notes

So here's a thought I had the other day. Those of an intelligent and sober nature may wish to skip this post......

The question of why music appears fundamental to human experience has, for the most part, remained unanswered. Philosophers of music focus their attentions on the mathematical relationships and ontological hierarchies that structure music whilst anthropologists pick out cultural resonances between the epiphenomenonal froth of songs and ballads, and the social and political waves upon which they are generated. Psychologists, on the other hand, treat music as an independent variable, to be correlated to human responses with little explanation of the black-box that connects the two, whilst neurologists have successfully identified the parts of the brain which create, respond to and remember music. However, few, if any, disciplines have provided any explanation of why music has the effect it does.

The reason this is important is that music that the relationship between music and the emotional states it creates in our minds reflects the biggest philosophical problem of history. That of the objective and measurable and the subjective and personal. Nowhere else is the impotence of mathematical modelling and scientific methodologies more obviously exposed than in the explanation of why music makes us feel. The difference between Smells Like Teen Spirit and Bach's first cello suite, in structure and form but also in emotional content and subjective impulse, whilst obvious to all humans, is virtually indecipherable to the scientific instrument. This is primarily because the ghost in the machine is unintelligable to objective knowledge and rendered meaningful only through encountering the subjective, personal and emotive self. In short, music is the food of love, not cognition.

Why is this? I believe it is because we are music. Humans, if we can be described in any essentialist manner, are the music of the universe. Now, hold the hippy horses. I am not, I would like to make clear, writing this having donned the hemp sandals and kaftan of the museli-munching chakra-chanter. Music, as its most basic, is a pattern of energy. In most cases, sound waves, but this is irrelevant. Epistemologically, music is knowable as a pattern, whether felt through the skin, cut into vinyl, imaged into magnetic memory or recalled from our very own synapses. It is the pattern, the structure of information, that govern the emotions not the CD, the tape or the record.

Humans also, cannot be defined (surely?) by their physicality. Surely, it is the pattern of life that we make over generations, the algorithm of being which makes us who we are. By this, I do not simply mean DNA or the evolutionary process, but the entire human froth that is generated on the waves of time, space, geographies, economies and the Number 24 bus which generate the phenomena which we call life. Putting it more simply, what makes us human is not our legs, arms, eyes or even brains but the temporal patterns that have generated these forms.

In other words, we respond to music, not due to some cultural resonance or social nicety, but because music is what we are. When we hear it, we feel it, when we feel it we move. When seen as meaningful patterns, music is life and life is music, and science, with all its objective power may describe, but can never understand this.