Why is music so powerful? The end of the Christmas break is always a depressing time for me, the idea of going back to work after some nice vacations with my family is not a happy perspective,… but music always helps me in some way, particularly and paradoxically sad and dark music! Yes, have you noticed? Listening to happy music when you feel sad simply doesn’t work, it doesn’t fit your mood and it doesn’t even cheer you up. Curiously, when you feel sad, you go back to a music that fits your state of mind. Why is that?
I am not sure, scientific studies about the relationship between music and emotions are very complex and often fail to explain anything,… we are far from understanding anything in this area. Music has a power, a communicative power that goes beyond language even though there are obvious parallels between music and language, but the meaning of music – if music has a meaning – goes beyond that of a simple sentence. It’s deeper, more abstract, ambiguous and mysterious, and especially it often brings something new when words aren’t able to. Music is more complicated than language, and it often allows us to release an emotional tension that has been blocked by a lack of possibility to express it verbally. Music can be a catharsis experience, and we all know that.
Some scientists and musicians think that music is a synchronizing force between people, that music is the sound of other human bodies moving, doing stuff, and since we are attuned to the rhythm of other bodies moving, we are driven to it… In this sense, music goes way beyond emotion, it is rather a movement, a dance and when we find someone dancing to the same rhythm we have a tendency to follow. After all, listening to music activates the motor cortex of the brain, the same part of the brain which is associated with movement, so all this makes sense.
Thus, music does much more than simply resonate in the emotional part of our brain. Actually there are some kinds of music which are neither sad nor happy, they are just music but nevertheless effective connections with other human beings. Music resonates in our body and in the brain’s area directly connected to our body parts! It also resonates in the area concerning memory (where nostalgia and melancholy come from), vision (where the visual imagery comes from), social interaction, identity, and I don’t know what else! When we realize how many parts of our brain music activates, we can totally comprehend why it is such a very powerful force.
Music is a full body-and-brain experience and that’s why we love it so much. It overwhelms us in all the senses of the term. When we find the right music that synchronizes with our brain’s chemistry, it brings us pleasure, releases the right chemicals in the brain, and we can relate to it so much… like an auditory trace of a human path, dance, movement, emotion, vision, activity. We will never be done at describing the music experience.