Sunday, March 23, 2014

About the music....

So, about the music...

The music's is where and when and how you can reveal yourself...to a great many or to a great few or to no one at all. It is an art form equally invigorating when experienced as a group as it can be experienced in solitude. It can augment solitude, it can affect a feeling of transcendence - you are no longer just in your bedroom... It affects the narrative drama and adventurism of great novels - to give you escapism into a world that feels all your own - but it also affects a communion, a ferocious and felicitous expressionism (often through dance, i.e. dancing in a group), letting off steam in such a way, in such a place (with low lights and no sound but the beat and the melody and the groove smooshing into your ear holes to a dazzle you and drive you), like you've found your tribe and they speak the language you've been humming-in-your head all day and here you all are with a chance to shout this language together and no one will care how loud you are. Louder the better.

Music.

It's fantasy. It makes you feel cool. Helps you appreciate what actually IS cool. It gives you catharsis. It gives you a chance to contemplate. You can grieve to it as much as groove.

It is your theme, your march, your own last slow dance in the spotlight when the dance-floor's cleared just for you.

It's your ballad, it's your dirge, it's your anthem, it's your headbanging, fist-pumping, don't-care-who's-watching chance to freak-out... Some people call it a jam... They used to call it a joint... Some just call it "tracks..."
It's yours, for you, your transport...
It's your transport...
But, ya know, I woke up thinking about this, wanting to employ the phrase "transfiguration..."

Where you achieve a radiance - something declarative and dynamic that finally glows about you. Am I far off on this? Call it the soundtrack effect - but that song you love so much is taking you to where you want to be -at which you'll arrive looking just how you want to look, moving just how you want to move. I'm not saying that I'll see this radiance, I'm not saying you're crazy (or that I'm not crazy); I'm mostly saying that this is where you'll go, in your head, to an emotional epicenter, some cerebral cave where you reboot and readjust and, hell, maybe even regenerate... Refuel, perhaps. Replay. Record. Remix. Replay. Replay. Replay.

But this isn't a book and it's not a film and it's not a frame of canvas with dried acrylic paint... These are intangible, indescribable sounds, tantalizing timbres, charming reverberations and plucky, riffy, twangy notes that resonate against your heartstrings - the warm and fuzzies, the goosebumps, the hair on the back of your neck, the ringing in your eardrums... the  melody that will not leave your head... These aren't set stories, a set strip of film with unchanging images or a painting that will always have the same face on it - that guitar will sound different to you tomorrow morning and it will actually take you to a new place, a different place, almost every time.

Right?

But more than making you feel cool...

There's the "stress hormone," identified by psychologists, that being Cortisol. Think of everything stress does to your body and how you operate - its coming from this "flight-or-fight" hormone released by your adrenaline glands when you get scared or anxious or worried.

Psychology Today: The Neuroscience of Music, Mindset and Motivation 

Identify the target mindset you want to click into and then use music to tap into this conscious state-of-mind by entering 'up' through a "trap door" buried at a sub-conscious level.



And then there's its power to heal:
Los Angeles Times - Looking Into The Healing Effects Of Music
"There's tension in music...and then it resolves. When you have these tension releases, they hit us in our brain, and they make us feel good. We can play with that in the future. This is just the tip of the iceberg." Neurosurgeon Christopher Duma, a musician (also) who started Foundation for Neurosciences, Stroke and Recovery in California, found that, experimenting with  music as therapy: triggered the memories of Alzheimer's patients. And Parkinson's sufferers could better accomplish a physical test to put pegs in holes while listening to the music.

I've got nothing else to add.
I just wanna put some headphones on and listen to some music...




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