Observations on Music

I’ve never taken a music class, and the most exposure I’ve had to playing an instrument was a year and a half of trombone back in grade school. Emptying that spit value was always a highlight of my day, let me tell you.

For what it’s worth, however, I am a deconstructionist. So when I sit down to listen to music I try and figure out 1) if it sounds appealing and b) why. Over time I’ve accumulated observations on music that may be either extremely stupid or worth pursuing further. So if you’re willing to bear with my ignorance, let me share a few of these:

1. They say that people who are good at math are good with music. I don’t know why that is (and if anyone can explain it I’d love to know), but it seems to me that good music, like math, is pattern-based. (And I know there are artists who make deliberately chaotic music, but even they rely on snipets of melody that have structure to them.)

I would love to see a study that categorizes popular patterns in music. As a simple example, here are a couple bars of the third movement of Mozart’s 11th piano sonata:

This piece is immediately pleasing to the ear, but why? Mozart’s piece follows an unmistakable pattern: a burst of five notes that descend and then ascend the scale, the same pattern repeated a note higher, and then a third iteration with slices of the theme added as “noise”, again all a note higher than the previous bar. Though these observations may be manifestly obvious to those that study music, I find it fascinating that this sort of identifiable structure produces such a delight to the ear. It seems to me that melodic progressions could be grouped into general categories, and that these categories could be found throughout the world of music. I’d tentatively title this one an upscale triplicate iteration with pattern nesting.

2. Building off the first point, it seems to me that musical structure carries with it meaning. I believe much of what we experience is framed by metaphor, so the structure of music is a metaphor for ideas and feelings. For example, in U.S. American culture “up” is generally a metaphor for superiority, “down” a metaphor for inferiority. When you’re feeling good, you’re up in the clouds, on a high, on Cloud 9. When you’re feeling bad, you’re feeling low, down in the dumps, under the weather. It has been proposed that these are not casual associations; they are manifestations of our entire system of understanding, in that we use basic relationships to define more complex ones.

If you accept the above to some extent, then musical structure may borrow from the same gestalt. I would hypothesize that higher notes generally connote a state of happiness while lower notes suggest depression and adversity. The instrument used to express each note is also a metaphor for experience. The sharp sound of drums tend to connote regimentation, the underlying structure of a song; the sound of a flute suggests a lighter state of emotions. By capitalizing on our primal associations, musicians draw from melody and instrument selection to affect a reaction in the listener.

3. Not all listeners are created equal, of course, and I think instruments in particular create predilections towards different kinds of music. I believe that many listeners have an “access point” to the music they listen to, driving the value they identify with the piece. For example, some listeners seem to focus on percussion and the emotional power of the beat. Others (such as myself) access music through the vocals, identifying most with the singer (perhaps because they want to sing along!) By determining the hows and whys of listeners accessing music, I think we’d understand the psychology of music a little bit more.

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on these fledgling ideas.