Notes

I wonder why instruments are played with vibrato. It's almost universal--if it has the capability to do so, people developed a method of playing the instrument that involves wavering around one note. Bowed string instruments--violin, cello, the Chinese erhu--and also plucked string instruments like guitar, as well as voice. Why are humans attracted to vibrato?


Does it render instruments more similar to the sound of the human voice? Is it because when we speak we change notes very slightly on words, or at least on emphasis in the different phonemes of the word? So if the note itself doesn't vary, there is at least change in the stress behind different aural units and thus our ears are predisposed to find small modulations in sound and find them pleasing. In that case, the underlying principle seems to be language. Is music language?


I remember in music class we discussed what exactly music was and whether something like Gregorian chanting or Koranic reading was considered music. I think it would be incredibly fascinating to study the neurological basis of music--because here is something so fundamental to humans, so universal, accessible (it's around us all the time!), and yet we know so little about it. We understand very little about it, since we do know things like what chords sound pleasant and how they can be mathematically described. Oh, there was this one old video I remember watching, it might have been disney and maybe it was fantasia, where a narrator talked while strings got proportionally cut and vibrated at different frequencies...what was that??


Furthermore, music does odd things. There's the fundamental power of music to make you feel something. But why does that happen? Why can sound invoke pictures, colors, moods, stories while the other senses do not? Or if they do, seeing an image is already engaging the part of your brain that processes visually; eating food generally doesn't grab you and change your entire consciousness (unless you are Marcel Proust, or really really into food and probably also french) and let you keep experiencing that the whole time; etc with the rest of the senses. I guess that seeing an image can put people into emotions, or create stories--otherwise the entire genre of modern "art" would just be a blob on another blob--but it doesn't engage the rest of the mind-senses.


I always played piano better when I had a story that the music told. I remember when I was learning a piece for the WMTA competition called La Lutine Puck, my piano teacher Karen (who made me love piano and was just an amazing person) and I made every phrase capture some part of Puck's character. He was a mischievous elfin thing, who pranced around. Another classical piece I played which regrettably I can't remember the title of since all classical pieces are called the same name plus or minus an arrangement of letters and numbers (I think it was a Bach) had counterpoint voices, which I made into a tale about two people who loved each other but the the woman couldn't love him back for some grandiose, Baroque reason. Some pieces, like the Raindrop prelude, made the story itself--but still, it was so fun to darkly rage through the thunder part and suddenly return to recapitulation. Everything relaxed, the whole atmosphere changed, and I always imagined a rainbow against dark clouds receding in the distance while the sun shone through the rare type of rain that falls sometimes after a storm and the sun comes out.


Anyway. Getting carried away. Music does odd things. The Mozart Effect, this effect--http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/131/3/866.full which was a study where stroke patients who listened to music showed the most recovery. The Royal London Philharmonic played a concert for plants. Music and memory are somehow linked, since Alzheimer's patients often remember more when listening to music. Wish it'd help my memory cause it needs it.


It's late and I need to sleep but one last thing that popped into my head (but is a thought I've thought of before--I'm like a recycling factory for thoughts). What is the effect of lyrics on music? Does putting lyrics to music limit the possible interpretations of that melody, that sequence of tones because then do you listen to the words and not simply the music itself? Or does it open it up to more interpretations, since you have a semantic story on top of a musical one? Hopefully tonight will be one of those nights when I sometimes hear orchestral music before falling asleep. Too bad we can't record the sounds in our dreams.


Also--to think about later: what happens when your mind creates while you're asleep? Like seeing an idea for a painting, or being in a room (where you're like, a giant mushroom or something) but on the wall is a painting and that painting is one you've never seen before but your mind made up to decorate your dream room with. It's like a creation within a creation.


STOP! BED! okay.