Thoughts on Music

You are walking and suddenly you hear a tune, coming from some distance unseen place, and it instantly starts a video of your childhood in your imagination. You can’t help but go through the entire experience again. As if all these memories were just waiting there to be unleashed, and that tune, that music opened the door. We all have had such experiences in our life. At least I have. So, this is a simple note on my thoughts on music.

I have always divided thinking into two types, Abstract thinking, and Imaginative thinking. Imaginative thinking is the one that involves imagination, i.e., thinking in terms of images. Further, we can divide imaginative thinking into a number of dimensions involved. You can imagine in 2 dimensions, 3 dimensions, and if your name happens to be Einstein then perhaps 4, 5 …..N dimensions. I didn’t include 0 and 1 dimensions because our imagination of a dimension is always an embedded image in a higher dimension. So, I am not sure how many of us can imagine in 0 and 1 dimensions. So a typical example of imaginative thinking would be when you try to see the shape of a curve on a sphere, or a person walking on a village road, etc.

Now that I have described Imaginative thinking, I can tell you what is Abstract thinking. Abstract thinking is what is not Imaginative thinking. That’s all it is. This is the type of thinking that doesn’t involve an image or a video playing in your mind. An example would be if I ask you what is 23+16? You answer this with only numbers in your head. There is no image. Try to think of a smell without its source, or a color without an object, a touch without the object that touches or the object that is touched, try to think of a feeling without a face or heart, try to think of numbers without things. In all these cases, you encounter abstract thinking.

Ok after that long tiring discussion on thinking, you might be thinking, what’s the purpose of these in music (again abstract thinking…ok I will stop). Which type of thinking does music fall into? This is the beginning of my fascination with music. I feel music falls at the intersection of both. I guess most musicians and composers think of music in abstract terms, but if you want you can use imaginative thinking as well. You can think of tunes as abstract sounds and try to compose, or you can think of each tune as a tiny vertical ripple in a large rubber sheet and the music as a dance of thousands of such ripples in an ordered fashion. Or you can even try to paint a canvas in your imagination with each tune as a different color and duration as a stroke of brush (This is hard but once you do, you will see how different each music paints). In abstract terms, you can easily use a microphone and convert the music into abstract numbers that can be used by any machine to reproduce or even enhance the original music. Although with proper convention, abstract thinking of music is much rich and usable, to me, imaginative thinking is more attractive for music as it is unique to each human.

There is music with vocals (lyrics) and there is music without it, just instrumental. I personally like instrumental music and it gives me the freedom to imagine and fit any story I want. With lyrics, I get forced to imagine the story told by the singer. If the singer says the sky is yellow, I must imagine the sky is yellow.

It's amazing how different cultures even though evolved at different places independently, still sad music is sad for all, and a piece of happy music is happy for all. It feels like music transcends the world of language to invade the realm of emotions. I wonder if we connect emotions to music after we collect data in the form of experience from this world or if this connection is deeply rooted in our system from birth by evolution. But why should music be put in our DNA as essential information? Did some particular types of sound in nature help humans to identify certain situations in past with time as humans evolved this information got imprinted into DNA as essential information for survival and reproduction? It is possible. In other species of lifeforms, say some birds, produce a particular sound, and certain natural phenomena produce another type of sound, so it is possible that humans started attaching sound with conditions to identify survival opportunities and by that attached sound to emotions. We can do a simple experiment to check the hypothesis that the connection of music to emotions is embedded in DNA (genetic information). We can take some newborn babies who haven’t yet learned to speak and make them listen to sad and happy music, and record their responses. If we get some correlation, then our hypothesis is established.

Whatever the case, who could have thought an ordered tiny vibration of molecules will be capable of  transcending us from the dimensions of space and time.