Have you ever been captured by a feeling while listening to music that is hard to even express? Don’t you understand how some melodies can affect you like that? We’ll tell you then what happens.
Since man has been man, he drums, beats, twangs, jingles, plays on string, wind and keyboard instruments, sings and dances. Likely the song was the beginning and the dance originated from it. It is still not clear whether the aim was to imitate the sounds heard in nature or whether it was a particular form of communication. Nor do we know for sure whether our relationship with music is instinctive or something deeper.
However, it can be observed that in one way or another, all human cultures, – even the oldest and most isolated ones -, have been and are in some way connected to music.
According to research, it is education- and culture-dependent to some extent if someone considers something musically enjoyable or beautiful. For example, according to Josh McDermott’s research, members of an Amazonian tribe with only sparse contact with the Western culture did not find too much difference between the consonances we thought were beautiful for our brains and the dissonant sounds we found deafening.
At the same time, there are not only differences but also similarities between the music of distant cultures. Sandra Trehub, who teaches and does research at the University of Toronto, has compared the lullabies of different cultures and found that while they are different in many ways, they are also similar in one thing: they are suitable to calm young children and help them fall asleep listening to them.
Music is also part of our culture. We know it from our childhood, it appears in education, movies, commercials, music channels, radios, in the form of ringtones or signals in elevators, on the street, in the public transport either live or recorded, life is almost unimaginable without it. Usually, we can face how much it is part of our lives if it stops for some reason (for example, when watching a movie that doesn’t have music, like Foxcatcher, or when we are longing for a half-hour of silence after an overdose of music by a loud concert).
For what music is, it’s hard to find a definition, many grasp it in many ways, from many angles. According to a well-known definition, music is “an emotional arrangement of sounds and silence”. Others define it as “meaningful noise”. Some describe it as a kind of language, some describe it as a moral law. (The latter was, by the way, said by Plato. “It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form.”)
But what happens to us when we listen to music?
Why was our mother’s lullaby soothing? How does a song raise tension? How can we cry listening to an emotional song, but we can’t even tell the reason, why? Why is it that one music radiates the joy of life and another will overwhelm us with its sadness? Is rhythm the reason? The pace? The melody? Or is there something deeper…?
So the question is: how do we experience music, and how does our experience work at all?
Let’s suppose the experience takes place on several levels
Music is information. As such, during the experience, we create three kinds of notions of it, and depending on how many of them we are aware of, we also perceive music differently. The experiences of the three kinds of notions are quite different.
Physical level
Perhaps there is no need for a particular explanation for the fact that we perceive music primarily with our ears as a sense organ. The air vibrations that make up the music are converted by our ears – through the tympanic membrane, ossicles and cochlea – into stimuli, which is sent by the auditory nerve to the brain.
Since the body and the structure of each person are different, – even between twins there is a minimal physiological difference -, it already follows that we perceive and process incoming sounds differently. We transform sound into stimuli in different ways, and our brain likely processes the incoming stimuli differently, even on a purely physical level, since the way our nerve cells are connected is different from individual to individual.
It is also true that from where one hears something, from there only he can hear that – since no one is standing at the same point in space, at the same moment in time – the sound reaches others differently. Sounds from the same source are thus perceived differently simply because we are physically in different bodies.
At the same time, the process of hearing itself is very similar on the physical level in all people.
It can also be linked to the experience on the physical level that certain songs evoke a certain mood in us. This is related to the functioning of our brain. Our brain, when “left alone” – that is, we are not consciously controlling it what to do – responds to incoming stimuli based on what it has learned. If we’ve learned about a song, chord, instrument, or even a performer that it’s good and we love it, it produces hormones that create a pleasant mood. If you associate unpleasant experiences with a song, hearing it will cause disruptive biochemical changes to avoid the circumstances associated with the experience as far as possible. That’s why we’re going to have our favourite songs, performers, and musical style, and that’s why we’re going to have ones we don’t like.
Mental level
At the mental level, much greater differences can be observed in the experiences of individuals. Our previous experiences and knowledge alter what we understand from each music, and thus we all create a different mental notion, or we recognize different notions from music as information.
