Music Imitating Life or Life Imitating Music

Music is kind of like another way of measuring reality. Just as I can measure my life over time, or by classes taken or places I've lived, I can measure my life by what music I was learning and listening to and singing.

History
To give a brief history, years zero through six were oldies for the most part: Joan Baez and Simon and Garfunkel and songs my mother sang to me when she woke me up, Sound of Music,  and Disney music. Songs from old Hindi movies and snippets of Wham's Last Christmas, and "Kissed by a rose!" and Fleetwood Mac as my first few years of life took place between India and Britain and Illinois and Madison. Music was so ubiquitous in my household and to me, it was normal and natural to break out into song.

In Springfield, IL, my mother had to implement a "no singing at the dining table" rule because my sister and I always singing pieces of songs as our hot food became cold. Throughout elementary school, I sang to myself during worktimes and recess, and sometimes got yelled at by my peers, while my teachers didn't always have the heart to shut me up. (But they had plenty of opportunities to, nonetheless, because I was really talkative.)

My actual point
I won't bore you with 15 more years of history, it suffices to say that I've always felt that we have a natural connection with music and it seems with every year that goes by, it grows stronger.
To me, music seems irreducible. That's not to say that you can't lift a melody and still do it justice-- but it means something different. It means something different with an addition or a subtraction from it, and thus, to me, anyone's cover of a different song is entirely different from the original. And to me, each element is of equal importance in a song-- lyrics or lack thereof, rhythms, melodies -- vocal or instrumental are all on the same plane. You may like a song for only one of them, sure. But each is important to the entire song.

And I think that beyond all of these things that may be compositional arguments, music runs through our veins and in our brains. Sometimes, I'll be going through a rough patch in my day or in my life, and a perfectly applicable song will run through my mind. Sometimes Come on Eileen will pump through my head while I'm taking a test, or Crown of Love will come and sing to my broken heart.

Something I've been wondering about for a long time now (I think I may have asked it in a previous blog entry) is whether the songs that get stuck in our heads are in the right key. Think about it. It's bouncing around in there uncontrollably and at times you just want to say "Get out of my head, you!" But it occurred to me that it was stuck in my head, and maybe I couldn't sing the words or anything, but it was still running like a recording. So I started to wonder if the songs that get stuck in our heads are in the right key. My theory is that even though we might not be able to reproduce the elements of the song, but we remember it right, as if it's a record playing in your head. I've tried to test it by waiting til a song gets stuck in my head and singing it as close to the key as I can. Then I check it with the actual song. And it worked! And it makes me think that music hits us close to the soul more than we can express.

Today I found out that researchers at Tufts University have found that the minor third in music (the traditional sad interval in western music, everpresent in my band's new song, Becoming Real and in pretty much every traditionally minor sad song) is used in Western speech to convey sadness the same way it does in music. This brings up questions about music's effect on life, or life's effect on music-- a more far-fetched-sounding argument. The lead author, Megan Curtis, says she's interested in studying Hindi speakers use of intervals in expression of sad speech to see whether those intervals are different, suggesting it's culturally learned. Else, if Indians do speak in minor third, maybe the minor third is universal. (I'm not sure that she'll find a pentatonic sad tone in Indians.)
They've looked at macaque monkeys that emit higher octave-like tones when they're jubilant, and descending tones when they're sad. Curtis says (on To the Best of Our Knowledge) that the study suggests that speech and music have a common ancestor... maybe singing came first?

It's weird that once a song is sung or released to the universe, you don't own it anymore. It has a life of its own-- it's free to get stuck in some stranger's head. And yeah, that's life, and everything you do always affects someone else somehow, but for some reason, people are realistic with music! The music someone chooses to listen to, alone, when no one's around or when people don't know what you're listening to, is like a direct path to their soul. It's feelings that you can't help but wear on your sleeve. Do you notice that when you meet someone you really like who shares a musical interest with you, you automatically listen to that music more? Or, when you sing a song to yourself and someone joins in, you like that person so much more? I know these are really silly things to point out, maybe I'm overexcited... but I think it's kind of crazy that we have this relationship with music. It's not just the music that has an effect on us, we have an effect on the music, I argue, and music is a very effective means of touching and connecting with one another.

(A link to the Curtis study: http://ase.tufts.edu/psychology/music-cognition/pdfs/Curtis&Bharucha2010Emotion.pdf)