How good musicians communicate their deepest feelings.

Get this: over a lifetime, the average person will have spent thirteen years listening to music. That’s a heck of a lot of Mozart (or Boyz II Men).

It makes sense when you consider that the average person listens to music 25 hours a week. It’s a startling number that only promises to increase here in the 21st century. Today, music, like many other digitalized experiences, is readily available at every turn. While we drive. While we jog. In the shower. Music is woven into the fabric of our entire experience, perhaps more than in any other society in the history of the world.

But for all this digital saturation — all these soundtracks — most people haven’t a clue about how music actually works. Quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes? Please. Symbols of notation? Forget about it. In a most ironic twist, it is precisely during this current-day musical revolution that musical illiteracy is reaching new heights. Today, even many musicians cannot read sheet music!

Not all musicians.

But still.

Which do you know better, music or football?

Is music illiteracy a bad thing? I think so. Is illiteracy ever a good thing? You see, when you understand music, your capacity to appreciate and enjoy it increases exponentially. For example, imagine yourself attending a football game as a total novice to the sport. As an uninitiated spectator, there is certainly something to appreciate: large crowds, larger hotdogs, and grown men making every attempt to incapacitate one another. But this hardly compare to the insider experience — a knowledgeable fan who sees the game from the inside out!

For you pragmatists, music is a powerful tool that can increase productivity. Music can influence how we feel and what we do. And knowing how to harness various genres to make our lives more productive is more empowering than you can imagine.

But music can only progress and evolve when a society supports its musicians. Let’s be honest: there are a lot of bad musicians out there. And in an odd way, the more we learn about music, and the more we interact with it, the better it will get.

What is Music Anyway?

Have you ever thought about how communication works? Somehow, one person is able to transfer thoughts and ideas into another persons head. It’s fascinating!

Of course, this process seems banal because it’s so common to the human experience. But let’s parse it for just a moment, and then we’ll compare it to the language of music.

Everything begins with an idea, which is basically a set of thoughts processed and stored inside your brain. You generate this idea before your mind has decided what words to use in order to articulate it. At this point, the idea is not anything but concrete — it exists purely on the level of intuition and general concepts.

But when you decide to make the idea concrete, to share it with someone, the only way is to place your idea into a container — a linguistic package of sorts, custom tailored to deliver this idea, and this idea alone. The better your vocabulary, the more material you have to choose from when creating your package.

And it all happens in your subconscious as your mind searches through your spoken lexicon to construct a set of sentences fitting for the idea you want to communicate to your listeners.

Have I lost you yet?

Think about it this way: when shipping an item, the type of package depends on the item. If it’s something fragile like glass, you need much more packaging than you would for a book. The same is true for ideas: nuanced ideas require more packaging, if you will, to be delivered successfully.

Imagine you’re talking on the phone and you have something important to say. As you begin to speak, your diaphragm (a thin muscle membrane located at the bottom of your ribs) pushes down on your abdomen, creating a vacuum in your lungs for the purpose of drawing a breath. Once you have air in your lungs, your diaphragm, together with your rib muscles, controls the output of your breath as you engage your larynx to phonate your vocal chords — this creates the audible phonation that allows your friend to clearly hear what you’re saying.

As the sound is created in your larynx, it is immediately manipulated by the shape of your mouth, the position of your tongue, and placement of your lips. And it works like Morse code: the sound has been encoded with an encrypted message, which can only be decrypted using the same lexicon you used when you encoded it.

All that in the time it takes to utter one phrase!

In terms of physics, the sound you create during speech is a set of frequencies, a vibration of air molecules. And because there are air molecules between you and your phone receiver, your phone microphone, which is a tiny diaphragm itself, detects the vibration of these air molecules and is able to read and record the message.

In an incredible feat of technological power, your message is instantly converted into a digital signal and beamed through a radio frequency to a nearby cell phone tower. Your cell phone tower is operated by your communication service, so the message travels to the appropriate hub, which directs the message down to a tower near your friend, and then finally into your friend’s cell phone.

Your friend’s cell phone receives the radio frequency sent by the tower, converts it back into an analog signal and using your phone’s tiny speaker reconstructs your message and beams it through the air molecules and into your friend’s ear. The human ear has a tiny membrane, known as the eardrum, which is able to detect this message and turn it into an electrical signal and send it to your brain.

At this point, your friend must possess your lexicon used in the message to successfully decode your message and understand your original idea.

In an instant, an idea generated is an idea communicated.

What does this have to do with music?

A similar process occurs when a musician performs, but this time with emotion.

Good musicians are in tune with their own feelings, and sensitive to the feelings of others. Like the rest of us, their feelings can be overwhelming. But whereas we look to the punching bag, or the page, musicians confide in the craft of music, which to them is a much more effective tool for communicating emotion than words.

Emotion is to the musician what words are to the philosopher.

Good musicians utilize a mastered instrument to create a package for their feelings, one they can send your way like they would a phone call.

Feeling packages, if you will.

Of course, when lyrics are involved, there is an overlap with linguistic communication and ideas are passed down; but if the musician is good, the lyrics themselves are not about the idea as much as the feeling that the idea solicits.

You could be at a Snarky Puppy concert, say, and the chart calls for a guitar solo. If there aren’t any psychological barriers, the music should soon elicit a feeling inside of you. The bass and drums provide context, the guitar player improvises with riffs that seem to tell your story. Even though there are no words, you close your eyes allow yourself to be taken on a brief journey. It is time travel. It is storytelling.

It is both somewhere you’ve been and somewhere you’ve never ventured to before.

You open your eyes and, at that moment, you realize that you and the guitarist are on the same journey. And when that happens, good music happens.

Beauty happens. Community happens. A shared experience takes place.

This, my friends, is music.