A Quick Start on Music

This isn't the only time I'll talk about it, but let's discuss music for a moment. What can be said? Let's have us a list, shall we?

1. Of media forms, it is the most pervasive. There is hardly a single thing we can do that requires us to shut it off. We can work with it on, drive with it on, even sleep with it on if we want to. Anything that requires watching a screen is more distracting and has to go. Music, however, can be ever present.

2. It works wonderfully with sensory memory. Just as a certain smell can trigger feelings of nostalgia for a certain time, person, or event, a few chords or the right note can instantly transport you back in time. This leads to the next one...

3. Music is an incredibly emotional form of media. While a movie might take two hours to wrench your heart strings, a song takes care of it within minutes. Given the right song, it might just take the first note or two. In fact, what do movies use to manipulate your emotions? Well, ever watch a movie without a soundtrack? The music in a movie is key to how you feel about it. Without it, the sad moments are less emotionally traumatizing, the happy ones less jubilant, etc.

4. Music does what words can't. The English language is incredibly vocabularius, a word which here means it has lots of words for lots of things, and as I just showed, if a word doesn't exist you can just make one up. Even with that, it is so common to experience something words can't describe. Usually this is concerning the emotional depth, breadth, or intensity of an experience, and where words fail us, we revert to music. "I'm not just sad...I'm drop-two-octaves-into-a-serious-minor-key sad."

5. It inspires us. Almost nothing gets right to the heart of us like that one song. You know the one. Or the two, three, or four of them. Music motivates us, inspires us, gets our blood pumping. It makes us feel more creative, more energetic, more powerful.

6. Music puts us or keeps us in whatever mood it was written for. Upbeat songs help us be happy; depressing ones just the opposite. It's amazing how influential music can be in this sense. It changes our perceptions so much that there is a branch of counseling known as music therapy, using music therapeutically to help patients overcome their difficulties.

7. Music is a way of communicating who we are and what we stand for. The messages contained in music declare what is important to us, and the way it's presented shows our personal identity, whether reflected in rock, country, rap, or whatever other style captures your essence.

That's just a few quick points. We'll do some exploring into music in weeks to come. Music theory (how music makes us feel the way it does), lyrics, bands, listening behavior, we'll do it all. I'm sure each of us could talk about music alone from now until the end of the semester, easily, so I don't think we'll quickly run out of topics with this one.