Music has always been a very important part of my life. As long as I can remember back (about to age 5, I can’t see much beyond that except snatches of images) there are tones around me that colour my life. Sometimes bright, sometimes darker but they’re always there.
Music is a very special art to me. Paintings, statues and other works of art perish with time, get lost or destroyed.
Music is for ever.
There is I believe no more direct route to the emotions of a person than to play a piece of music at them. And the really eerie thing is that it seems to have a similar effect on people from all cultures and all walks of life. Even babies are not immune to the beauty that lies between the notes.
I think the reason for this is that music and singing have been with us since pre-historic times. Ancient flutes have been recovered, and for sure percussion instruments as simple as a tree and a stick have been used just about forever. Or at least as long as there have been humans.
Music bypasses all our ‘normal’ ways of receiving an emotion, we don’t need to understand anything read anything or listen to words and interpret them, it plays directly on our heartstrings. And sometimes pretty powerfully so, there are musical pieces that can instantly make me laugh or cry, no matter what the mood was before the piece started playing.
There is something very fundamental going on there, and how interesting that it should be our ears that are so sensitive to these tones. The eye is theoretically of much higher bandwidth than the ear, it has many more sensors and a much higher spectral range, and yet there is no equivalent to music received by the ear.