Quiet of Mind

Music is probably the least understood thing on the planet. We study it much for its composition, prose, format, flow, and enjoyment in addition to scientific measurements like the physics of sounds and acoustics. What we don't really study or particularly understand is what it actually is, why we love it, and how it can affect us in the ways that it does. I saw a video once that I wasn't able to find for this posting that displays how clearly all people understand music scales intuitively across the world, regardless of their background. Why?

What's more, music is a drug. There's no doubt that music can completely change your mood, your thinking, or what you do. Music, while it may have become butchered and corporate in an relative sense, completely engulfs and surrounds us to the point at which it is so omnipotent that we often fail to realize its presence at all. Rarely do we focus on the music in the background of a store, television show, movie or possibly even a car when we intentionally turned it on. We get lost in it, and it's lost on us.

The key question is, and this might be getting too technical, how can a combination of sound waves affect us more than more concrete physical stimuli, and why? Music may be translated for processing by our brain via neurotransmitters, but that's merely a means of signal transduction and not at all a novel chemical process. Why can certain sounds and combinations of sounds produce varying feelings? Even if we can understand the pathways, it still doesn't follow that we can understand the evolutionary purpose of such a mechanism. Certainly music may be a tool for bonding, but it seems rather far-fetched that early man's survival hinged on the concept of being able to make and enjoy music. What's more, other creatures besides humans display enjoyment of music, which implies that such an evolution would have taken place at a relatively early point before species differentiation. Yet, there couldn't have been music on primitive earth! The notion of actually enjoying sounds other than those that are not too shrill or intense (which we sometimes do anyway), is completely baffling as far as I can tell from a scientific perspective. Then again, I'm hardly an expert.

Music is whatever we make of it, and rarely do people share the same tastes, but we ought to appreciate the power music has and share our love of it with others. It's a shame how many music programs have been cut from school in favor of other subjects that are no more important in any educated person's experience. One thing that we can be certain of is that love of music is deeply encoded in our genes. We ought not take such an amazing facet of our reality and treat it as a matter of minor importance. A world without music, to me, is the same as a world without color.