The Right Song at the Right Time II
We will now look at The Right Song and how it is able to affect us so deeply from a more abstract viewpoint.
We talked some time ago about how the patterns of notes in music [especially classical] mimics the patterns in reality and how listening to music can somewhat subliminally show us patterns that are occurring in our life – some of which we may not be all that aware of – helping us experience life more deeply and sometimes even helping us solve problems by revealing patterns that make the subtle relationships between the things we are dealing with more clear.
Patterns [I think of them as weighted undirected graphs mapped into a 2D projection, because I am more comfortable with 2D than 3D. YMMV.], in this context can mean professional relationships between you and your co-workers, between the various priorities in your life, between your kids multitudinous kinds of ‘success’ in life and their overall well-being, … it can be just about anything. Perhaps you might think of these patterns as fractals [fractals have been matched to many patterns that organic life presents to us].
Back to The Right Song, and cutting to the chase, one can think of the patterns in the Right Song matching some kind of matching need for this pattern in the mind so that when the two come together, it is quite pleasurable. I think of this as two, very complex puzzle pieces, one being the Song and one being your current state of mind, and they fit together more or less perfectly. Or I think of it as two molecules, thinking back to high school chemistry, with one missing a few electrons [the brain] and one with a few extra electrons [the Song] and they come together to form a 3rd molecule [a happy brain].
In these two senses, the Right Song ‘completes me’ [back to Jerry Maguire again? And, no, I haven’t watched that movie for a year so this is NOT a Jerry Maguire inspired post. Or at least I do not THINK it is. Better go listen to some classical music… :-)].
One reason hifi works so well in making us feel good is that many more complex patterns are made audible in a given piece of music compared to what lofi reveals. With more patterns there is many more opportunities for the music to ‘fit’ the ‘holes’ the brain is producing.
We now another perspective on Druglike music:
Some high quality audio is just able to stimulate the brain in some areas and relax it enough in others enough that we experience wonderfully expansive states of mind.
The perfect song is a piece of music we are receptive to Right Now. It will have The Most Impact on us at this time.
But we also carry around with us medium term and long term patterns of receptivity [the sizes and shapes of the puzzle pieces of our mind], making us especially susceptible to enjoying certain songs and certain types of music.
So we can stimulate our minds to special states with high-quality hifi music, or we stimulate our minds with the Right Songs. Or we can do both – and at the same time.
Open questions are
A) how to determine what your Right Song is at this moment. More generally, is there a way to determine what your Right Music is at any given moment?
B) Is there a way to put yourself into a receptive state for a particular song or music? [e.g. you are going to a Stones concert. Or a rendition of Nelson’s Mass. Or you just got a new Bjorn CD]
One potential solution to A) is, maybe, to rapidly play small snippets of songs [say 2 sec each?] and have the listener stop and listen to a song when they Think it is The One, or use some kind of biofeedback so that our brains automatically pick The Song. Software that supported this feature would have as a side-effect a new kind of ‘sampling music’ where people would listen to only parts of [potentially] dozens of songs each minute they are listening. Obviously some kind of streaming or disk-based audio system would be required as the back end.
