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Why Does Music So Profoundly Affect One's Emotions?


Music drives your emotions to new realms of wonder. It drives you spirit to imaginative highs. How can a combination of sounds make for such a profound effect on the human psyche? Sweeping orchestrated pieces of music are perhaps the most profound and easiest to identify the conveyed emotions. You listen to music because of how it makes you feel. Music is can make you feel empowered, or enchanted, or even intrigued. Is it any wonder that music has existed for as long as we have? It is perhaps integral to our own existence for music to exist. Musical arrangements are things that invoke emotion, inspire creativity, and are part of your consciousness from birth.

In a novel titled, Home of the Gentry, there is a passage I will quote that helps describe the power that music has on your mind:

The sweet, passionate melody captivated his heart from the first note; it was full of radiance, full of the tender throbbing of inspiration and happiness and beauty, continually growing and melting away; it rumoured of everything on earth that is dear and secret and sacred to mankind; it breathed of immortal sadness and it departed from the earth to die in the heavens.

The power that this music obviously has on the listener in this novel is pretty overt. It inexplicably forces the listener to feel the sorrow of the music. Music has a stupendous ability to turn the listener into a marionette of emotion, yet this phenomenon is very enigmatic. There hasn't been a plethora of research devoted to understanding this. Research has just recently begun to blossom. One of the reasons for this lack of research is perhaps because music's content is very subjective. While a musical piece may be undeniably emotionally powerful, it may also have different meanings to different subjects. Yet, it does appear that all the meanings between subjects are somewhat related. It is thought that music may be wired into the brain. This comes from a study that showed 4 month-old children to turn-away or squirm if they were subjected to dissonant notes at the end of a melody. "Music is in our genes," says Mark Tramo, a musician and neuroscientist at the Harvard Medical School. "Many researchers like myself are trying to understand melody, harmony, rhythm, and the feelings they produce, at the level of individual brain cells. At this level, there may be a universal set of rules that governs how a limited number of sounds can be combined in an infinite number of ways." It is fairly overt that people are affect in some way by music, and in a subconcious manner.

Inspiration by music is something that I personally know to be powerful. The very inspiritation to write my research paper on this subject was from a pieces that inspired emotions of intrigue, wonder, and urgency(this is the song.) The piece in question inspired my mind to careen away from one of the topics that was assigned to us for this particular paper. My very being was awestruck with wonder, thoughts of epiphany, it made me wish to know what caused this reaction. What could possibly have such a sagacious effect on the emotional parts of my brain? Well the arrangement of music appears to cause your mind to become more creative depending on its arrangement which was demonstrated in Mark Tramo's article titled Music on the Brain. According to a Harvard Gazette article, part of your inner ear contains a spiral sheet that the sounds of music pluck like a guitar string. The plucking of these "strings" triggers the firing of brain cells that make up the hearing parts of your brain. Patterns of firing excite other ensembles of cells, and these associate the sound of music with feelings, thoughts, and past experiences. The triggering of past thoughts and experiences can inspire creativity that stems from past thoughts and experiences. It allows your mind to bridge gaps with past memories without actually needing to conciously remember such memories. This sub-concious accessing of past thoughts and memories allows you to elaborate upon them, and this is all based from music! The power it has over your every action is limitless! One day scientists hope to fully understand this phenomenon.

The philosopher Boethius once stated, "Music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired." To me this is showing that even throughout history it is realized that music is active in our cultures from the dawn humanity. There has not been a single culture discovered thus far, who lacks music. It is also argued that the rules for music and the emotions that pieces coax out are "hard-wired" into your brain from birth. This is may be true seeing as how dissonant sounds at the end of melodies cause 4 month-old children to squirm and turn-away. It wouldn't be illogical to conclude that music is part of your genetic heritige. Just as someone is musically talented as a gift, that talent would simply be an extension of traits and behaviors that exist throughout us all.

Throughout humanity's existence, music is part of our lives and is part of our being. The brain is hard-wired for music, and your emotions greatly correspond to musical tones and melodies. Music's origins are debatable and unknown, but probably stem from things in nature like flowing water and the sounds of the forest. Music also stems from our mind being more developed than most animals. Not only are we more intelligent but also more actively thinking and creative. Let's hope it stays that way for future generations.



References:

Nichols, Timothy. Music: Its Effects on Human Emotion.Greendoor, P.L.L.C.
http://www.grndr.com/music.htm

Turgnev, Ivan. FreeBorn, Richard. Home of the Gentry
Penguin, 1856. Translated in 1970.

Tramo, Mark. Music on the brain. Harvard Gazette.
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/03.22/04-music.html

Vaidya, Geetanjali. Music, Emotion and the Brain. Serendip.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro04/web2/gvaidya.html

Cromie, William. How Your Brain Listens to Music. Harvard Gazette.
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1997/11.13/HowYourBrainLis.html




Media:


Music File #1(Part of the body.)

Music File #2

Music File #3