Bulldog Bash, one of the biggest music festivals in Starkville, took place last weekend. With so much revelries revolving around music, sometimes we should stop and question, what is this thing we call music and why do we find it so appealing? Our liking for music is paradoxical in nature. For instance, why do we generally find repetition of the same sounds monotonous, but most of our favorite songs consist of a repeating chorus? And how is it that a note by itself has no value to us, but when a series of these noises are strung together in a systematic manner, they suddenly have enough power to change our moods?
Since repetition of the same notes and verses can become uninteresting, I have wondered if I could possibly compose a piece that lacks any repetition whatsoever. Turns out, that is not a good idea at all. Scott Rickard, a scientist who received his PhD from Princeton University, presented a piano sonata that had no repetitive pattern during a Ted Talk he hosted. The piece ended up being horribly unappealing to listeners. For those of you brave enough to listen to the music, he titled it “The World’s Ugliest Music.”
So I am forced to conclude, we need a repeating element in music to find it appealing. In fact, research backs up the conclusion. Another Ted Talk video by Elizabeth Hellmuth titled “Why We Love Repetition in Music,” claimed people prefer digitally altered versions of a song that has repetitions as opposed to original versions composed by human beings.
The reason we like patterns in music so much may be because we enjoy the comfort of familiar sounds just as we like familiar faces and shapes that we associate with pleasant memories. The research presented by Hellmuth also found that when a line is repeated multiple times, our attention shifts from the singing to the different instruments in the background. Also, when we sing and tap along with the chorus of a song, it not only makes us a listener but also an active participant. Maybe we as people enjoy this so much because it seems as if we are part of the song’s composition.
Music seems uncanny when you think about what we are really doing to produce it. Beating and pulling on a bunch of objects to make sound and varying the pitch of our voice to utter words that normally would be spoken in a uniform tone, is an interesting way to look at the creation of music. It is an anticipated anomaly that we find this absurdity amusing when no other living creature stops what it is doing to group together and create noise for enjoyment.
It must be because along with our very physical existence, we are made of a spiritual component that enjoys different frequencies of stimulations. In this case, it is auditory stimulations. We can observe the power of music when we look at how every religion has its chants that make the followers feel closer to a creator they believe to be larger than their own lives. It may be that a repeating segment takes us into an immersion that gives us an escape out of the reality of the physical world. Who knows for sure? Where silence is parallel to darkness, music is light to our ears.
