Why do you like music?

[jnWake]

This is a hard question. I generally love melody and emotion in music. Mainly pretty melodies. But I can also get behind a good rhytm (like trash stuff)!

When listening to music, there are lots of things I appreciate. I love jazzy 7th chord progressions for example. I also love creative chord progressions. In sounds I really like synth pads and stuff like that, but organic instruments are cool too!

Lately I've been super obsessed with Genesis. Maybe it's because I'm a keyboardist, but I find their music incredible. The chord progressions in their songs are super creative and I really envy Tony Banks for coming up with them! Their songs are also pretty technical so they're fun to learn and play!

I think my songs reflect this to some extent. I use lots of 7th chords and lots of synth pads, but also a lot of piano! With remixes I don't fool around with melodies that much, but what I like doing is slight variations over a same musical idea. That is cool too!

[digitalxero]

I love music for the emotion it delivers, and how it makes me feel while listening to it. To that end, the biggest drivers for me have been chord progression and interesting melody. I also like musical flow -- that is, having continuity in a section or an appropriate transition. Eg. it's hard for me to enjoy stuff like dubstep since the grinding feels like it's just interrupting the rest of the song in my opinion.

Of course, technical or more complex stuff can be interesting too, but really my bottom line is what feeling the song evokes in me, and whether I like that feeling or not. I'm still learning about composition and arrangement so I haven't really tried to release anything yet, but that philosophy is certainly one of the primary guides I like to use. I guess that's a bit vague, but then again composition is pretty subjective

[Nase]

why do you like music?

"cause it feels good."

why does it feel good?

"??????"

you can point to lots of things you enjoy in a thing, like the structure of it or your favorite application or whatever.

however, you can't really explain your enjoyment in the end. you can write up a history of how that enjoyment might have come to be, but you cannot explain the fact that there is someone there to feel enjoyment.

all questions like that point to the hard problem: consciousness.

the two questions are basically enough, but let's break it down further by including the evolution argument:

why does it feel good?

"because over the course of evolution, our perception of frequencies arranged in sequences evolved in a way that we can derive pleasure from."

ah. on that matter, why is that so? why do i need to feel this pleasure thing in the first place? or anything else for that matter?

can't i just be a robot that feels nothing and just makes decisions based on complex algorithms?

but in that case i'm not even me anymore, i'm actually not at all!

why does the universe need "me" to feel all this? WHY AM I?

"ok dear that's enough, take your pills."

[Guifrog]

Because of its emotions, colors, images, tastes and I like dancing too \@/

[Mak Eightman]

I'm kinda emotionless so..

I become emotional IN music, THROUGH it. I guess that is why i like music.

Still.. First music catched me was Mozart and i was 1 year old..

So I don't know why i like it

[Chernabogue]

Because it inspire me.

[Lemonectric]

Ever since I was a kid, I've always liked singing/humming harmonies while listening to music. My mom used to say I was good at naturally picking up on that kind of stuff.

So...I still have a preference for music with a lot of harmony and interesting chord progression. Melody is what people remember, but what good would it be without something there to support it?

[Hypnotikid]

OCR opened me up to different styles of music. Then anime opened me up to world music.

I am not a musician, but I do like Spotify and video game music. At first when I was 8 I only liked rap, then about 15 I liked Rap and Grunge. Now I like every style... Rap, Rock, World, EDM, Country, etc...

Video Games and Anime are my life now, and listening to over 200 genres makes that life much much sweeter. (=

So Why do I like music?

It is because it is creative, and creativity is open to interpretation and exploration of the mind.

Edited December 5, 2014 by underworld_imp

[Nase]

So Why do I like music?

It is because it is creative, and creativity is open to interpretation and exploration of the mind.

that's one good answer.

i like to liken it to storytelling. a story is a sequence of events that becomes something much larger than the individual events (if it's any good). a good story is an exploration of your heart and mind and can give you a hint of everything there is to feel.

so music is abstract story.

[AngelCityOutlaw]

Zombie thread.

Anyway, I still like it for the same reasons as before. It sounds cool, it's fun to listen to and make, and it's an art I don't totally suck at.

Well, okay. That's a lie. I do totally suck, but I can make better melodies than I can draw stick people soooo...

[webcider]

I Think the reason I like music is because the sounds make me comfortable, I never liked vocals, because I associate it with my poor relations to people in the past..

However i really love the idea of music being a language to feelings, it's like a whole other world. Where I can get out what I want to say indirectly. So for me music is very much personal and deeply integrated to my beliefs in what truly matters in this world.

[Nabeel Ansari]

I wrote about this recently:

I find it peculiar to try and explain the importance of music in my life and my being. It seems, to me, that it is an idea so instrically common sense that I've never thought to attempt conveying it to another person. It has always been important to me, and will always be; in any case, it will be a fruitful exercise to illustrate why, and how.

