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What is a tune? A series of intervals, a series of different notes at different pitches, a sequence of notes forming a rhythm. The tune is simply what's going around your head at the moment. Some people seem inherently to have this music whizzing around inside them, whether they are able to musically express it, or not. How fast can a tune go, how slow can a tune go. Spaces of silence can also be a vital component of a tune. Think of The Beatles, 'A Hard Days Night'. Arguably the pause after the first chord is played is as important as the chord itself. A single note played on a piano, for instance, can trigger in us an entire song from memory, because of the timbre of the note. Think of the opening note of Elton John's 'Bennie And The Jets', it sounds distinctive, just that one note. The air where the note was recorded, the piano and type of tuning, the force used when hitting the note, the position his finger was hovered over the key all have a part to play. Record Producers, good ones, are extraordinarly adept at picking up the type or brand of instrument just from a few short sounds. Examples of such, King Tubby, Joe Meek - were almost scientific in their ability to re-wire components and know exactly how it would a change a recorded sound, a valuable asset in a record producer. Yet, what is a tune and what effect does this have on us? Dr Daniel Levitin is a cognitive psychologist who runs the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal. He says 'By the age of 5 we are all musical experts, so this stuff is clearly wired really deeply into us.' Levitin's colleagues credit him for focusing attention on how music affects our emotions, previous generations of psychoacousticians studied narrower questions about how the brain perceives musical sounds. This all reminds me of stories of people with dementia, who have lost such an amount of memory they can't even recognize their wife, yet can still hum or sing a song from their youth perfectly and not only that, they appear to remember the melody and the way it affected them. A lot of our musical tastes may well be formed by chance hearings of music not of our own choice before we are five years old, in the same way a youngster can more easily learn a language, another verbal skill, at younger ages. With our emotions all over the place, during puberty, we seem to latch onto music as a means of keeping us stable. Often, the music heard and picked up upon during those years more easily 'stays' with us than music heard at any other time in our lives. Music and emotion must be inherently linked together, yet this still seems inexplicable. It remains a mystical, magical thing. Suzanne Hasner, chairwoman of the music therapy department at Berklee College of Music in Boston says 'Deep in our long-term memory is this rehearsed music, it is processed in the emotional part of the brain, the amygdala. Here’s where you remember the music played at your wedding, the music of your first love, that first dance. Such things can still be remembered even in people with progressive diseases. It can be a window, a way to reach them…' Music can seemingly reduce negative emotions like fear, distress and depression. Can music really make you a happier person, then? Well, that's a subject that's always fascinated me and I have no answer. What music makes me happy wouldn't be the same music that makes Joel, a prog-metal fan from Sweden happy. Yet sometimes it is. Nobody has the answers, it seems. All we seem to know is that listening to music definitely affects our emotions, can seemingly have a part to play in the healing process and reportedly, affects the same parts of the brain used for enjoyment of food and sex. Yet, music apparently isn't essential for our survival. I love the fact Horror films have these certains types of stabbing strings, brief sharp bursts designed to raise our temperatures and blood pressures and we associate those types of sounds with that genre and with 'scary' things. We associate light classical music with love and calmness. We associate punk music with anger. These associations have been built up over time, passed on from generation to generation and seemingly survive the change of personnel originally spouting said views. Yet, even with commonly held perceptions such as the horror music industry, no two people seem to 'feel' music in exactly the same way. This brings us back to Dr Levitin's view that we are all fully formed 'music experts' at the age of five. Everything we basically are is there by that age. It can only then be enhanced or reduced, learned or learned out of, yet it always will remain. It's possibly why we see 70s bands lauding 50s rock and roll, 90s acts lauding 70s glam, 00's acts lauding the 80s. It's the genneration gap yet more importantly, it's the music that they heard when they were very young. Whatever emotions were expressed and felt in those first few years will have formed links in the brain it's forever hard to be rid of. Personally, at a local english countryside village fete, they played 'Senses Working Overtime' by XTC. That would have been 1981, I would have been 7 years old. Yet, that still strikes a chord within me as a pivotal moment in my own 'musical development'. I knew at the time nothing about what I was hearing, just that it prodded areas of my musical memory already open to appreciate such sounds. I was already done for and other musical forms may well still be appreciated, but i'm sure there is 'an ideal' for me, perhaps a band has already touched upon said ideal, perhaps not. It will be different for each and every person. If everything musically I appreciated was put together into one great mixing pot however, the ending results would be a big sloppy mess. Emotions? Fear? Loudness, constrast. Anger? Speed, aggression. Happiness? Your earliest happy musical memory. Sadness? Your earliest calmingly emotional musical memory. Tenderness? Soft and kind. Solemnity? Quiet and polite. What is a tune? How can we describe it? It's a 'catchy' tune is one often used by record reviewers, even knowing each readers knowledge of that phrase 'catchy' will be slightly different. For some, catchy may be The Beatles, for others, Motorhead. It's a fairly useless thing to say, yet we are short of words to adequately describe music in any logical sense. We can only ever express how it makes us feel. |