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Entry tags:
music musings
Writing my eco book while listening to my Spotify list "Romantic/dramatic" and have to wonder about the existence of music once again. Certain sounds arranged one after another evoking feelings, even specific scenarios. Latter is greater part cultural but former greater part innate, at least it feels so, though it can very well be that the music available to me even from remote cultures has gone through a filter which removes the incomprehensible and hard-to-relate. One example springs to mind. What little I've been exposed to gamelan music is interesting but can't gleam much emotional message or satisfaction from it.
One of those universal human things, which all human peoples share yet no other animal shares – I mean birds sing and wolves howl and so on, but that's more analogous to language (I think).
Human specialities: Music, fashion, religion (split later into science&philosophy&maybe psychology?)...
Fashion (in a very broad sense) is about being aware of oneself as an individual in a social setting.
Religion is very multi-faceted, but something about dealing with the need to have structure in the universe, an overarching story, which our brains are looking for.
Music = ? social cohesion, but also just the satisfaction of being able to affect one's emotional state quite precisely. But why sounds? Why not smells? Or touching different materials? These was this article titled something like "Science at last discovers why music exists!" and it was that it was discovered listening to music releases dopamine in the brain. Eeehh, thanks for nearly nothing. We already know it's pleasurable and that it's specifically dopamine, well, interesting for brain researchers but not one step closer to answering "why?".
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in other news, I've reserved almost all the tickets I need to get from Finland to Dublin for Worldcon by ground travel. Just the bus ticket from Helsinki to Turku harbour missing, they haven't been released yet. I never realised Ireland was so far away. Most of Europe can be reached in 2 days, to Dublin it's almost 3. It's going to be uncomfortable and expensive (at least more expensive than flying Ryanair or such - about 350€ just one way...) but that's my extreme experience. No mountain climbing or deep diving, just sitting in a bus and train and bus and train for nearly 3 three days straight.
One of those universal human things, which all human peoples share yet no other animal shares – I mean birds sing and wolves howl and so on, but that's more analogous to language (I think).
Human specialities: Music, fashion, religion (split later into science&philosophy&maybe psychology?)...
Fashion (in a very broad sense) is about being aware of oneself as an individual in a social setting.
Religion is very multi-faceted, but something about dealing with the need to have structure in the universe, an overarching story, which our brains are looking for.
Music = ? social cohesion, but also just the satisfaction of being able to affect one's emotional state quite precisely. But why sounds? Why not smells? Or touching different materials? These was this article titled something like "Science at last discovers why music exists!" and it was that it was discovered listening to music releases dopamine in the brain. Eeehh, thanks for nearly nothing. We already know it's pleasurable and that it's specifically dopamine, well, interesting for brain researchers but not one step closer to answering "why?".
----
in other news, I've reserved almost all the tickets I need to get from Finland to Dublin for Worldcon by ground travel. Just the bus ticket from Helsinki to Turku harbour missing, they haven't been released yet. I never realised Ireland was so far away. Most of Europe can be reached in 2 days, to Dublin it's almost 3. It's going to be uncomfortable and expensive (at least more expensive than flying Ryanair or such - about 350€ just one way...) but that's my extreme experience. No mountain climbing or deep diving, just sitting in a bus and train and bus and train for nearly 3 three days straight.
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