It's the relationship between music and listener that's a little
different than the relationship between words and listener. It's
an active participatory process. The system requires both to act
in concert. Yes, I just said that smile emoticon I'm going to
use engineering analogy. Apologies ahead of time: Imagine a
series of mechanical sliders inside of us. These mechanical
sliders can be moved by many means. Words, music, art, movies,
thoughts - they can even move on their own. They never really
stop moving. These sliders are all of the components of our
emotional states. There's many emotional states. Sliders are
tied into each other, so one slider can affect others. Two
sliders can affect an entirely different set of sliders. Now you
have music. Music is a very direct manipulation of these
sliders. It's not entirely an objective system; there are
certainly cultural elements involved... yet the cross-cultural
nature of whole bodies of music (classical is a good example, as
it's everywhere), makes them activate these sliders in the same
way across many nations around the world, even those with local
cultural music that's different and doesn't quite move the same
way. Yet we're not bound by our cultures either. We have our own
settings we prefer. Our sliders are all unique and slip and
stick differently. Now compare to language. Language involves
semantic systems as well as activating the sliders. Language is
musical but it is also visual/tactile: metaphors activate fast
comprehension of meaning. "emotionally distant" activates the
parts of the brain that are also used in seeing things that are
far away, and activates the emotional sliders in the same
manner. Broken heart activates pain centers of a heart attack.
It's all hidden in plain sight. The sliders are of course tied
into all of course sensory inputs. I believe we all have
synthethesia to differing degrees. Music can activate a smell
sense, a taste, a warmth, a vision, a coldness, an anger. Words
can too but they're a little more prefrontal cortex. There's a
lot of calculations going on to ascertain meaning. Music though,
can move the sliders themselves, almost effortlessly if one is
attuned (see what I did there?) to that style of music. == Well,
I think we're far more than complex Turing machines. I tend to
believe in embodied cognition as a better model, where our
social, physical, environmental and mental are all "one thing"
that's us and it's more complicated than a computer. But it's an
easily available metaphor so I used it smile emoticon == I don't
like having to use engineering/computer metaphors for humans,
because we're not robots or computers. We're not spiritual
meatbags, at least as far as I see it. But the metaphors are
common. I'm still working on better metaphors that can better
encompass the totality of the systems that humans engage in as a
functioning (and dysfunctioning) unit, along with all of the
products of our creation such as
computers/math/language/music/art/philosophy/poetry/etc as well
as the Universe around us, and all of the things that are unseen
and unseeable. But that's probably a life-project. I'm far from
close. I'm always feeling as if I'm just starting it new. ==
