You hit play on your favourite, but very obscure, song. You prepare yourself to enjoy it despite your friend’s lack of enthusiasm. You are shocked when their head starts bobbing. You enjoy it even more now. You like them even more now. 

An instant bond forms when you meet another who shares your appreciation for music. Whether it is a new friend, an acquaintance, or an awkward date, a similar taste in music can melt the tension quicker than any well-turned phrase. 

And there is a very good reason for that. 

Music Communicates What Words Cannot: Emotion

The issue with trying to explain an emotion is that feelings are relative. What to you is a terrible discomfort is to another an almost unnoticeable inconvenience.  

That gap cannot be bridged by an extensive lecture. And it is, in most cases, difficult to find a comparative experience. Therefore, the communication of emotion is best left to the realm of art.  

Each artistic discipline communicates the abstract differently. The best painters express a mood and freeze it in time, allowing hindsight to interpret. A sculptor captures the aura of a person or group.  

Music, when crafted and performed well in service of a purpose, is an exhibition of the artist’s deepest, most visceral emotion. The communication of such raw feeling transcends differences in experience. 

Music allows two people to identify with a pure emotion. This forms a common ground that is essential to a productive dialogue. There is no use confronting difficult topics without first finding common ground, making music invaluable as the universal language of emotion. 

First, it is important to understand why verbal language is more likely to fail in finding a common ground between two people or groups of different backgrounds. 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein devised an analogy that perfectly frames language’s shortcomings. He called it ‘the beetle in a box.’  

The Beetle in a Box Theory 

Imagine you and another person have a box with a beetle inside. You both can look at your own beetle but cannot show it to the other.  

Now try to describe your beetle in such a way that you capture it so vividly that the other person has a photorealistic image of your beetle in their mind. Not even Shakespeare could.  

To you, a sleek, black shell with uniform, vertical lines creasing its back may be an accurate description of your beetle’s unique anatomy. But the word black may inspire a different shade in the other person’s mind.  ‘Uniform, vertical creases’ may capture the texture of your beetle’s shell, but the other person cannot grasp the exact dimensions of the shell’s width and the corresponding depth of the creases.  

All that is possible is an approximation of a beetle that is heavily reliant on the other person’s prior conception of a beetle. 

This may seem overly pedantic, but the beetle is a metaphor for our true selves.  

No amount or depth of detail will ever perfectly capture an aspect of your true inner self, let alone the entirety of it. There is a barrier inherent to verbal communication, which is why art is essential for communicating life’s abstract experiences. 

The Power of the Present 

18th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard provided a great explanation for why music is so effective at finding common ground. He believed that great music affects the imagination directly and transcends personal differences onto a separate plane of aesthetic experience.  

Music reaches the depths of your imagination and recalls an emotion to the present. When such an experience is shared with another, the effects can be intoxicating. In bringing emotion to your focus, you are living in the present moment. 

This ‘presentness’ touches on a key factor in healthy communication.  

People are always either lost in the past or yearning for the future. It is hard enough to relate to someone when you are both grappling with the present moment. It is impossible when you are in separate temporal realms. 

So if someone is showing you their favourite song, try your best to understand it is not really the song they are showing you but their soul. 

Source:

Kierkegaard, S. Either/Or. Penguin. 3 June 1992.

As a professional writing student at Algonquin College, Adam Dickson combines a passion for writing with an interest in the deeper meanings of music. He will frame his perspectives through experiences with the psychologically healing properties of music and its possible philosophical nuances.  He aims to piece together themes and messages common to popular musical pieces and movements. It is his hope that each post promotes a greater depth of thought into an aspect of music. Adam’s focus lies in classical music, where more historical context can be found but hopes to cover many different cultures.