The Affective Experience of Music

Last night I saw Wolf Parade perform at the Boston House of Blues.  Perhaps because I’m getting older and standing still in a crowd for an hour kills my back, but I’m finding myself less able to get wrapped up in the concert experience like I did in high school and college.  I no longer find myself caught up and carried away.  Instead, I found myself thinking about the ‘concert experience’ more than experiencing the concert itself.   What I’d like to think about today is the experience of listening to music, how music engages the human body, and what kinds of affective experience (emotions) are produced from music.

Since we began dating, Nate has been teaching me how to listen to music. Sure, I was into music before, and had what I consider fairly good taste. But most of the time when I listen to music, I am engaged in another activity, while walking around the city, reading on the bus, or as I write. I rarely just listen to music on its own; I’m a passive music consumer.  What Nate has been teaching me is to engage with music, to give it an active ear. Mind you, these are not necessarily Nate’s words. I don’t want to injure his ‘street cred’ by my awkward word choice.  Like analyzing sports, I’m new to this music game.   My artistic medium of choice is text. I’m a reader.  The visual-oral appearance of the words on page engages me.  Yet, as I’m embracing other artistic mediums such as film, music, and even sports and dance, I’m finding they differ in how they engage the human senses. We listen to music.  We apprehend it aurally, first and foremost.   Though I’ve always enjoyed music, I’ve found I have to train myself to really listen.  I’m learning to take note of the nuanced variety of sound, and finding this aural concentration is changing my listening experience. 

Yet, music is not solely aural. It is experienced through a living body, which simultaneously sees, feels, smells, tastes.  How do we consider these other senses when we talk about music?  Music criticism very reasonably focuses on the aural quality of music.   But, how do we discuss the bodily experience of music?  How we listen to music matters.  The situations in which we listen to music shape not only how we hear, but also how we understand that music.  We listen with IPOD and headphones, with a stereo or computer, at a bar, attending a concert or even producing music ourselves.  Each of these situations invokes the different senses to varying degree, producing individualized emotions that affix to the experience of hearing that music, eventually embedding that sensory and emotional experience as a memory.  We carry these emotional memories of music with us, and we can often visually recall a time when we heard a certain song. How do these different music-listening situations engage the other senses and fulfill certain emotional needs?

As we listen to music, what do our bodies and minds do in the process of listening? Where do your eyes fixate? If you close your eyes, do you experience music more directly?   While music is primarily aural, it is not exactly non-visual.  Listening to music is an embodied experience; music is experienced through a living body engaged in multiple senses.  Our vision and sense of touch are not suspended as we listen.  At the Wolf Parade concert, I could feel the vibrations of sound in my stomach.  I could see the musicians on stage. I even bounced around a little to the beat (or in my case, slightly off the beat).  The songs, which I’ve only heard through my headphones or stereo, are now performed in front of my eyes.  I’ve often noted the feeling of the uncanny when attending concerts.  When you know a band’s songs intimately, yet have never seen them perform either on video or live, the experience of confronting the band’s visual existence can be surprising, incongruous and strange.  You sometimes doubt that that voice, that sound, is coming from the person you see on stage. This disconnect comes from how we individually imagine/visualize music when listening without a visual aid or spectacle like a concert or music video. Listen to a song, close your eyes, and what do you imagine seeing? 

Music has been described as the most abstract art form, for, as the argument goes, music resists visual representation.  What does a sound look like? How would you visually represent a song? Yet, if we turn to our cultural collection of music videos, we see music represented in incredible visual variety.  Music can be represented visually, but these representations are of course personalized interpretations, translations into the visual medium of film.  Are there certain principles or patterns to how we translate music into the visual?

I recently rewatched The Soloist.  The overly sentimental previews for this movie did this artistically challenging and moving film little justice, and I recommend that you check it out if you haven’t already.  Director Joe Wright takes up the challenge of visualizing music. He does this most successfully through shots of the affective experience of listening to music. Throughout the film, Wright uses close ups on the characters playing and/or listening to music, registering their emotional, affective experience as they listen. Through this pairing of music and the human body listening to music, Wright gives the abstractions of music a visual bodily presence.  The Soloist shows how we feel music, how the sounds become embodied within us by engaging our senses.  I’m still working out why all of this fascinates me.  This post feels scattered and confused, but I feel as if these ideas are touching upon some relationship I'm  seeing between art and the human.  So, to end this post of a million little questions, I'll return back to the big questions:  What are our bodily, emotional, and mental relationships to different art forms? And, what do we need from these relationships?