Do you play the piano? I think the piano is the best vehicle for grokking music—it allows for melody and harmony (and rhythm) all in one instrument, in sort of a visual way, that is hard to get in monophonic instruments, or even with guitar (for more complicated reasons). I think I developed my musical sense in two main ways: 1. listening to songs on records and on the radio, and figuring out how to replicate them at the piano, and 2. playing lots of music on the piano from sheet music, where I was constantly exposed to chord progressions and the like in other people's music; the "tropes" of Western classical and popular music, if you like. Neither of these are trivial, but both are within reach of most people, I think. I will posit that there are few shortcuts to musical mastery. Grokking music is definitely not like (as easy as) learning a new programming language.
6 years ago, I accidentally abandoned my preferences and disengaged disgust in an attempt to stop automatically judging. And then I returned to music for the first time in 18 years with the idea that there is no wrong note. Here are some of my observations:
- I wasn't deeply/actively/mindfully listening to music when I was younger. This was part of a cycle of an attention-degrading cycle where I'd hear music and then distract myself with judgements of it, emotions that followed the judgments, and judgments about those emotions.
- Songs that "feel sad" don't. How a person hears/attends to music, how their body has been conditioned to receive different notes/chords/progressions, the meaning given to the sounds/words, the judgments around those things, and how they learned to feel in response to those judgments is what's being described when someone says a song feels a certain way to them. It's not universal and those feelings can be disengaged.
- How I feel in response to music has gotten way deeper and more expansive as a result of releasing all those conditioned feelings. I did this, in part, by pressing a bunch of random keys down on an organ and sitting with the feelings that came up and let them pass. Part of the practice involves letting up on one key at a time and then pressing it again, back and forth, until I can distinguish the note in the cacophony and have reached a feeling of contentment with the sounds. Rinse and repeat for each note.
- Music theory is absolutely unnecessary and in many ways hinders the learning process. I play improvisationally and not necessarily to play a song I've heard. Doing this for a year led to the emergence of a skill where I can start picking out melodies I remember.
- Styles and genres are largely based around preferences. I have a friend whose connective tissue disease (Ehrler-Danlos Syndrome) keeps them from feeling music. As a result, they've developed a strong liking of noise music, which would likely feel very uncomfortable in the body to people whose bodies have been trained on more traditional forms of music.
- The discomfort with dissonance is largely a learned thing, due to cultures of being unwilling to sit with dissonance. It can be turned off.
- If what you're looking to do is make music people can easily like based on commonly cultivated body feels around different sounds and preferences, focus on rhythms that don't change much, avoiding dissonance by default, repetition and also on novelty.
- If you want to make music people can easily ENJOY, repetition, improvisation, and novelty are keys. If you don't know any music theory, novelty will be easy. If you can make some sounds and then vaguely make the same sounds again, repetition will come (this can take a bit of practice, especially if not very connected with the body). Improvisation is such a broad idea because there's improvising around a melody or theme, around rhythm, around volume, around whatever the inspiration is (whether it be sounds, rhythms, feels, words, stories, colors, whatever), and probably more. Allowing and accepting whatever happens is a key to improvisation.
- Music can be enjoyable, even with abrupt transitions from slow to fast, soft to loud, harmonious to dissonant, rhythmic to droning.
- If I want to play what's in my mind, I can sing it and play along with how I'm singing.
- "Wrong notes" played rhythmically can fit into anything.
- If there's no wrong sound, I can play any instrument.
- Everything is a drum.
- Everything is music. Including silence. They cannot compel the silence to cease. So you are music trying to music in some ways and making music without trying. Trying to do that in a way that gains approval or caters to preferences is one way to live. Experimenting in the ways I describe here is another.
I happened to go to an experimental concert just last week, involving organs (since you mentioned them). You might enjoy it. It's available for streaming here: https://roulette.org/event/cleek-schrey-and-weston-olencki-o...
Here's the instructions for doing the nonjudgment practice that led to all these realizations. I highly recommend them. The effects are quite literally lifechanging, unlocking/unblocking joys I didn't even know were possible.
I've had to really staunchly stand up for myself and my music to other musicians and to my past notions of music, and have definitely gotten defensive around playing music like this.
No more. I'll just send people to this. And I'm definitely going to focus on playing more like this again.
Thanks again for bringing this into our lives! <3
I sometimes feel like one could take this sentence and substitute just about anything for "music."
"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do."
There is nothing wrong with trying to turn an art into a science. Music just has a bunch of implicit rules that people want to make explicit. Musicians find this frustrating because they aren't interested in understanding music this way. Both perspectives are fine.
And yet I get the feeling that if someone does investigates that (and adjacent topics) in depth with success there would be a bunch of interesting consequences to it.
Maybe, I have got no knowledge in the field - it just sound like something interesting, why the heck wouldn't we want to know it?