Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.
Can you imagine what life would be like if there were no such thing as music, at all? Not one note. Try for a second to contemplate what that would be like. I think it is almost impossible.
Conversely, what if there were something just as amazing as music for which we do not currently have a sense (sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing) to process? Could you imagine what that would feel like? It would be akin to a blind person who was blind at birth suddenly being able to see for the first time. The experience would be inconceivable to most of our imaginations to conjure what that might feel like.
Spielberg and the futurists envisioned music as the universal language that would establish a communication between us and life forms from another galaxy. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he leveraged music as the commonality that would initiate a communication and build a bond.
Music goes back millions of years. No doubt at some prehistoric time, some humanoid ancestor discovered that banging a stick had cadence. That gave way to rhythm. Perhaps another discovered that they could mimic birds or animals with their voice and that gave way to discovery of melody. Who knows, perhaps another 4 joined them in the animal sounds and created harmony.
These initial inceptions, inspired by the sounds of birds in the trees and other sounds of nature, gave way to what we now call music.
Music is capable of so many transformative variables. When we are cutting a reel at The Illusion Factory, music is the factor that brings it all to life. It is fascinating watching any scene in film, television or live performance in which initially there is no score, and then watching how amazing it becomes when the music is added. It is like the mental spice of life. Many great dishes are dull and boring without the spices that make them breath and taste as the chef has envisioned. Such is the case of a scene without a score. Take any great scene and remove the music and you still have a dramatically compelling experience but it does not stir the soul (in most cases) as it does with the proper score.
To make this point, take the original Star Wars (episode IV) the very very very first one. Can you imagine what that movie would be without John Williams’ incredible score? Imagine the opening with no music. It is below, try turning off the sound and watch it. All that is left is a mediocre movie, with weak acting, mediocre dialogue, adequate visual effects and zero emotion. (Sorry, I hate Star Wars and have since the first movie). But, with audio on, John Williams’ score creates the emotion, plucks our heartstrings, and gets our adrenaline going. Even though the same action is playing on the screen, it does not have nearly the same effect without the music.
Music finds our soul and it resonates in ways that I believe we have yet to truly understand. It is our comfort, our stimulation, our consolation, our expression of victory, triumph and joy. When we are in love it bathes our heart, when we are hurting from love, it ensconces our feelings and emotions like nothing else in life is capable.
It impacts animals and plants with equal values and is proven to charm the snake, comfort a creature in pain, and stimulate others into unique behaviors.
For me, one of the most amazing experiences in life is standing in an arena with 86,000 other people, all singing the same song. It is cathartic like nothing else in life. Inexplicable. We become part of the Borg (a collective hive like mind in which everyone is on the same page). Hard to explain, until you have been there with a track that you love. The collective experience is so magical as to defy explanation. Certainly one of the greatest casualties of Covid is watching moments like this fade backwards, and hoping we will all get to the point where it is safe to be in a room with that many people breathing out with song at the same moment.
We take metaphors like your “desert island picks” aka finding three songs that if you were on a desert island and only could have three songs what would they be? We use these concepts to isolate the music (drug) that we need to survive. Because music is intrinsically important to us in ways that we cannot fully articulate. It delivers a quality to our lives that is so precious, so innately important to our overall well being as to defy any explanation.
I believe that since we are made up of entirely vibrational energy, as is seen when you zoom into the specific components of an atom, and literally nothing else but vibrating electrons…. that music frequencies are connecting with our body frequencies and stimulating something so primal and indescribable as to evade the true explanation of how the music frequencies that are vibrating the tympanic membrane in our ear and sending a code throughout our vibrational beings that is being deciphered on levels that have yet to be understood.
Happy Thursday!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhAUTOBBfm8
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