What comes to mind when you are asked, what is music ? A common answer is: music is deliberately organised sound. Then, what do you think after that. Does your favourite piece of music float into your head, or that strange avant-garde piece you heard the other day that made you really question whether it was music at all. When I ask this question to myself, I first tell myself that music is organised sound (which is the essential structure to music). When I think a little deeper, I see emotion being directly transformed into sound waves across the air. To me, this is music. This is why I love music.

Music is often describes as a universal language. This means that if people living on a remote mountain in India heard the famous Jaws theme by John Williams they would feel the same tension as those living in New York. Essentially, the music would communicate to both people that something bad was about to happen. Yet, the literal words: “something bad is about to happen” would not have been able to be communicated through spoken language. Therefore, music surpasses even the ability of spoken language to communicate emotion.

Music is as universal as emotion is universal to the human experience

This analogy shows why I think that music is so effective in expressing emotions: When spoken or written language is perceived in your mind it has the ability to turn the tap on. Sometimes this happens and the bath begins to fill. You eventually have a full bath and the language has created an emotion inside you. On the other hand, music presents to you an already full bath that you can immediately dip into. Music did not have to create the flow of water (emotion), because the water is music itself.

Music is a particularly special form of expression. Playing music has been shown through PET scans to activate more areas in the brain than almost any other activity. This includes painting, dancing and playing sport. Music is so effective at reaching deep areas of the brain that it is effective in reducing symptoms of dementia (not just because of the joy in taking part in the activity but because it activates long dormant areas of the brain).

“Where words fail, music speaks.”
― Hans Christian Andersen