Music and feelings
Mark Changizi has an article in this month’s Scientific American, a line of thought that John Cage would appreciate. Is music simply another form of language?
Speech sounds alone, stripped of their meaning, don’t inspire. We don’t wake up to alarm clocks blaring German speech. We don’t drive to work listening to native spoken Eskimo, and then switch it to the Bushmen Click station during the commercials. Speech sounds don’t give us the chills, and they don’t make us cry – not even French. But music does emanate from our alarm clocks in the morning, and fill our cars, and give us chills, and make us cry.
I’d have to disagree about French. I’m far too romantic for my own good. Cuss me out. Call me all sorts of names. But do it in French and I’m yours! But even a familiar language can have emotive power. I’m thinking here of the performative art of Pentacostal preachers. One could argue, however, that those sermons are at times sung rather than spoken. Surely people are swept away by a sermon delivered in the classic revival format even when the hearer doesn’t speak the language. This emotive speech is discussed in the article. I still have to disagree about the language barrier, though.
Music is exquisitely emotionally evocative, which is why a touch of happy music makes even unrelated pictures seem more pleasant. In light of the above, then, we are led to the conclusion that the artifact of music should contain some distinctly human elements.
The question, of course, is what those elements are. One candidate is our expressive speech – perhaps music is just an abstract form of language. However, most of the emotion of language is in the meaning, which is why foreign languages that we don’t understand rarely make us swoon with pleasure or get angry. That’s also why emotional speech from an unfamiliar language isn’t featured on the radio!
I wonder if there is a market for some speech sounds. Actually, there was that PBS show whose soundtrack was nothing but baby sounds: squeaks and squeals.
Although it probably seems obvious that music can evoke emotions, it is to this day not clear why. Why doesn’t music feel like listening to speech sounds, or animal calls, or garbage disposals? Why is music nice to listen to? Why does music get blessed with a multi-billion dollar industry, whereas there is no market for “easy listening” speech sounds?
This article is a great read. Enjoy!
