What does music mean to you?

[Dawn]

Do you really listen to the lyrics? Perhaps envision that you are part of them? Put yourself in a fantasy during certain songs? Do you listen to songs that match your mood, or do you choose them to alter your mood?

Or is music just background sound for you?

[kristof47]

I can't really discribe it. If I don't hear music, I feel like something is missing. Mostly, it makes me happy and gives me energy. Like when I'm driving and I'm playing DHT - Alone at maximum volume, it gets me pumped. I drive faster and more aggressive, yet I'm also happy.
When I'm going out and drunk, the music sets my mood completly. Boring music and I'm depressed. Good music and I'm happy.

[nanook]

ahhhhhh, the question of all questions.
hmmmmmmmm, kristov is right, it is very hard to describe how music fits into one's niche.
i've said it many times.........it's the music which captures my interest, if not for this..........the words would never be heard by these ears.
i think we all know i'm a techno/metal head.
they may seem like two very extreme spectrums of the music genre, but i beg to differ. they are more alike than many may actually sit and ponder.
both are very much based and driven on their drum and bass line.
both can be repetitive at times.
let's face it, most heavy music is bearly audible or comprehensible, therefore, i can say that i luv it purely for it's melodies and riffs.
when i'm listening to trance/techno, i find i can listen to a song which has no lyrics and am just as profoundly affected. these songs can be so mezmorizing that i am completely entrenched in it and am taken away to every place i would like to be. i am happy.
music is my world. without it, as kristov, says, i feel as if something is missing.
and i am always looking for new and unique roads to travel, when it comes to music.
sometimes a song can make me feel so ecstatic, that i will literally get up and dance, with myself, around my house like a damned fool.
music can make a very bad day, become one worth trudging on toward.

but, Dawn, music can be everything u have listed and much, much more!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Ramona_A_Stone]

Vision.

Or, if you're up on your Sanskrit, darshan.



Physicists have known for a long time that our perceptions literally create the sensible world out of a phantom storm of quantum possibilities--that everything we see, touch and hear, from a point of view only slightly different from our own, does not exist at all.

"...Is that oak tree simply there, a given object in the landscape? Not at all. To a neutrino, which can pass through the entire earth in a few millionths of a second, solid objects are as vaporous as fog... Everything about that tree is malleable. To a proton, which takes billions of years to be born and then decay, the life an old oak is less than a split second. To a mayfly, with its lifespan of one day, the oak tree is literally eternal. To a Druid priest, the tree would be sacred, the home of forest deities, and therefore a tremendous source of power. To a logger it is just a days work."
--Chopra

Take any quality a tree might have, and it not only changes according to the perceiver, the perceiver is the creative force. To perceive the world, our brains transmute virtual photons into sensory information.

At a very young age, I realized that this process occurs in two different ways. One, it creates the phenomenal world of oak trees, land, sea and skyscapes, and our experience of other beings. Two, it creates an interior landscape of equal reality, equal beauty. In this interior world however, we are more free; we can dream, take flight, change shapes, see events unfold in more than three or four dimensions, travel infinite distances in the blink of a (third) eye.

It may be that this interior world is an echo of the neural process with which we assemble our vision of the exterior world, or that this interior world is preexisting, a model upon which we build our perceptions of the external, concrete world. In the end it doesn't matter, both worlds certainly inform each other with a strange and inescapable symmetry.

When I close my eyes and listen to music, I am travelling in this interior world. Brass sections become forests, guitars become rippling streams, voices become stones, pianos become mountains, a gong becomes a sunrise, and changes in tempo become the speed at which I am flying, swimming or otherwise moving, surveying it all.

Of course, listening to music is not always an intense trip into this interior world; sometimes we are only listening, thinking about the meanings of words, tapping our feet. But this is only a question of where we are placing our attention. In fact, when music is only 'background noise,' some part of us is still moving through that interior 'imaginary' landscape and sending messages back to our busy conscious selves, engaged as we are in whatever tasks and distractions, and saying this is a cavern full of shimmering jewels or this is a hot wind sparkling in a vast desert or this is a deep sea dive among colored corals and strange fantastic creatures.

Darshan means basically, "to be in the sight of" - to behold and be beheld, and this is what music means to me.

...And that human beings can create messages this complex, profound and beautiful for each other, is also what life means to me.

[nanook]

i have never read something so beautiful and inspiring.
when asked in a previous thread as to which artist/music we would like to know more about....

u have now answered my questions.

thank u.

do u know that your music makes me feel this way. this way that u speak of. only i am floating through space. capturing all of it's wonders and works. and from what darshan writes, this may actually be possible one day, or is already, only we are not aware yet.

if not, i'm asking God to allow me to be the protective angel of the black abyss, that is the universe, so i may witness the births of new stars or the death of old ones.

or guide man through their maiden voyages of time and space.

[theknife]

Originally posted by Dawn
Do you really listen to the lyrics? Perhaps envision that you are part of them? Put yourself in a fantasy during certain songs? Do you listen to songs that match your mood, or do you choose them to alter your mood?

Or is music just background sound for you?

All of the above...life needs a soundtrack and it's up to each and every one of us to create it. What is so phenomenally fantastic about the digital music revolution is that it allowed me to go back and recapture the soundtrack for various phases of my life...and this is pricelesss, because nothing, and I mean nothing, evokes emotion and memory and feeling like music.

[nanook]

Originally posted by theknife

and I mean nothing, evokes emotion and memory and feeling like music.

it's wild, isn't it?
but at the same time, i like creating new memories, with the newer music that comes into my life.

[theknife]

Originally posted by nanook


it's wild, isn't it?
but at the same time, i like creating new memories, with the newer music that comes into my life.

yup...and the ability to store the soundtracks as you create the memories as you go is just fantastic

[Snarkridden]

This forum is DEEP very deep, the contributors are wonderfully expressive with words, and obviously serious readers, to boot, so nice to be just a part of the scene.

Not into tecnho, but highly into digital music, do my own production and editing, of folk music, and that means WORLD folk not just English.

Main likes are Celtic, but followed up by Bretton dance, anything lively, not too much into stuff that makes you cry, I prefer to have my tingles in the spine, if you know what I mean?

New adverturous folk music, new rhythms, new instruments, young energetic Scottish groups like Malinky (Watch out for them)

Going places pretty soon...

So thats my offering, no fancy avatars, no fancy picture uploads, don't have a clue how to do it YET, but I have lots of English folk muso's pictures taken at major English festivals, like Sidmouth etc

Snark,

[Ramona_A_Stone]

Welcome to the music forum Snark. Did no one issue you your hip-waders? ...Terrible oversight, I'll get a pair out to you right away.

A bit off topic, sounds like you'd be familiar with Mouth Music? Definitely my favorite Scottish band. I've loved their first two albums, Puert-A-Beul, and Mo-Di for years now, and just (a couple of days ago) purchased Seafaring Man, (2001) to which I am currently hopelessly addicted.

Hopefully you'll turn us all on to a taste of what you're producing soon.

[gazdet]

Welcome to the Music Forum Snarkridden.

Originally posted by Snarkridden
...into digital music, do my own production and editing, of folk music, and that means WORLD folk not just English.

.....we look forward to listening to some of your work.

So thats my offering, no fancy avatars,
Snark,

dude, you gotta be kiddin', your avatar rocks! lol

[Mazer]

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.