Understanding the experience of music a little better.

https://www.tiktok.com/@creatingmusicandsound/video/7289481308018068782

I don’t have formal training in music beyond a year of violin lessons, and I don’t have a natural gift for it or a cultivated talent. Nonetheless, I like paying close attention to experiences and sensations to understand what’s happening and why I like it or don’t.

Music seems to be one of the rare types of experience shared by many who appreciate it, that conveys some of the sense I feel with complicated beauty and structure I enjoy perceiving and constructing in other arenas. A lot of things have a similar kind of spatio-temporal, kinetic manifestation to me, which is hard for me to explain to others who don’t experience it that way, but analoging to music is one way.

But ironically, with music I’m particularly not able to tease out my intuition into a conscious analytical understanding of what I’m experiencing as a gestalt.

That’s why I really love this guy’s TikToks. He takes music that I’m familiar with and enjoy and shows what pieces it’s made out of, and why those pieces matter and how they fit together. I really enjoyed that in my undergraduate music theory class in college, but unlike other things I learned in school that I continued to expand on with my own efforts, music never went anywhere for me. These videos really go a long way towards closing the gap.