Music and time

Music is meant to be listened with the heart, not only the ear. That is the part of music that appeals to the emotion. Emotion in music is sometimes lost when one only listen with the ears.

Melody is a strange thing as it is most often the only part in music that make us recall certain piece of music. The rhythmic part does not play that role. Maybe because if we could recall a piece of music from childhood, the melody is what we remember. The rhythm is almost always inevitably associated with it in our mind, whether it's a fast or slow rhythm.

Sight, smell, sound and taste. Each of them could evoked memories from our past. Scenes of old houses, river streams, clouds across the distant hills, children playing in the field brings back memories of travelling back to my mother's hometown when i was small. Smell of a certain perfume brought back the thoughts of standing in a crowded and smelly mini bus, and the welcome relief when a woman came onboard with her fresh-smelling perfume. Sometimes, all of a sudden, my mind recall certain memories instantly when i smell a certain perfume. Maybe those perfumes of old are still being used by women who cherished her past?

My niece likes to touch and lines up her toys and most all physical objects she sees. Doesn't most children likes to do that-stack, lines up, put things in a certain way. Then kick or knocks them down. Why is that? Scientists explained that children are just learning about space. How then, do they learn about time? Can one 'time' fit inside another 'time'? Can two or more 'time' fit side by side? They find that in music.

Watching the clouds goes by. At first glance, every clouds looked the same. But perception changed through passage of time. Consciousness does not pervade our senses at all time. Not all of it is present at a given moment. One cloud does not look the same as the next. Even if there were two identical clouds, sooner or later, they're going to looked different as time passes. Watching the clouds would make one realize that time is really relative. Watching any events of nature tends to do that to our senses.

It took so long for me to see the similarity in music itself. Music moves along. Films moved aloong too. Favourite scenes from a film could always be watched in an instant using the 'scene selection' menu. Certain interesting part of music could also be listened to using the 'search' function, but the search criteria is always the "time". Our sense of sight would like to tell us that we see everything in an instant. To certain extent, we have the choice to choose where we see in the big picture. Here or there. Wide or narrow. We can choose when we want to look at the picture too. This luxury is not accorded to our hearing.

The sense of hearing takes a serial passage through time. So little of music is made available to our senses at a given time. If there's an interesting passage in the music, we must listen to it now. Time passes and 'now' no longer is there. The hit of a snare drum is an instantaneous sound that will be lost if one failed to listen to it amidst the passionate vocals and ringing guitars.

We have a mental map of which part in the music contains which instrument. And sometimes we liked a certain part of a musical piece. The guitar solo. The snare and cymbal crashes. Good music let us discover musical sounds, effects, not heard previously, even after many, many years. And when one discover a certain sound in a favourite that was not perceived earlier, it could make for a fulfilling experience. Like gaining a new, pleasant memory to keep.

I have always thought good music is more than discovering new sound. More than hearing a strange bleep of a synthesizer buried in those atmospheric washes of strange noises that sounded so musical somehow.

Good music grows with us. It allows us to discover certain aspects of ourselves that we have develop through life's experience. Like going through the pain of losing someone. No answer could be found to comfort us. No truth that can be understood in those moments. But somehow, with no clear explanation, music help us to escape from the pain. To be able to project our pain in the music itself, somehow.

If the world does come to a standstill and time stood still, music will no longer make any sense. It would be washed away with time...