Much of the emotional significance that we find in music comes from our own life experience: whilst still in the cradle we learn to associate the music we hear with the emotional environment we hear it in - so a mother’s lullaby might imprint us with calm memories for major keys, whilst a lovers’ lament in A minor would remind us of breakups and ex-girlfriends. But these automatic brain mechanisms are only the beginning of how we read meaning into music. Certain chords sound pleasant because of how we divide tones into different pitches: harmonically simple, consonant chords, like majors, are easy to do this for, but harmonically complex chords, like tritones, are harder to distinguish and so we find them dissonant. So if music is a language, how does it convey its meaning? After all, it doesn’t have any words, does it? At the very basic, physical level, loud and fast noises excite us more than slow quiet ones because our brain-stem is tuned to attend to these kinds of noises in the environment. Next time you hear someone speaking emotionally, listen to the acoustic characteristics of their voice - they’ll mirror music of the same emotion: fast, loud and high for excitement and happiness, slower and softer for melancholy. The brain even processes musical syntax using the same area it uses to process language syntax. Music has structure, progression and syntax - just like language. (Inside Science) - From a simple, lonely melody to an intricate sonata, sometimes it feels like music can speak directly to your heart, in a language that you don’t know, but your emotions understand.Īnd that’s because music is a language.
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