Music, Gratification and Us.

This essay is from a time I took myself more seriously than I ought to, also before a friend introduced me to Medium. Even though it has its flaws, I am pleased with this piece, and I imported it here along with the other piece from my previous blog.

Back when this blog was a draft (under a different name, on Tumblr), I tried to start by writing an essay about good music, and when that draft turned into something too deep and too serious for the blog, I decided to put that one on the backburner. Still, no matter how deep I went trying to write that, I could keep one concept in the center: gratification.

Not unlike other organisms, Homo Sapiens Sapiens expects some sort of gratification as a result of their actions. Making or listening to music, be it directly or indirectly, provides such gratification. When the gratification is provided indirectly, it is easier to observe causal relations. For example, music that’s made/listened to for accompanying meditation incorporates elements that make it more relaxing than a military march and this difference seems to be superficial and natural upon initial inspection.

I can almost hear all you postmodernists saying “Woah there, what tells you I don’t go to sleep listening to military marches and mosh to ‘yoga music’?”. I accept that musical elements gain their meaning through convention in a cultural context, thoughts on music cannot be based on any other premise unless one ignores the musical diversity of the world. Yet, we can clearly observe that certain musical elements that gain a certain meaning in a certain cultural context do have effects that arise from the meaning that they gained.

I can almost hear all you non-postmodernists saying “Context?! Convention?! What’s that got to do with anything? Certain music conveys certain feelings!”. But, it isn’t hard to observe that, when nobody thinks that a quietly, softly played piano, a slow tempo or a minor scale is sad, then nothing in the nature of these elements make them so.

So far, I’ve explained the gratification that music provides indirectly through the meaning it gains in the cultural context. What about the gratification that it causes directly? How does music work when it isn’t providing gratification through practical use? How does it mesmerize us? How come we are able to compare two pieces of music in terms of gratification, what causes us to distinguish one from the other and like it more?

First of all, music is an art form, and art has the potential to create extraordinary experience. While our experience related to most of the things that we do or are exposed to in our lives grows duller and duller, pieces of art bring together certain possibilities from an infinite universe of possibilities at each occurrence and each piece can cause an entirely novel experience. Art is a way to escape from the tyranny of the strong and practical connections between our brain cells! ART IS, IN THE BATTLE OF DISCOVERY AGAINST MYELIN… Woah there, got carried away. This is where we should get to some sort of resolution.

Music provides us gratification as directly as possible when it causes an extraordinary, unusual, novel auditory experience. I think this was what I was getting at while I wrote the previous piece.

So, if a piece of music solely needs to cause an unusual auditory experience to provide gratification, why are there any conventional forms of music at all? Wouldn’t we be able to produce even more extraordinary, unusual and novel pieces if we made random sounds all the time?

The relation between the cultural context and music comes to my rescue once again. To derive gratification from a novel experience, sensory input is not enough. It is necessary to perceive the sensory input as a coherent whole(in this case, the auditory input as a musical phenomenon). In this case, a good piece of music (music that can cause direct and genuine gratification) has two effects, (i) presents or invokes some elements of a cultural context to allow its perception as a piece of music and (ii) makes novel and original connections between these elements. The artist progressively gains a potential to produce better pieces as they put more effort in both becoming familiar with the forms that already exist within the cultural context and experimenting towards bending these forms to achieve unique results. They acquire and improve the skill of creating more satisfactory experiences.

I have been thinking about these experiences that touch unusual spots on my brain at unexpected moments and tickle my neurons. And now I started writing about them. I really enjoyed it. I hope you do too. If you think something’s unclear, or if you disagree, the comment section welcomes you.

Thanks for joining me on the first step of this adventure.
Kerem

Originally published at canvasmadeoftime.wordpress.com on March 19, 2017.