The Right Song at the Right Time III

This post will illustrate one metaphor, an oversimplified model, of how music kind of helps the world make more sense by reflecting its patterns back at us in a different form… a musical form.

Here we are representing the world as a puzzle [ain’t it tho], and the brain trying to ‘piece it together’ but how we still have gaps between our understanding (the pieces around the listener’s head) and the puzzle of the world itself. Music here is providing some of the solutions to this puzzle.

Back to hifi. As we all know, lofi stereos cannot reproduce the complex passages in music; when they try it all comes out muddled and sounds like noise and it less than worthless, it is annoying.Lofi can only reproduce the most simple of melodies and least complex music [and even so, it does not do this very well].

HiFi music systems can reproduce all kinds of music, including that with a lot of complexity, which supplies the brain with lots and lots of patterns, puzzle pieces, with which to create possible interpretations of what is going on around us in the world.

A simple, somewhat contrived example, would be a situation where you might be having difficulties working with a 4-member team, some friction between expectations versus results, say – and after listing to Beethoven’s 5th, da-da-da-DUM, your brain kicks in a you realize that 3 of the team members are quite similar, but the 4th is quite different, and needs to be treated differently, with different expectations and handling on your part [I TOLD you it was contrived :-)].

Notice that we are completely ignoring the content of the lyrics here. “You can’t always get what you want” is indeed useful in understanding the way the world works [albeit we learn this, in my generation anyway, when we were very young from our parents on a daily basis]. But these posts are talking about how music affects us, not how the spoken word affects us.

This theory can be tested, I think, by, say, playing a number of songs for people who love baseball, with some of the songs having patterns that are similar to the patterns in baseball (lots of 3s… 3 outs, 4s… 4 bases… 9s…. nine bases, etc) and see if they prefer [are more comfortable,naturally familiar with] the songs with the baseball patterns compared the songs without these patterns.

Conversely, if one is writing a song for people who love baseball, perhaps using these patterns, and several of the more complex patterns found in baseball, might be quite advantageous [more complex patterns would including the fairly regular rhythms of, say, the swish of the pitch, the crack of the bat – or that of the ball hitting the glove. The response of the crowd rising/falling in the background, etc.].