# Is music different?



## Gaspard de la Nuit (Oct 20, 2014)

Is there, as some people suggest, something different about music from its sister arts? Why does it often seem to affect people more immediately and more powerful than other forms of art - or does it? How did humans acquire the ability to appreciate music?


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Gaspard de la Nuit said:


> Is there, as some people suggest, something different about music from its sister arts? Why does it often seem to affect people more immediately and more powerful than other forms of art - or does it? How did humans acquire the ability to appreciate music?


1. It's different because its audio.

2. It isn't necessarily more 'powerful' than visual art, poetry or prose.

3. You have it backwards. Music was developed to take advantage of our ability to interpret sound.

Good questions; I'm hoping you get the sorts of answers you are looking for.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

In addition to being audio, music is "in time" in a way that most "art" isn't. A painting (or a piece of furniture or whatever) has all kinds of aspects, but not really a beginning, middle, or end. The nearest analogy to it has to be story telling. In fact, I believe theories of music that don't treat most forms of music as parts of a continuous spectrum of phenomena ranging from plain speech to pure music are mistaken.

But another difference is that music means more to us than most (not all) of the other things we usually count as art. I think the original reason is that music affects our identity so much. The nearest analogy in this sense is religion. I even believe that religion and music (with ritual story-telling, dance, and interpersonal identity formation) have been _nearly_ (but not quite) synonymous in most situations at most times in most human cultures.

No one can prove that we acquired the ability to appreciate - or to make - music for one reason or another, but my guess is that these behaviors (music, religion) evolved because our ancestors who were better at them were able to secure higher status within their groups, which meant more resources and perhaps more sexual opportunity, and were able to form groups that were more cohesive and cooperative in adversity. We're not conscious of this any more than they were, of course. There were probably other factors as well, but I feel those were the main ones. Anyway, whatever the reason we evolved music, it's lost in the primordial time of foraging societies that had never known agriculture or government, conditions too different from our present lives for our imagination to be more than a very crude guide. I hope psychologists, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and other scientists find ways to give us more insight into this question.


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## Declined (Apr 8, 2014)

Music is more auditory whereas nearly all other art is primarily visual.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Music is strongly tied to the body in a way that other arts aren't.

Singing and playing are inherently physical acts that consume the whole awareness of the body. Music is also closely linked with dance.


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

Video art is a good parallel to music in my opinion. Anything by Douglas Gordon is music to my eyes.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

Audio and time. Exactly. I also enjoy it not necessarily having a meaning. I hear it and I am (mostly) taken on my own personal experience with it.

Reading also requires a lot of time and it is also enjoyable to me for this reason. I am engaged with it for a long time. It is a personal experience.

Pictures depict. They exist in a single frame of time. There is no motion. While I can become engrossed in a scene, it lacks development. My experience is predicted.

There are other arts, but music, literature and painting are the ones that I have the most contact with in my day-to-day life.


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

Visual art can play with the idea of time so the illusion of time is retained.


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## Gaspard de la Nuit (Oct 20, 2014)

Wow, these are astonishing answers to me - I wasn't expecting them to be so literal!

My conception was that music is different, because 

a) Even to many people who reduce an organism's (including humans) qualities to a mechanical natural selection, there is no convincing reason for music appreciation to be selected and pass on - there's no really strong argument as to how it has aided survival and reproducing on a large scale.

b) It makes sense that humans would appreciate visual art, since apprehending visual beauty in ordinary life is a very common experience. However, most people won't hear a sound in ordinary life and be like, "Wow, what a beautiful noise!" The strongest emotional response humans have to sound is fear - like, "What was that?!?!" when they hear an unidentified, threatening noise. So it seems strange that music would affect people so much more deeply than sounds in ordinary life - since visual art doesn't as frequently exceed the beauty that exists outside itself.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

One major difference between music and other arts is that sound is processed by audio centers but also directly affects the limbic system (specifically the amygdala which is strongly correlated with emotions). Visual inputs get processed by the visual cortex and then fed to higher level brain systems without directly affecting the limbic system. I believe that is why music has such a profound emotional connection to many of us.


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## Giordano (Aug 10, 2014)

In Beethoven-speak, 

Music guides man in ways that man does not comprehend.


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## Gaspard de la Nuit (Oct 20, 2014)

mmsbls said:


> One major difference between music and other arts is that sound is processed by audio centers but also directly affects the limbic system (specifically the amygdala which is strongly correlated with emotions). Visual inputs get processed by the visual cortex and then fed to higher level brain systems without directly affecting the limbic system. I believe that is why music has such a profound emotional connection to many of us.


 My question to you would be if the nervous systems examined were western listeners listening to western music....to me it seems like it may not be inherent that music is processed emotionally, though it represents a possible way of apprehending it, as evidenced by western listeners. I realize this contradicts my previous statements somewhat, but it's a complex issue.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

I want to say "different than what?" Baseball? Eating broccoli? A 1934 Stutz Bearcat? I guess the answer in most cases would be yes.


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## pierrot (Mar 26, 2012)

If we acknowledge that a truly great work of art transmits a universal truth¹ to its readers/watchers/listeners, in what way can music accomplish that, that other works of art can't?

¹. I'm not referring here to religious truth of any kind, but something more general


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