Well this thread certainly got me thinking, which is what I love best about this forum. So to describe what music means to me I may have to explain a theory I had a while ago. I thought about the idea of mnemonic devices, those little tricks everyone uses to remember important things. Everyone has a system they use to store thoughts and information so they don't forget. I myself use more mnemonic devices than I can count. So that leads me to believe that people use other kinds to mental devices to correct the quirks in their personalities and even emotional and psychological problems.
Without straying too far from my point I'll say that I use music as a mental device for such things as keeping time. I can't think of a single moment in my past when I havn't heard a song playing in the background of my mind. Sometimes I have two or three songs overlaping. I figure that this music supplements my biological clock, I don't have to wear a watch because I always know what time it is. If I wanted to I could train myself to glance at the clock at exact intervals (in highschool I always caught myself looking at the clock every fifteen minutes and it went on for years).
But when I actually listen to music there's a part of me that devotes a lot of my attention to the song. It organizes my thoughts in a funny way. If I'm listening to the radio and there's a lot of talk and commercials I get distracted but if there's a song playing I can concentrate on what I'm doing. For me music is very practical and utilitarian in some ways.
And when I can devote my full attention to a piece of music I lose all sense of my surroundings and all my other senses are dulled, unless I'm using Winamp with a visualization plugin. I enjoy music most when it's just sound because it can be an environment in whcih I live rather than just a sound my ears detect.
But the strange thing is that all my dreams are mostly visual with no sound. If I do dream of music I never remember it when I wake up. I think it's weird.
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