What is Music
An artistic form of auditory communication incorporating instrumental or vocal tones in a structured and continuous manner musical activity (singing or whistling etc.)
(music)The sounds produced by singers or musical instruments (or reproductions of such sounds).
Solving a Scientific Mystery is a book by Philip Dorrell which explains a new scientific theory about music: the super-stimulus theory.
The main idea of the theory is that music is a super-stimulus for the perception of musicality, where "musicality" is actually a perceived property of speech.
"Musicality" refers to the property of music that determines how "good" it is, how strong an emotional effect it has, and how much we enjoy listening to it.
The theory implies that ordinary speech also has this property, in a manner which may vary as a person speaks. The musicality of speech is much more subtle than that of music, but it provides important information which the listener's brain processes (without conscious awareness of the processing), in order to derive some information about the internal mental state of the speaker. This information is applied to modulate the listener's emotional response to speech, and this accounts for the emotional effect of music.
Language fulfills so many needs for us: We can
be mundane or lofty, can speak factually or philosophically, make
specific observations or generalizations. We can describe our
interior thoughts as well as the outside world. We can speak of
events long gone or yet to be.
Music is often called the “universal
language.” But if music is a language, what can it express?
Music is singularly capable of exploring how
the future arises out of the past. How dependent is the future on
the past? How much is remembered, how much forgotten? Are initial
ideas self-sustaining, or do they require an influx of new
elements? How fast does progress or transformation take place? What
is the ultimate outcome?
We compose our lives with these questions: How strongly are we bound by our upbringing or heritage?
How easy is it to break our habits? How far and fast can we stretch
our personality while still maintaining a sense of identity? How
much transformation can we tolerate? On a social level, we ponder
whether the Constitution and religious texts are “time-independent” documents
or living ones that evolve. We question the pace of reforms and
the consequences of unexpected events.
Words may describe time's passing but music enacts it for us. For instance, the greater
the amount of repetition, the more the future is conditioned by what has already happened. If an idea returns literally, it speaks to its transcendence; if
it is perpetually transformed, then it changes with the times.
A-type forms project continuity, A/B-forms disruption and
change.
