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The Science Behind The Music: “I Know Nothing About Music”

September 21st, 2009

Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night"

Music is everywhere. It is used to evoke our emotions everyday, wherever you are. Advertisers use music to make a pair of jeans, a six-pack of beer, or a new car model seem more hip and cool than their competitors’. Filmmakers use music to tell us exactly how we should feel about scenes that might otherwise seem ambiguous, or to heighten our emotions at a certain dramatic point.

Music is always used to manipulate our emotions, and people enjoy it. We accept it and thrive with it. But people who still love music insist that they know nothing about it. Music theorists have a mysterious set of terms and rules that are as odd and complicated as some of the most intense studies of highly advanced mathematics.

In the eyes of a “nonmusician,” the tiny black spots and lines and squiggles of musical notation just may as well be notation of highly advanced mathematics. And yet, you don’t have to know how to read musical notation to know what kind of music you like.

Most of us have a practical knowledge of what we like. You may be a huge hip-hop fan, memorizing the lyrics, practicing in front of your mirror, driving and nodding your head to the beat of the music… but you may, in fact, know nothing (or very little) about musical notation.

I know that I like the artistic works of Vincent Van Gogh. I can often spot or even guess his paintings even before I’ve looked at the artist’s name because I like his style, but I could never paint such a beautiful masterpiece, knowing how to mix each colour on the pallet, use specific brushes, or conjure up such a imaginative scene in my mind and transfer it onto a canvas. Still, I appreciate Van Gogh as one of my favourite painters.

People become intimated by what they don’t know, and it’s a shame that many people are so intimidated by the jargon that musicians’ theorists, and cognitive scientists throw around.

An unnatural gap has developed between those who love music, and those who are discovering new things about how music works.

Music remains to be a mystery in many ways. If we all hear music the exact same way, how can we account for our widely different preferences in music? Why does someone prefer Limp Bizkit over the Beastie Boys, but another prefers the Beastie Boys over Limp Bizkit?

In the last few years, the human mind has been opened up as the field of neuroscience exploded with new approaches in psychology, new brain-imaging technologies, and drugs which are able to manipulate neurotransmitters.

Thanks to the continuous advancements in computer technology, we are coming to understand computational systems in the human brain like never before. Language is practically nailed into our brains, and consciousness itself is something that comes from observational physical systems.

Until now, no one has take all of this together and used it to comprehend humanity’s must beautiful and mysterious obsession: music. It is indeed, one of the deepest mysteries of human nature.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

Look out for my fifth article on The Science Behind The Music. Here, we’ll start asking questions like, “Is listening to music the same as eating when you’re hungry, like satisfying an urge? Or is it like watching the sunset or going for a spa massage, triggering a sense of pleasure?” Look out for article number five!