Music

What is music?

This seems like a pretty straightforward question to answer, but like most things we take for granted, it can actually be pretty tough to define. At its core, music is a collection of sounds placed together in a manner designed to be contemplated by other human beings.

Not all music has lyrics, although most of the stuff we humans download, purchase, or stream nowadays does come with words. There are almost always certain elements, though, like a melody (the central tune of the song) and a rhythm (the “beat”).

Sometimes, music will have a second tune that compliments the melody called a harmony, but not always. Lots of songs also have varying quiet and loud parts, often called dynamics.

Music exists in every civilization on the planet today, and it has been present in every culture ever to exist, at least as far as we know. Few things will tap straight into a raw emotional state for me than to listen to a particular genre, and this feeling must have seemed magical to our ancestors.

Want to languish in the sorrow of grief? Try Erik Satie or Neurosis. Want to feel energetic and nostalgic? Yacht rock might be the thing for you. No matter what the mood, music has a good fit for you, and it must have been this way for a very, very long time.

Music can help bring you back to a particular place in life like nothing else can. Want to jog your memory? Listen to songs that were on the radio the year you started high school. Seriously, try this today, and let me know what songs are on your playlist.

Music is also a uniting force. During my lifetime, I’ve become gradually more and more interested in the varying cultures out there in two main ways: food and music. I tend to be grateful for anything that makes me curious about the way other people live, and music has a special place for me every day.

Music can even heal you, at least under the right circumstances. Al-Farabi, another one of those polymaths from the Islamic Golden Age, wrote about the psychological effects of music during the 10th century CE. He believed specific melodies could influence emotions and even physical health, and he tried experiments to restore the ability to walk (this didn’t work, but it did seem to lift spirits and encourage recovery in other areas).

For all the things music is, we’re not really sure exactly how it got started. The oldest instruments ever found are made from animal bones made into flutes. Why?

Well, for starters, certain bones are already ideally shaped for creating wind instruments. They’re shaped like tubes, they’re hollow, and they’re rigid—all of these things mean that you can poke little holes on top, then cover them up so that a different note comes out whenever you blow air through the little bone-tube.

Second: these are the oldest instruments we’ve found, not necessarily the oldest instruments there were. This is notable because bones tend to stick around for longer than, say, wood. Even still, we have a flute found in Slovenia that’s estimated to be around 50,000-60,000 years old. This instrument has four very deliberate holes in it, and it’s made from the femur of a bear.

So, we were playing flutes 50,000 years ago (and probably much earlier, too), but there’s another form of music that probably came about way before wind instruments: percussion. Human beings almost certainly began aeons ago making music by slapping their bodies or hands, stomping feet, and essentially creating a beat.

Unlike a flute, you don’t need to have a high degree of skill to turn your body into an instrument. If you add a little bit of vocals in there (no words necessary, just sounds), you have something like a human beat box:

Humans have an innate sense of rhythm, too: watch a young child start bobbing their head to the rhythm or tapping their foot in time with a beat. Is there something encoded in us that gives us this motivation? Are we wired for music?

Present-day hunter-gatherer societies suggest that we almost certainly are. They tend to use the “human beat box” style of making music even while they have not yet made other instruments (like flutes).

Why we spent so much energy making music in the first place might be a mystery to anthropologists, but whenever I feel music’s transcendent effect, I think I get it. This sense of wonder is more than enough for me, but even beyond that, music is math at its core. Each note is a different frequency of sound, and each octave up the musical scale is double the frequency of the last one.

It’s fair to say that when you’re making music, you’re arranging numbers in a mathematical manner. The ratios of the numbers are what make the sound appealing or cacophonic. Is it possible that this aided our cognitive development? Could that be a key to our evolutionary development?

Regardless of how or why it started, music has stuck around with us, quite possibly for as long as we’ve been human.

What does music mean to you, personally? Have you ever had an experience where music has helped you get through a tough time? Are there bands or artists who you listen to in order to invoke a certain feeling?