I connect most with music, but not for the same reasons most others do. Music, to me, is movement. Unlike static art, it can not be observed in components or be held up to specific analysis by sheer manner of time invariant inspection. Music establishes itself in the domain of time, by the nature of it being sound. Like sound, it is nothing at any point in time, and only can be perceived as time goes on. Events take place, and then they cease to take place. Music is dynamic, with action and rest. No other medium can be a total parallel to music. Visual art does not move. Photography does not move. Motion picture moves, but can still be perceived when paused (and in implementation, is made up of a string of singular, time invariant events played sequentially in a specific time setting). Because music is only movement and can be nothing else, it is unique in its place as the medium of movement. It fills the sense in our ears, whether to balance the influx of visual information or simply to be its own experience. Its role is unique, and the ideas and expressions conveyed through music are unable to be replicated in any other artform to the same effect.

In addition to its fascinating nature, music also affects our cognitive function. A peculiar phenomenon that occurs with music in narrative is the concept of association. In the presence of emotional and intellectual stimuli (such as a sad movie scene), the music will acts as a vessel for those stimuli. It's as if they are preserved with the music; when we again hear the music, our brain is inclined to respond by calling forth those stimuli, even though they are entirely mental at this stage. We again feel those emotions, or think those thoughts. Because of this, music, to me, is the second most powerful contributor to narrative (the first being the construction of the narrative itself). It has quite a deep affectation in our mental and emotional state that no other type of sensory information shares the same way.

[Nase]

interesting thoughts, though one thing: movies and music are very similar. your argument that a paused frame is unlike a paused track because it can still be perceived...the paused frame still has colors that have a certain frequency. the colors are moving, in other words. else you wouldn't perceive them.

the most interesting thing about all this is that everything can only be described by movement, i think. that's why there's this thing with likening music to the universe or the universe to music: it's all vibration.

[Nase]

so if you wanted to make an audio playback device that parallels the dvd player or whatever, you would make a winamp with a little granular buffer thingy, and make it repeat a little sample right where it pauses.

but we don't do that, right? cause it'd be a fucking nuisance.

which leads to this sort of obvious and simple conclusion: audio overkill is much easier to achieve than visual overkill. i mean, we can stare into the sun, that's overkill. or we look at something sad and that drags us down, but then, that's not sensory but emotional overkill.

i mean, isn't it weird how annoying audio can be? some midrange stuff can drive anyone insane over time, i'd wager.

it's just interesting how sensitive we are to audio, and how it's much harder to 'overdose' on video. at the same rate, we talk about video as the dominant sense.

seems a little contradictory.

[timaeus222]

Well, think of video as audio+picture. You can't examine audio with your ears when it's paused, but you can still look at a picture under the same time pausing conditions.

[Nase]

movie is audio+moving picture. video is just video.

sorry for the semantic nitpicking, but it helps me think.

see, i think you're confusing playback mechanisms, which could be changed rather easily, with core aspects of the art. that's why i went into this tangent in my 2nd post.

[timaeus222]

movie is audio+moving picture. video is just video.

sorry for the semantic nitpicking, but it helps me think.

see, i think you're confusing playback mechanisms, which could be changed rather easily, with core aspects of the art. that's why i went into this tangent in my 2nd post.

what? You can pause a movie, just like you can pause a video; just press the pause button. What are you getting at here?

[Nase]

what? You can pause a movie, just like you can pause a video; just press the pause button. What are you getting at here?

reread my posts pls

so if you wanted to make an audio playback device that parallels the dvd player or whatever, you would make a winamp with a little granular buffer thingy, and make it repeat a little sample right where it pauses.

but we don't do that, right? cause it'd be a fucking nuisance.[...]

see, i think you're confusing playback mechanisms, which could be changed rather easily, with core aspects of the art. that's why i went into this tangent in my 2nd post.

to elevate the way pause buttons are engineered to a core aspect of the art is a stretch.

the fact that the pauses work differently has entirely different reasons. sorry, i like tangents.

and the subject allows for many. for example, why is the visual pause not annoying at all? a visual glitch would be annoying, of course. quick repetition, worst with a drastic change in light. this is equivalent to a short piece of audio being repeated forever. so my analogy wasn't perfect either, because an audio pause equivalent to the standard video pause would be so short you could not hear it. so it would be effectively silence, but only to our ears. it would still be audio, just not audible to us. with colors we can perceive this extremely short loop. if it wasn't one, we would not see colors. or light. a complete visual pause would equal darkness, or more precisely, nothingness.

i may be talking out of my ass as i'm not an expert on visuals. input welcome.

Edited April 23, 2015 by Nase

[Nase]

and there's another simple conclusion: we are more used to effective audio silence than visual 'silence' (no input).

final verdict: i think i'm being so anal about labels because neblix answers the question "why do you like audio". and it's a good answer on that - made me think.

to differentiate again, neblix answered the music question as well, because audio and music partly overlap, of course. but his answer was much better if you take the audio. because in effect he's right, the audio pause is different. it's not in the audio spectrum.

silence in music is a pretty deep topic. the pause is an essential means of musical expression. it doesn't really have a visual counterpart except no movement. stillness.

so a still picture is a bit like a pause in the music. the scene is still present, but time stopped. we got some time to reflect on what has been said and on what may come. this occurs in movies naturally, of course. time to breathe in very reflective parts of the movie, if it has those.

so there is a reason for separating audio and music sometimes. in music, a pause means information, in audio, a pause means lack of information.

so once you go purely technical, you lose some information

Edited April 23, 2015 by Nase