what is music?

[embodied1974]

wow. well put. to add, i feel that there is some essential balance between the familiar pattern and unfamiliar trimmings or modifications to the pattern that generates an emotional response.

@Satyr

Interesting.

This is how I see it, in brief.

First proposition
Patterns
The brain is a forager of patterns.
It is an ordering biological tool.
The mind is its projection in time/space.

As such it is attracted to patterns and order.
The brain can only comprehend what it can store and analyze.
Storage requires ordering (Cataloguing, Categorizing).
Ordering the confusing or chaotic or complicated demands simplification/generalization.

We create approximations to efficiently act. We understand by finding a pattern and extrapolating the entirety.

Second proposition
Resistance

The path of least resistance implies that repetition lessens resistances creating habituation and experience.
We are drawn to the familiar because a neural pathway, once established, is more easily reused, rather than replaced.
Continuous use makes something familiar and easy.

This attraction to the familiar creates behavioral patterns resulting in thinking, species or culture.

Third Proposition
Energy

Energy is a resonating activity.
It is action/movement manifesting or universal flux.
Matter is resonating energy at a specific tone, making it more or less substantial in relation to our sensual acuity.

Fourth Proposition
Music
Music is a sound exhibiting patterns and repetition.
Otherwise it is called noise.
It is energy made audible.

Conclusion
The familiarity of the pattern makes it attractive.
It awakens remembrance by stimulating neural pathways which might have become forgotten or by harmonizing with our own energies it can imitate our becoming.

This is why music can be emotional and exhibit psychosomatic effects.
We are energy and so the vibrations are intimate to our becoming.

[Lollipop_King]

This is why I found Schopenhauer’s ideas concerning the Will and music to be fascinating and so beautifully correct.

It is in the spaces, between notes, in the silence where the Nothingness seeps through, linking the chiming Becoming, wanting to Be.

Interesting how in science we now speak of vibrating superstrings.

Another thing to consider is why we find flawed music, as opposed to computer generated, flawless music more appealing.

One more thing.

The idea of ‘the path of least resistance’ is one which, I believe, hides some interesting connections to human behavior and to natural phenomena, in general.

Is the genetic code, the encoding of pre-established familiar pathways particular Becomings took along their history?
Is this how species come to be?

If so then reason can only become free, or more free, by breaking away from the cycle and by choosing the ‘path less taken’.

Is reason challenged to cut through the jungle a new path and resist treading over what it is comfortable and familiar with?

Is this not intellect versus instinct in a nutshell?

[Ierrellus]

One needs only to consider the effects sound vibrations have on both plants (Google sensitive plants) and animals to appreciate tone as soothing or discomforting. My cat hates it when I play harmonica. The sound probably causes pain in the internal structures of his ears. Yet he hears my soothing tones of speech and responds gratefully.
The mystery is why, even among plants and animals, some sounds are euphonious and some are cacaphonious.

[heavenly_demonic]

what is cacophnous and what is the other thingy? euphonous? sorry 4 the misspelling…

[Jakob]

@embodied1974

…and why does it have the effect on humans that it does?

i asked this question to a bunch of my musician friends a number of years ago, and they just kind of stared at me or gave uninteresting answers. i’m wondering if anyone around here has any opinions on the subject. here are some questions that have popped up in my mind:

what is it about the rythmic, repeating or cyclical nature of music that we find pleasing?

why don’t most animals respond to music?

what is it that we find pleasurable about music?

Because “the spirit of music” is a tautology, music gives us the capacity to move forward. Music or grinding stones.

Music reveals to us the world of the soul, the experience of higher values, things we can magically discern inside the mere sounds of voices or copper or stretched animal skin - this is why the melody of the wind pipe is so haunting, it is at once spiritus, (breath) and Geist (spirit). We discern only what we are. Music is a mirror. Did you know this before?

“Let me say again: today for me it is an impossible book. I call it something poorly written, ponderous, painful, with fantastic and confused imagery, here and there so saccharine it is effeminate, uneven in tempo, without any impulse for logical clarity, extremely self−confident and thus dispensing with evidence, even distrustful of the relevance of evidence, like a book for the initiated, like “Music” for those baptized in music, those who are bound together from the start in secret and esoteric aesthetic experiences, a secret sign recognized among artistic blood relations, an arrogant and rhapsodic book, which right from the start hermetically sealed itself off from the profane vulgarity of the “intelligentsia” even more than from the “people,” but a book which, as its effect proved and continues to prove, must also understand enough of this issue to search out its fellow rhapsodists and tempt them to new secret paths and dancing grounds." - N (The Birth of Tragedy, opening)

[Brando]

I think it is worth to discuss Music values in a constitutional sense: What stands Music for, and what is Happening if it vanishes? I think that Emotion as a base for the Environment of reasoning would vanish. But why did reasoning select a emotional base? I think this is the same as the Geworfenheitin existential commitment. (thrownness)

[Brando]

I would also suggest, that Music mirrors what it is to be not oneself, but another (Lévinas or Rimbaud…) - it is what constitutes communication through monads in Husserls monadology. So fulfillment within an Event is a representation of what another being does in remembering myself. Earlier in history this was reflected in Persecution of witches. Now we are more intelligent, and may divide what it is to be a wizard (which have to be killed according to the Bible) or what it is to Support solidarity as a principle of the real (see also Whitehead)