If we have a musical background, we can recognize instruments, the names of sounds or chords and the connections between them. We may know the performer, the musical style or era, we can understand how the instrument emits the sounds. We can also understand the lyrics or know what effect a given rhythm and tempo is typically capable of eliciting. We can know what dance is related to this style, or in which film it appeared as a soundtrack. And so on. We can find an almost infinite number of correlations.
Clearly experiencing music through understanding is much more subjective.
The feeling
The third level of experience is feeling. This seems to be the hardest thing to understand and phrase, and this is not without reason. Namely, that it is beyond the physical level (hearing itself) and beyond the mental level, that is, understanding. Thus, experiencing the feeling is neither possible physically nor mentally on its own. Which means that, in some respect, the feeling itself is incomprehensible.
And that’s exactly why we often don’t understand what happens to us while listening to music.
Although it is not possible to experience the feeling merely through understanding, it is still comprehensible what feeling is and how it happens. Why can this be useful and exciting? Because, firstly, it brings us closer to extending our attention onto the feelings as well, and secondly, knowing that we are experiencing feelings is much more than only experiencing them.
We often confuse feelings with impulses, even though they are two different things.
Impulse originates from us, it is a manifestation of our will on the physical level. This practically means that it always has a subject and is always subjective. I love this music, but I can’t stand that. This happens on the physical level, since the brain does it on its own, on the physical level. It does not require mental functioning to classify and sort which music does it rate as good (so then it can look for them) and which ones as bad (to avoid them).
The feeling does not originate from the individual, if it were to be formulated with directions, the direction of the feeling is just the opposite of the impulse. While the impulse belongs to the will that originates from us and is directed to the external world, the feeling belongs to the experience through which the individual can gain new information from the external world.
The individual is a unit of the physical, the mental and the emotional levels, these together make up the individual. If we listen to music purely on the physical level, all that happens is that the sound vibration gets into our ears, we transform it, and our brain somehow processes and reacts to it. With this, the experience is complete on the physical level – but this in itself does not even presuppose consciousness, it happens basically by itself. If understanding is associated with the experience, it is more than the physical level, but it is still not about the complete information. Or approached from a different direction: not the whole individual experiences the information. It is a matter of point of view.
When we experience the full reality – and we experience with our whole being – the two meet. This is similar to when a body is immersed in water and a surface is created where the body and water come into contact. Such is the encounter between reality and the individual. It depends on the shape of the body, what this surface looks like and what shape it takes in the water. In the same way, the way one experiences reality depends on the individualism of the individual.
This surface itself, the experience of this immersion, in reality, is the feeling. It’s the movement, the way how the two meet. As general reality (water) and the individualism of the individual come together (the unique form that is immersed). Both are constantly changing, so no two experiences of reality are the same, no two feelings are the same: how we experience reality is always different.
Feeling has no object, it is not aimed at anything, it cannot be delimited and it is difficult to talk about it, and mostly we can only paraphrase it.
The levels of experience are not separated from each other, they happen together. The physical experience, the basis of perception, always happens when the individual and reality meet. Experiencing on the physical level does not require consciousness, this is what every living creature that has a sense organ can do. Mental experience requires physical experience, without it there is nothing to understand, so the physical level is also the basis for mental experience. And the feeling is neither without physical or mental experience.
Approached from another aspect, the feeling is an experience that refers to the fullness of reality.
Feeling, in this way, is not a constant thing that once experienced, can be put off for later use, we cannot recall it again and experience the same thing. It can’t even be owned, so it’s not mine or yours. It is a one-time and unrepeatable movement as two ever-changing things meet. What the feeling physically or even biochemically evokes in us can be stored as a physical notion, and what we think of the feeling is the mental notion of it. We can recall these notions and we can also talk about it. The feeling, however, is beyond that, it is more than that and is more complete.
So what happens when we listen to music and a feeling comes over us?
To put it simply, we hear with our ears, perceive with our brains, and experience with our whole being a musical piece of reality and ourselves (through reality). Depending on the extent of our own attention, we may be aware of either the physical perception (to hear the music), of the mental comprehension (to know things about it, to see connections to music), or even of the feeling. If our attention is not that extended, these three things will still happen, we’re just falling behind.
Of course, we can experience reality through anything, not just through music. At any time. Even now.
More precisely, only now.
(The article is based the book The Theoretics by Balázs Török-Szabó.)