Deleted User said 9 years, 6 months ago:

@syzygy Thanks for your reply! I was trying to compose my thoughts about this (pun not intended). I’m probably going to go off on a tangent.

I guess it all comes down to what you define as music, looking around I found definitions to vary from basically ‘organised sound’ to ‘That one of the fine arts which is concerned with the combination of sounds with a view to beauty of form and the expression of thought or feeling’.

Music as just simply ‘organised sound’, implies that there is no emotional aspect to it, and the emotional aspect is something that we apply to it. Does the ability of music to incite emotions make it more than just notes or is it still that, and it’s us that apply feelings to it?

Music undoubtedly has something that brings people together as well and is a way of creating social ties where there may be things such as language barriers, maybe that is something that makes it ‘more than it is’ but then again you could argue that music is simply a vessel through which we gain the encouragement to do such things. It seems for every point I make I’m creating a counterpoint (pun intended) haha.

Deleted User said 9 years, 6 months ago:

@syzygy You make very good points, no, don’t worry, I think it’s nice to have some element of different opinions about things. But then would you consider things like musical practice music? Repetition of a musical phrase to make it less technically difficult, would that be considered music? Or only when it is presented in it’s complete form with expression, because maybe that would make expressive practice music. I agree with you that music is stimulated by emotions, Schubert said that ‘There is no such thing as happy music’, maybe he meant that the music itself is not happy and that we choose to interpret it that way, or that happy music is not completely happy, because everyone feels pain in their lives and happiness can’t be felt without knowing sadness first as a comparison. I’m tangenting again, I know.

People use languages to set words to music, but in the case of instrumental music, maybe it’s a language of it’s own. Certain intervals and harmonies convey different emotions in different ways, whether it’s discordant and feeling unsettled or whether it’s consonant and gives a greater feeling of emotional and tonal stability.

Deleted User said 9 years, 6 months ago:

@coffeeandmusic well you see, Fran, that’s the thing, our ability to recognize patterns in nature, the ability to recognize repetitiveness, even when it is very vague, is the key to our consciousness, our ability to learn, to systematize our knowledge, hell, math comes from this – math is in a nutshell science about what patterns are, what their nature is.

So when it comes to music, only we can recognize it. Every other animal in the world would be deaf to it mostly. Some animals will recognize the rhythm, because it’s a simple sequence, but only we could recognize the complicity of classical music’s fractal structure, consistent of similar, but not equal elements.

This ability being the core structure of our thinking can be proven by, for example, a fact that when people stimulate their consciousness with psychedelic drugs, such as lysergic acid diethylamide, mescaline, dimethyltryptamine or psylocibin to name a few, they tend to see fractal or pattern-like textures in surrounding objects. It doesn’t necessarily mean these patterns aren’t there, and the stimulated brain is just seeing things – the brain works more complicated then that, and so does the music: it creates sound-wave patterns which don’t exist in nature on their own, and it literally, metaphorically, physiologically, psychologically and fellatiologically blows our mind.

Music is math that you can dance to. It is one of the most complicated structures that we create just for fun. It’s like understanding the Universe for your own amusement.