I’ve been thinking about the power of music in our lives lately. Why is it so important that every culture has developed their own ways of producing it? How can it be so powerful that it provokes emotions and physical reactions?
What come to music and sound, each music culture and genre has their own aesthetic and functional preferences. There are endless purposes for music: some music is for dancing, some for meditating; some for advertising, some for worshipping; some for creating atmosphere and enforcing social ties. Anyhow, it’s always a matter of communication: humans communicate with each other and the visible world, or even with the higher powers of our universe. For example, the Balinese gamelan music is used as a communication vehicle between the three layers of the Balinese cosmos: the lower world of the evil spirits, the middle world of the humans, and the upper world of the deities and gods. Balinese sure know how to use their traditional music! (I find gamelan so fascinating that I think I need to dedicate one, or even several posts to it.)
But how can music obtain such power? There aren’t always lyrics in music, and if there are, they aren’t necessary the most important feature. There has to be something more to it, something that we cannot point out merely by analysing the music theoretically. Going beyond the rhythms, melodies, harmonies and structures, I’ve come to think about resonance: that we are all searching for things that cause physical and/ or emotional reactions in us; things that resonate in us somehow.
Here, by resonance I mean the vibrations in physical objects caused by sound waves (here in better words). Besides hearing sounds and being able to distinguish different pitches, we can also feel different frequencies in different parts of our bodies, even without actually hearing them. According to an Italian study, besides each of us having our individual musical tastes, every individual seems to have a certain frequency that has the most powerful affect on their brain. And because our bodies are all unique, they also respond to sound waves differently. That means, the sounds that make provoke reactions in me, do not necessarily have any affect on you, or they might even feel irritating.
To me, our quest for resonance seems universal, and apparently also our ancestors thousands of years ago took advantage of the power of sound: historical sites, that have been used for rituals, often have very powerful sound amplifying qualities. Some of these sites are naturally occurring, such as caves, and some are human-made. Interestingly, in many of these sacred sites the most optimal frequencies are something between 70 and 130 hZ, and, as the aforementioned study shows, these are the frequencies that have very strong physical effects on our brain.
Music cultures all over the world have developed their own ways of producing sounds that affect them somehow. The harmonic ideals and the instrumentations of Western classical and popular music are definitely not the only possibilities for producing strong resonance: there is a vast variety of different tuning systems, instruments, instrumental and vocal techniques, rhythmic and melodic ideas, timbres and musical genres in this world. Another example from the versatile gamelan music: the instruments of gamelan ensembles are intentionally tuned in pairs so that the other one of each pair is slightly lower-pitched than the other. When ringing at the same time, the two pitches very close to each other produce interference, a special shimmering sound, that adds up to the gamelan ensemble’s rich, vibrating sound. This “fullness” is considered to give the spectator a sense of divine presence, and the music also helps people to alter their state of consciousness.
With all its applications, I think that resonance is the thing that makes music one of the greatest superpowers we humans have, and EVERYBODY can benefit from it. But since there’s so much music to choose from, the question is: What makes you resonate?
Sonic Observer 