Hello Musical Unplug Box

Wtf is music?

Welcome here, where I publish thoughts on the universal meanings hidden in music.

When I was a kid, at a time when I didn’t think much about music, “The Siamese Cat Song” was occasionally played; I understood the words and could even sing along, but it was more like a game than whatever music actually is. When we went as a family to see Lady and the Tramp, the film that features the song, I sat there watching the movie like any other— until the Siamese cats made their appearance. When I realized that I knew the song, and that it had a more complex meaning than I had known, something unusual happened in my head; I began to cry, bewildered.

I had to photograph my stupid computer screen because Disney has actually spent effort preventing screenshots of their intellectual property. 😆

What was this emotion that wasn't pain or frustration? I’d never even considered there was something to be understood about this song, so I certainly wasn’t looking for an epiphany. Still, the carefully encoded information of the film – the lights, melodies, motions, noises, and words — had flowed into my head and created a peculiar new meaning. Today I only vaguely get what happened to make me so emotional. At the time, though I could not understand those tears of understanding, I knew something had happened in my brain, and it was something triggered by music.

Since then, I’ve encountered many songs: some have no impact whatsoever; some have an immediate impact, filling me with joy in seconds; some underwhelm, then slowly nag at my subconscious until I play them more and more, until I could listen to them over and over again, endlessly, always coming back to them, over and over and over again, repeatedly with no end in sight, and I could still cry at their beauty each time; some, that I listened to on repeat 30 years ago, come back like they were never gone, and then I listen to them again and again again. Songs change our minds with little vibrations through our ears, and they vex us with a spiritual quality— or maybe it’s a non-spiritual quality. It seems that music, as a form of communication, is at the same time amazingly effective and totally inefficient.

If a piece of art aims to communicate an idea or a way of thinking, why do we encode the information, hiding its meaning amongst the slips and dashes of music and the poetry of lyrics? And then, what force points out the existence of meaning in these puzzles of sound before we ever know it’s there? Why do we want to understand what we yet cannot understand, even after a thousand listens? How does an exploration of music lead to understanding?

If you too enjoy these mystifying qualities of music, please consider subscribing to Musical Unplug Box. I’ll publish bi-weekly-ish articles which aim to understand understanding through music (and some other non-music stuff, but mostly music stuff).

Thanks for your time!
Kevin

Thank you to Dan Bernardic, Jeremy Nguyen, Sarah Ramsey, Michael Schafer, Steven Ovadia, and Jude Klinger for contributing to this article.