On Music

My taste in music has always varied and the result it that my listening base is very broad across genres. I have noticed some patterns in behavior and in the music. These are just a few brief thoughts about my experience with music.

One of the things I love most about music is seeing the environment’s inspiration reflexted in the piece. Nature, modern life, love and altered states seem to be the most recurrent.

One of the most impressive examples of nature directly showing up in music is Vivaldi’s four seasons. Nature is translated in sounds that mimic its intensity an delicacy, while beautifully drawing the shapes that define its inhabitants.

You can hear the fractal nature of plants, sprouts growing and birds singing. Violent lightnings and rain and leaves falling. The sharpness of cold and the snow that falls.

Something similar is portrayed in the classic dark side of the moon but the environment are the sounds of the mind and modern life. It starts with internal madness, people walking, helicopters and the trip inside a cocoo clock. The sound of the cashier, colors of art and inebriated states of love at the end. A similar but more abstract approach is that of the group Art of Noise.

Moving on to representations of abstract states maggot brain has stood out to me as one of the best psychedelic songs of all time. It is so clearly about an altered state of consciousness that you live a bit of that experience each time you listen.

Finally we come to observe one of the greatest examples of profound and philosophical music. In Bob Dylan’s case lyrics take the center stage, in search for depth and meaning. He is his own category.

I’d like to stop on lyrics a little longer in the general sense. I have noticed often that there are a few lines in the song that impress me because when listening to that part of the song I was overwhelmed by feelings. Oftentimes that peak experience is what got me hooked on the songs I kept on listening over and over, waiting for that moment.

I wanted to understand what the pattern was about so I collected all my obsessions and extracted the salient lyrics. What I realized was that while they had a common thread that was about what I was feeling in that time period overtime the peak moments stopped being so. In fact they changed and vanished.

But the repeated pattern of listening persisted through desentisization. I was chasing the high of the first time, hoping to be surprised again. Because in those peaks I experienced a bit of beauty, even if ineffable.

That’s how I realized that listening to music can be morbidly addictive. So I took some time off music. And cotrolled the reintroduction to limit maladaptive behaviors. I was curious to see if music added anything useful to my life.

I was surprised to see how music colored my emotions throughout the day once reintroduced. i limited myself to one song a day for a while and gradually expanded to active listening sessions. Overtime I realized songs compile differently at differernt times of life as the headspace changes

But as I mentioned earlier one can get stuck on a few songs for a long time because they reinforce the headspace, preventing you to shift to a new headspace. I noticed that music can become a surrogate companion when infused with associative memories of someone. Listening stimulates many images, but eventually nothing is more uninhabitable than a place where you have been happy.

There are many songs that capture the experience of limerence. The songs that make you feel exposed, sensual and yearning. Other songs like deftone’s sextape clearly expresses painful pleasure. But I found they are most often about loss, rather than love.

I think the artists needed to create music to process their experiences. And in doing so they create artifacts, places for all of us to take shelter in. It is the intrinsic impulse of expression. They need to pull out what they feel to make it more bearable. I understand them.

Notes