Where Does Music Come From?
The following writing is an opinion piece on the philosophy and metaphysics of music. To ground my contemplations in the scientific literature, be sure to examine the recommended readings enumerated at the end.
As a professional musician, I have been listening intently to live and recorded music for the better part of 28 years. Every now and then, a melodic line, vocal frill, rhythmic burst, or harmonic unfolding presents itself so magnificently that I ask: what truly is this music? What made this beautiful moment stand apart from the rest of the tune? It may not even be the musician’s intentional energetic inflection which moves your heart. Perhaps the music was ordinary, but some part of it just connected with you profoundly. This bassline, that drum fill, this chord voicing… it affects you deeply for some reason, while other listeners would hardly take notice.
What do these musical spikes (energetic inflections as described previously) reveal about the nature of music? What is really happening when the artist seems to pierce beyond the mundane plane of musical notes, overtones, sound waves, neurons and auditory signals?
From a materialist worldview, the profundity of musical experience is entirely confined to the brain and derived from its activities. However, I suspect that the answer to my question matches the listener’s intuition: there is more going on here. Even in a materialist understanding of the universe, music seems to pose some challenges. Sound waves after all, are not matter like air, water, particles, or molecules, but rather the distortion of matter. Our experience of music is our brain’s ordering of these material distortions into discernible patterns.
Why is beautiful music meaningful? When you hear a rhythm or harmony which captures your fancy, you know it is worth attending to. The music commands all of your attention, your eyes widen. Your senses align to process this novel sensory information to the fullest and equip you with new information on the world around you. Indulge me for a few moments. The chills across your skin from music’s haunting beauty are intimations of the awe of Music. In its potent essence music can be gripping, awesome, even frightful. We know music is meaningful; what then is the meaning being conveyed, and where is it coming from?
The Second World
Listening to music can be likened to wading in an ocean. You may only dip your toes, go ankle or knee-deep. Some go out for a swim, and others even plunge underwater. Regardless of how deep your experience, contact with music is contact with another world. The aforementioned musical spikes/bursts/inflections are like brushing up with a fish while in the ocean. It is a brisk evidence that this second world is powerfully and tangibly real, not simply a monochromatic, unidimensional expanse. The founts and mechanisms at the inner depths of music remain mysterious to us, but yet we partake in their fruit.
It is interesting to speculate the possibility that all music that will ever be played or created already exists. A composer or improviser then is connecting with this timeless, metaphysically oceanic second world: Music. This is an evidence that music may be timeless: the impact and beauty of great music does not dilute across time and space. Despite emerging from Mozart’s pen nearly 300 years ago, The Magic Flute’s power, majesty, and quality has in no way diminished over this timespan. Modern listeners have just as much access to the quality of great music as the first listeners had hundreds or thousands of years ago.
It follows then that if Mozart’s drew his music from a transcendental source, his compositions pre-existed him. This original music, we can presume, wouldn’t be in the form and likeness of discrete notes and timbres produced by our human instruments. Rather, it would be the energy behind the great composer’s notes and harmonies. Much like a glove is inert until a hand animates it, our musical scaffolding– instruments, notes, chord progressions and harmonies– may be lifeless without the breath of life which emanates from the second world, and gives them substance.
With all this said however, I find it unlikely that music and the spirit behind it represent a binary metaphysical nature. It seems more natural that the two elements are inextricably joined. One cannot play a beautiful sus13 chord on the piano without conjuring the majestic musical energy that automatically incarnates it. It may be that this second world is no more alien to us than the mysterious inner workings of our subconscious mind. What’s more– music may in this sense be the acoustic consciousness of the human race’s subconscious hive mind. Following this theory to its conclusion: there is no second world, only a deeper and unknown reality to the current world we inhabit.
These thoughts are a subjective, creative exploration of the question “where does music come from” but do not give a satisfactory answer, nor can they. The mystery of music’s origins and metaphysics seems beyond our grasp, but hopefully curiosity will bring us one step closer to the answer.
Recommended readings:
Goguen, Joseph. "Musical qualia, context, time and emotion." Journal of consciousness studies 11.3-4 (2004): 117-147.
Bharucha, Jamshed J., Meagan Curtis, and Kaivon Paroo. "Varieties of musical experience." Cognition 100.1 (2006): 131-172.
Schiavio, Andrea, and Dylan van der Schyff. "Beyond musical qualia. Reflecting on the concept of experience." Psychomusicology: Music, mind, and brain 26.4 (2016): 366.
Hunt, Tam, and Jonathan W. Schooler. "The easy part of the hard problem: a resonance theory of consciousness." Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 13 (2019): 378.
