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The Science Behind The Music: Human Curiousity

August 29th, 2009

Do you ever wonder WHY you love playing the piano so much? Listening to piano music? Or just music in general?

Since the beginning of time, human beings have been trying to understand the world by looking at past trends, historic events, and evidence that can be documented by our five common senses of hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, and feeling.

Over the last 200 years, human curiosity has revealed much about what, when, where, and why nature acts in a given scenario. This is called science. We now have hundreds different scientific theories about the compositions of matter, the make-up of biological DNA, the revolving planets in space, the behaviours of animals, and so on and so forth.

Although human beings have solved hundreds upon thousands of questions throughout the years, there is still one that has not been solved.

How does the human brain create thoughts, feelings, hopes, desires, love, and the experience of beauty?

Much of this is done through artistic creation: dance, visual art, literature, and music.

But what IS music?

Why do some combinations of sounds and harmonization create feelings and senses of bliss and beauty? Other combinations of sound such as someone running their fingers down a chalkboard makes most of us cringe and cover our ears.

In school, art and science are taught as two different subjects, and as we grow up, we see them as two completely different things. Art is indescribable, unjustifiable, different amongst different people’s tastes, and sometimes crazy. Science is uniform, evident, theoretical, and justifiable.

Art and science actually share more similarities than one may think. A musician’s studio and a scientist’s laboratory both have large numbers of projects happening at once, in certain stages of incompletion. Both require specialized equipment and materials and the end results are open to interpretation.

What artists and scientists have in common is the ability to live in a completely open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretation of the products of their work.

In essence, the work of both artists and scientists is the journey and pursuit of truth, even though both an artist and a scientist know that the nature of truth is contextual and can change, depending on one’s point of view. Today’s truth may become tomorrow’s miscalculation, mistake, or lie.

For the artist, the goal of their music or artistic creation is not to communicate literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that can keep moving and touching people even if societies, cultures, and contexts change over time.

And for the scientist, the goal of a scientific theory is to convey the truth as it stands today, to replace an old truth and accepting that someday, this theory may also be replaced by a new theory with advancements in science.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

I’m not done with this topic yet, so don’t even think that I’m done here. This is going to be a very long series of articles kept in the category “The Science Behind The Music” located on my blog. Stay tuned for my next article to find out more.