we feel

What makes us feel the way we feel when we listen to music, or think what we think as a result of listening to music?  It’s a longstanding question that has spawned all sorts of inquiries and theories.  Much focus is on pitches — melody, harmony, and all related issues — and for good reason.  The mysteries of vibration and sound, how they interact with our consciousness, are profound.  “Interact with our consciousness”: the very phrase points toward memory of past hearing, connections to our psychological state, and much more, so of course these are very real parts of why we think and feel what we do when or after listening to music.

I am interested in the role the sound itself has in all this, in how the many aspects of sound, including the traditional musical phenomena of pitch and rhythm, interact with the human mind to create its impact.  Everything we interpret is through the lens of human experience, which leads us to call the impact by familiar names, chief among them: emotion.  I prefer the more neutral and inclusive word, energy.  Energy is a flexible enough concept to include the fundamental essence of music – vibration – and extend all the way to energies of the body/mind such as emotion, thought/intellect and more.

Some parts of sound are measurable: things like volume, register, density, even timbre can be measured and explained fairly exactly, and the measure will indicate a direct connection to perceived energy.  Other aspects of energy are more human, slippery to define.  Memory itself might be discussed in terms of the intellectual or emotional energy it brings to the listener, and memory is incredibly important in music. Measuring or naming musical energy is difficult, highly subjective and thus somewhat unpredictable from person to person.  Some aspects of sound energy in the mind/body go deep: those potentially-instinctual features of sound recognition relate to our hearing abilities and how they help us survive, and exist in the measurable realm of sound.  (I speak here of basic things like loudness, quality of sound.)  All these aspects of energy are embodied in music, and we need to recognize and account for them if we hope to really penetrate the meaning and impact of music.

I posit that music is by its nature multi-dimensional, and that we can come to a significant level of understanding of its impact by tracing the energies created by changes in these dimensions as music unfolds over time.  A fundamental aspect of perception, potentially of the mind itself, seems to be that we notice change above all else.  As a musical “dimension”, what I will call a parameter, changes over time, it contributes energy to the musical whole. 

Sound post 1 here! (Follow the link to explore the relation of parameters, change and energy.) 

That change of parameter might be one that relates to a musical style, and is therefore culturally determined and related to memory and expectation, or it might be a change that connects to our deepest essence by evoking (for example) a fear response, whether muted by other musical factors or exposed enough to make us jump.  These energies, culturally determined or connected to survival, are in a constant state of flux in some music, or a steady state of non-flux in others.  One way or the other, energy flow is a most critical aspect of the musical experience that carries profound importance, from determining style on the one end to producing specific, personal reactions in an individual listener on the other.

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Come back for more exploration of this topic and more!  I will provide a range of offerings, from sound samples to musical excerpts to insights from my own work and that of others.  I will offer opportunities for your input, and offer them in hopes of gathering the wisdom of the group to develop this work in a realistic manner.

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For now, follow this link to a short audio demonstration of the kind of energy tracing I have in mind.