What music is for: how sounds affect us

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Try to find a person without headphones in the subway. It is unlikely that it will work - everyone nowadays carries their favorite tunes in their phone or player. Ask what music is for, and everyone will answer that it is a great tool for creating mood and a way to influence our emotional state.

How did music come about?

The first music on Earth was rhythm, and the first musical instruments were drums. The change of day and night, the seasons, the beating of the heart - everything in our life is rhythmic. It is not surprising that the primitive man felt this influence and tried to reproduce the rhythm that he heard in the world and inside himself with the help of improvised means, already guessing why music was needed.

The rhythmic pattern set the right mood. To raise morale, the drum beats were fast and powerful, and the shamanic trance was achieved thanks to slow and seemingly stretched beats in time. Human culture did not stand still - along with it, the complexity of creating musical instruments increased. Nowadays, the forms of music are diverse: fromlive, happening here and now, to electronic, created without a single tool, only with the help of a computer program.

Music as vibration

In many religions there is mention of the creation of the universe with the help of sounds. First of all, any sound is a vibration of energy waves of a certain length. Knowing the essence of these waves, you can know the essence of the universe, - so they thought in ancient times, arguing about what music is for. The gods created worlds by the power of their will, expressed in voice. According to one of the Indian tribes of America, the world was blown out of a musical horn by the creator-demiurge.

Why do we need music in the modern world

At this stage, music has reached its apogee of development - in parallel with technical knowledge and human capabilities. We do not yet know what kind of music awaits us in the future, just as we do not know what new inventions mankind will create. New developments will lead to new forms of music that we cannot yet imagine.

Now music is a way to isolate yourself from the rest of reality and literally drown in sounds. Your favorite song, listened to in the morning, can provide a good mood for the whole day. For sports, people often choose music that makes them stronger, from hard rock to drum and bass.

Remember silence

For all the positive effect of music, the influence of silence cannot be underestimated. We have already figured out why music is needed, but why do you need to listen to silence from time to time?

There are so many sounds in the modern world that scientists even came up with the concepts of “sound noise” and “sound pollution”. If the sound affects us so subtly, then, constantly being in the sound field of a large and noisy city, we doom ourselves to a constant stay in excessive tone. Remember how calm it becomes in nature, where the number of sounds is minimized. And how sometimes a constantly repeated sound irritant, like a barking dog or the crying of small children, can get on your nerves. By the way, about children: it is believed that the sounds of their crying are specially programmed by nature at such frequencies in order to cause an immediate reaction in an adult - after all, no one can endure a child's crying for a long time.

What is music from headphones for? To protect your inner sound from extraneous noise. It certainly saves in the crowd of the metropolis or on a long trip. But when you're alone, at least occasionally try to turn off the music to hear your own thoughts. Often we listen to our favorite songs when we want to escape from something, knowing that as soon as the melody stops, our thoughts will return to what we so carefully seek to escape from. This is neither good nor bad - it just needs to be accepted as a fact and learn to find harmony both in sounds and in their absence.