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How Is Music Possible

33 points rafaelc 2 hours ago 21 comments

wry_discontent 1 hour ago | parent

This was really interesting to read as a person who doesn't experience music deeply.

dumberquestions 1 hour ago | parent

I think not being able to experience music as much as I do would be akin to losing an entire sense.

colordrops 1 hour ago | parent

For real, it's about the only thing that reliably causes ego dissolution and bliss for me. And I've spent decades with various meditation practices. Nothing beats music.

saghm 48 minutes ago | parent

I have no clue how common an experience this is, but I quite literally get goosebumps when listening to music sometimes if it inspires strong enough emotion for me. I mentioned this to my friend who I played in a band with once, and later when we were listening to something I really liked I held up my arm to show him, and he was shocked because I guess he thought I did not mean literally literally. The hair on my arms genuinely stands up at the end and produces goosebumps purely because of what I feel when listening to music that resonates strongly enough with me; some sections of some songs produce it fairly reliably if I haven't listened to it recently.

intrikate 31 minutes ago | parent

This happens to me all the time! I'll be in the car with my wife and a song I really like will come up, and the section hits and I'll say "Goosebumps!" and show her my arm. She also did not believe me until I physically showed her.

They are often songs that are attached to important emotional events in my life, sure, but there are also songs that come out of nowhere and still give me goosebumps. Some things are just that moving!

hatthew 30 minutes ago | parent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson

saghm 6 minutes ago | parent

TIL! Thanks for the reference

wry_discontent 40 minutes ago | parent

It can feel like that sometimes.

It's weird cause there's this whole set of things (favorite bands/live shows/albums/etc) that most people are really into and care a lot about and it's a big absence in my life.

viccis 1 hour ago | parent

If you found Schopenhauer's thoughts on it interesting, I'd recommend giving The Birth of Tragedy a read to see where a young Nietzsche took it, relating it to poetry.

mintflow 1 hour ago | parent

The article reminds me a Chinese music which strike me one day when I just find it on youtube music

Cann't say something more, but it just made me a bit sad, and feel some nostalgia, and find how times flies over the years

Share the link below:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=sD115Li2Jl8&si=reD6a3Cjvt3...

amatecha 9 minutes ago | parent

That was really good! Thanks for sharing. <3

cachius 1 hour ago | parent

Next time stop the car and only listen

munificent 6 minutes ago | parent

Maybe the engine and the wind is an important part of the sonic experience.

asphodele 50 minutes ago | parent

Trying to explain why music is magical risks killing it with words. A lot of things are best left unspoken.

virgil_disgr4ce 26 minutes ago | parent

Explain how anything could in any way "kill music."

embedding-shape 6 minutes ago | parent

Some people find beauty in the explanations and understanding too, Feynman being a very famous example of this.

rguzman 40 minutes ago | parent

i, like the author, tend to find the theories of how/why music works unsatisfactory. in a sense, it has to be some kind of side-effect of capabilities that evolved via natural selection, but i find explanations for visual art operating that way more satisfying than music operating that way. music seems to be better analogized to the written word. we can engage with the written word "visually" (eg graffiti) but most of the time we don't quite do that -- what we do (stare at pieces of paper with funny squiggles in them and hallucinate) is far more abstract. music seems to be like that, too.

CGMthrowaway 15 minutes ago | parent

Why is a murmuration of starlings so pleasing to watch?

hypertexthero 36 minutes ago | parent

Good article.

Bridge of Waves: What music is and how listening to it changes the world, by W.A. Mathieu, is a sound book about how music is possible.

recursive 34 minutes ago | parent

Otherwise unspecified "major chords" are generally assumed to be major triads, and thus not tetrachords at all, which require four notes. I tried finding this section in the sources, but I couldn't find it. I wonder what's meant by this. Could it really mean that major triads are less pleasant than all tetrachords? That's surprising, since many tetrachords contain major triads.

> Major chords (which is what people who grew up hearing Western music tend to rate as positive), the Kalash instead describe as “strange,” rating them as less pleasant to listen to than “the most dissonant [of] all the possible tetrachords possible within the octave”.

virgil_disgr4ce 24 minutes ago | parent

This reminds me of when I did ketamine therapy. For some reason, the ONLY tether to reality that stayed intact during the k-hole was the ambient drones/loops coming through the headphones. Even during the experience I found this insane. Why should that one particular sense be carried through when everything else was left so far behind as to feel incomprehensibly alien?