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 do not rely on our intervention to exist. Rather, we are the ones who realise music, reorganise it, redefine it. We are the only creatures capable of attaching lyrics to the notes. We are the poets wielding words to create concepts and instil ideas. We stamp our gift of language onto its ancient audible history, an intellectual chanting, some refined voice of reason, and not always a voice too, sometimes it’s our technology that dominates this space, no lyrics needed, just noise, a running rhythm, a carefully crafted array of instrumentals producing calculated beats, strums, whistles, chimes, artificial and analogue tones varying in vibe, always an extension of our need to communicate and understand our innate feelings — Feelings of awe, wonderment, worry, woe, wishful thinking, and of course, love — Its longing, its linger, and sure enough, its ultimate and ever-tragic loss.

Music is loss. Gain and loss. 

Music is also a method of sharing meaning. This is all that feeling really is for me now, a physical form of meaning. And it is a known thing that many animals sing to communicate with others of their same kind. They make some specific series of noises to play, flirt, frighten, warn, survive. This is also music, but it’s language too, the language of sound, some cryptic system of primal codes, unintelligible to any animal outside the species of its origin. This is musical messaging. The universe in a very secret and constant conversation with itself ad infinitum. 

Humans are no different. Our meaning starts and dies as a sound. Don’t forget, we built an entire religion around this rationale. In the beginning, it is said that there was nothing, and then God spoke. She made a sound, added a lyric. And with that, into the void, came the ever-expanding noise of existence.  

Complex minded civilised creatures, beings of logic, this is what we have become. We think in abstract terms, and the music we make follows this form. Our messages are more conceptual than that of other animals. Our music maintains the power to question and challenge, inform and imagine. We are the new age of mating calls. We are the vessels for the evolved sound. The sound that has shifted from the blunt questions of sex or no sex, kill or no kill, to the esoteric territories of modern earth bound experience. 

But consciousness is older than language. It would seem that we always think in sentences, phrases, words, but this again is some form of misconception. We think only in electricity and impulse, nothing else. There is no voice inside our mind, no sound as we understand it. Language is just the translation.

Words are representations. Lyrics too. 

Human music is a fusion of the primal and the cerebral. We can’t help but sing our soul and we don’t really know why. Every spoken sentence has a 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 explain ourselves, information baked into the nouns and magic emanating from the music, and its the hum and interplay of these elements that furnace a focused form of conscious feeling; a shared experience of what it means to be human.