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.].

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.