6 Songs of Evolution

Daniel Levitin is a musician and a scientist that studies musical perception, cognition, and expertise. I read his book, This is Your Brain On Music a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed its interesting points on what music is to the neurons in our brains and why it is that we could have developed the relationships that we have with it today. This video poses some points about music that I think are important and will use in later posts and conversations.

"Could it be that all sound is potentially musical if only we could understand its internal structure, its organization? This is what the composer Edgar Varèse was driving at when he famously defined music as “organized sound”—what sounds like noise to one person is music to another, and vice versa. In other words, one man’s Mozart is another’s Madonna, one person’s Prince is another’s Purcell, Parton, or Parker. Perhaps there is a key to understanding what is common to all these collections of sounds, and to what has driven humans since the beginning to engage with them so deeply as not just sound but music."(1, Levitin)

Hello.

My name is Sarah and I am here to talk with the world about music. I am not a musical expert, just an enthusiast who likes to think deeper about what is entering her ears.

Music is art just as much as a painting or piece of literature is, but we don’t often sit down and have constructive, critical, and investigative discussions of the music that is produced for us. We don’t ask why it is being made or what it is about.

This is what I would like to propose that we do: sit down and fully digest and dissect the music that we love. By what is it being influenced? Why does it make us feel the way it does? Who even are these people? By answering these questions and (hopefully) bringing you some new compelling tunes to pop in the jukebox, cd player, turntable, or iMac, I invite you to journey with me into a world of resonance.