Sunday 4 November 2007

Pic of the day: The ecstasy of music... here from Sims 2. This is a university student, by the way. This entry is mostly about canned music, though, not the one you make yourself.

Music

I am starting to wonder whether most people experience music the same way I do, or whether this is another difference between the autist spectrum and the mainstream.

Music seems to be very important to the modern human, as seen from the enormous amount of music bought and copied every day around the world. Especially for young people, music can be an obsession, even among those who don't play themselves.

And yet I find that many people seem to use music as a sound tapestry, something that is in the background but that they almost never notice unless it goes away. A replacement for silence. Perhaps because silence scares people on a deep level, or perhaps they just think of music as an improved silence. Since there is nothing to notice there, why not have a prettier non-noticeable than the default? That's why we have tapestries these day, after all. For the beauty, not to protect the walls. We like to surround ourselves with beauty even when we don't actively observe it.

On the gripping hand, not all of music is pretty. Some of it is ugly and people are on it like flies on manure. Rap, for instance. I am hard pressed to see how that "music" can evoke any other feeling than anger, though in my case it is against the music itself, whereas others seem able to absorb it and use it to fuel their own anger toward others. As long as there is rap in the world, there are people who need a fundamental change of heart, or alternatively, to be removed from society until such a change takes place.

Conversely, I read that some public places in the United Kingdom have hidden loudspeakers piping beautiful music. When troublemakers come to these spots, which used to be their favorites (like the underground), the beauty drives them away with its unbearable mental pain. The harmony sears their soul. I guess it is a bit like some people say about Hell: The fire of Hell is the Light of God. I don't necessarily subscribe to that, but I agree that beauty and truth seem to cause horrible mental pain in those who are out of sync with them. Conversely, ugliness and delusion cause pain in those who are aligned with beauty and truth.

Apart from the extremes (like Bach vs Eminem) there are many genres of music, and one needs to absorb a genre to some degree to enjoy it. Some genres are so common in our culture, we can harvest their beauty without special training, at least to some degree. Standard pop music ... there are very few who goes "what the heck" at hearing a pop song. But bring out the Hardanger fiddle and play a stubb (like this for instance... more here), and people will go "what the heck" alright. For me who has at least partly grown up with it, there is a lot of beauty in it, but for the random citizen phrases that come to mind are "nails on a blackboard" or "torturing the cat". I have much of the same feeling about jazz, except there's a whole barnyard of animals being slaughtered.

I don't know if some genres exclude each other, but I tend to think not. For instance, I grew up with country and western music (which is incidentally mostly bad) and the aforementioned fiddle music, but my favorite music these days is Japanese pop, or Jpop, a rather different style of pop music from the Anglo-American.

As with any popular genre, there is a wide spectrum and not all who like one song like another. 90% of everything is rubbish, as the saying goes, but I have come to notice that one man's rubbish is another man's treasure, to some extent. There are the golden evergreens that pretty much everyone agree is great, and there are the fillers that are included on the CD but that people don't actually play. (I mostly buy singles these days, for that very reason. Outside Ireland, it seems to be almost a law of nature to fill up the CD with forgettable or worse tracks.) But then there are the songs that some like and other don't, even in the same genre.

I have this theory – and I've said that before – that music corresponds to larger structures in our brain connections. More permanent structures than the rapid connections set up for language. Changing these larger, slower connections won't happen overnight (barring divine intervention) but may take years. Over the years, they do happen though. For instance, in the late 90es I was crazy about the Norwegian band Infinity, which produced happy Euro-dance songs. I even enjoyed most of the tracks on their CDs. But now I find several of them disturbing. On the other hand, I now have the same intense addiction to some Jpop songs. If I live for another decade, who knows what my taste will be then? Probably not completely opposite, but there is almost certain to be some drift, for my brain is constantly changing. Evolving, as we like to say up here in post-post-modern la-la-land.

We are also fundamentally different in our proportion of rhythm, harmony and melody. I believe these refer to particular parts of the brain, and their dominance may be a fundamental aspect of our personality. Perhaps set at birth or very early in life, changing them may be possible only by surgery, divine intervention or 20+ years of meditation. For my humble self, melody is the clincher. The rise and fall of frequency and intensity set off very powerful waves in my brain that become rapidly more intense if I immerse myself in them. There are a few songs that affect me so strongly that I honestly think I could die from them. Or at least get a nosebleed. Convulsion-level pleasure attacks. But I strongly suspect that a harmony-dominated person would not notice anything special there at least, probably the same for those focused on rhythm.

Also, I am not sure if people outside the autist spectrum experience pleasure attacks at all. It requires (I think) a certain momentum to be built up inside the brain by sending impulses back into the loop again, kind of like you build up a laser pulse by bouncing light until it reaches a certain peak intensity...

Let us take an example. If you read this before it is yanked from YouTube, and you happen to not read it at work (although I believe almost all my readers are at work), here are two songs (from the same single actually) that make me almost stop breathing. Yes, I own that single, so just think of it as coming over to my place and listening to them, OK? Except the sound quality is obviously cleaner on the CD. Oh, and ignore the picture. *facepalm* It is misleading to say the least. The first is a pretty classical love song – we met on a starry night, blah blah promise, no lying, blah blah, starlit night. The second is a cheering-on / love song. (Thus its name "furefureponpon" – "go go pompom".) None of the lyrics are unfit for children even if they happen to understand Japanese, though the melody could cause them to bump into objects while dancing wildly in the living room. Or perhaps that's just me.

Here we go:
Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun OP "Yubikiri" (Full Version)
Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun ED (Full Version)

Not saying it is better than sex, but then again a goodly number of men die during sex too.

(In fact ecstasy has a lot in common, whether it comes from the body, or psyche (as here) or spirit. It is after all filtered through the same consciousness and the same body, both of which have to be present for us to be alive in the true sense. But that's a story for another book, is it not?)

Well, I'm off for my exercise bike. For an in-depth observation of my somewhat wide-ranging musical tastes, feel free to visit my Last.FM page and listen to my loved tracks. Obviously not all of the tracks are loved for the same reason – some for the lyrics, some for the tune – and not all fit together. And not much of it is Jpop, since Jpop came later to Last.FM than western music did. Japan is catching up on Last.FM though, so come back later.

The sad truth however is that no two people like the same music. But there are very few who don't like music. I also strongly suspect that a marriage between two people who don't respect each other's music will end in acrimony and alimony, but this is not something I can test out for myself. Still, worth considering. For those who consider marriage at all, I mean. But even without it, consider the music.