How Music Works

Throughout the history of recorded music, we have tended to value convenience over quality every time. Edison cylinders didn’t really sound as good as live performers, but you could carry them around and play them whenever you wanted. LPs, revolving slower, didn’t sound as rich as 45s or 78s, but you didn’t have to attend to them as much. And cassettes? Are you kidding? We were told that CDs would last forever and sound squeaky clean, but they really don’t sound as good as LPs, and the jury is out regarding their durability. The spectrum of sound on analog mediums has an infinite number of gradations, whereas in the digital world everything is sliced

When I later heard about bands actually paying to play in certain clubs, I knew things had been perverted in a terrible way. The desperate, innate desire to create and perform had been exploited rather than supported.

We carry our own soundtrack with us wherever we go, and the world around us is overlaid with our music. Our whole life becomes a movie, and we can alter the score for it over and over again: one minute it’s a tragedy and the next it’s an action film. Energetic, dreamy, or ominous and dark: everyone has their own private movie going on in their heads, and no two are the same.

where’s the surprise if you let the audience in on what’s about to happen? Well, odds are, if you don’t alert them, half the audience will miss it. They’ll blink or be looking elsewhere. Being caught by surprise is, it seems, not good. I’ve made this mistake plenty of times. It doesn’t just apply to stage stuff or to a dramatic vocal moment in performance, either. One can see the application of this rule in film and almost everywhere else. Stand-up comedians probably have lots of similar rules about getting an audience ready for the punch line

Depending on where you hear it—in a concert hall or on the street—or what the intention is, the same piece of music could either be an annoying intrusion, abrasive and assaulting, or you could find yourself dancing to it.

As cognitive scientist Daniel Levitin points out, too much confirmation—when something happens exactly as it did before—causes us to get bored and to tune out. Little variations keep us alert, as well as serving to draw attention to musical moments that are critical to the narrative.

it’s assumed that the folks who support fine music would be less likely to commit heinous crimes than the human flotsam that frequent a honky-tonk or a techno club

The implication is that great work should, if it is truly great, not be of its time or place. We should not be aware of how, why, or when it was conceived, received, marketed, or sold. It floats free of this mundane world, transcendent and ethereal.
This is absolute nonsense.

Canadian writer Colin Eatock points out that classical music has been piped into 7-Elevens, the London Underground, and the Toronto subways, and the result has been a decrease in robberies, assaults, and vandalism.5 Wow—powerful stuff. Music can alter behavior after all! This statistic is held up as proof that some music does indeed have magical, morally uplifting properties. What a marketing opportunity!

prehistorically early on—all art forms were communally made, which had the effect of reinforcing a group’s cohesion and thereby improving their chances of survival. In other words, writing (storytelling), music, and art had a practical use, from an evolutionary perspective