I love music. I spend a lot of time learning about its design and production. Despite my hearing loss, I try to play it. A question that has followed my efforts without answer is: Why does music wield such potency? Glib answers such as our pulses are rhythmic and melody mimics voice don’t suffice. Neither my pulse nor amusical vocalizations stir me this way. Pulsetaking while listening to talk radio is not known to stir the spirit. There is a greater mechanism at play, and I think I figured something out about it!
Psychology in the last half century has revealed that our brains are, more than anything else, storytellers. They select data from our copious sensory input and past experiences, stringing together both a linear thread of events as well a contextual tapestry into which that thread is woven. In studies where the data has gaps (brain trauma, surgery, dementia, for example) the brain will string together narratives that fit the extant information. With dreams, strange narratives are synthesized as memories are formed and associated with others. And sadly, when an individual’s narrative no longer dovetails with reality, a psychosis is diagnosed.
We are storytellers.I believe that music, abstract in its rhythm, tone, and often lyric, forces the brain to develop similarly, however abstract, narratives. I use the word abstract in a precise sense; I mean it here as drawn away from and with only indirect association with tangible reality. In the human experiential realm, abstract would not mean what we see, hear, touch, and smell, rather in this usage I mean our inner life of emotions. One process that may be going on with music, is that it bypasses the tangible, and triggers our inner and ubiquitous storyteller to work with pure, clean, rarefied emotional states to create a sometimes shimmering, sometimes leaden narrative (in the case of a melody) or tapestry (in the case of larger works), that carries us on a uniquely personal and unburdened journey through our emotional spaces.
How could this be tested? A correlative study done by survey that looked at imagination and ability to suspend disbelief (as proxies for storytelling capacity), and the diversity and intensity of musical preferences (as proxies for inner musical experience) might shed some light on any connection.