Music is a focused form of conscious feeling. This is music. Cosmic occurrence colonised by human thought. It’s branded bird song, electrified, digitised, remixed, re-rationalised. We are not the definitive reason for music. Notes and tones are natural things, they don’t rely on our intervention to exist. Rather, were are the ones who realise music, reorganise it, redefine it. We are creatures capable of attaching lyrics to the notes. We are poets wielding words to create concepts and instil ideas. We stamp our gift of language onto ancient audible history, an intellectual chanting, some refined voice of reason, not always a voice too, sometimes it is our technology that dominates, no lyrics needed, just noise, rhythm, a carefully crafted array of instruments producing calculated beats, strums, whistles, chimes, artificial and analogue tones varied in vibe, but always an extension of our need to communicate and understand our feelings — Feelings of awe, wonderment, worry, woe, wishful thinking, and of course, love; its longing, its linger, and sure enough, its ultimate ever-tragic loss. 

Music is also a method of sharing meaning. For this is all that feeling really is, a physical form of meaning. Most animals sing to communicate with others of their same kind. They make some specific series of noises to play, flirt, frighten, survive. This is the language of sound, a cryptic system of primordial codes, unintelligible to any animal outside the species of its origin. This is musical messaging. The universe in a constant conversation with itself. 

Humans are no different. Meaning for us now mostly starts and ends with a sound. Don’t forget, we built an entire faith around this concept. In the beginning, it is said that there was nothing, and then God spoke. He made a noise. And with that, into the void, came existence. 

Complex minded civilised creatures, beings of logic, that’s what we’ve become. We think in abstract terms, and the music we make follows this form. Our messages are more conceptual than other animals, our music maintains the power to question, challenge, reimagine, inform and explore. We are the new age of mating calls, we are vessels for the evolved sound, the sound that has shifted from the blunt questions such as sex or no sex, kill or no kill, into shit whaling ballads that wonder why she left me standing out there in the pouring rain holding my heart in my hands hoping she’d give me one last chance to worship that ass. 

But consciousness is older than language. It would seem to us that we think in sentences, words, phrases, but this again is some form of misconception. We think in electricity and impulse. There are no pages or pens inside our mind. No mouth to speak. We could think before we could speak, before we conformed to a language. 

Human music fuses the primal and the cerebral. We sing our soul and we don’t really know why. Our sentences have flow, rhythm, and our intonations follow certain melodies. This is the inbuilt nature of the human vocal chord. This is our civility at work. This is the multi-functional purpose of the voice. To express and to explain. Information baked into the words and magic emanating from the music, and its the interplay of these elements that form a focused form of conscious feeling; a shared experience of what it’s like to exist as a human.