“Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.”
Lao Tzu.
To a common man, the word music and universe lies it his extremities; simply because music, as he assumes is smaller than life whereas universe, in the other hand is larger than life. But why did Lao Tzu uses both the words into one small sentence and make it confusing ? How does one understands to smudge something smaller than life onto a canvas called universe ?
There is a reason for why many learned scholars always associate themselves with music. the reason being so is because they've all realized this beautiful line about music, "Music is proof that the human race is greater than it knows". Music captured the minds of these great thinkers as they questioned their existence.
Okay, if you feel that scholars and thinkers are making you feel left out ? well let's step down a bit. Let's take cinematographers and musicians for instance. Why do you think cinematographers blend in music to their visuals ? To amplify the emotions they want you to seek and shun your ability to think and remain in your awe state a little longer. To give you a clear idea of what I'm trying to state, let me throw you an example. Remember from the movie Interstellar where Dr. Mann tries to dock himself to the endurance unsuccesfully ? That docking scene (you could watch it again). Nolan and Zimmer have perfectly stitched this music-visual interaction, where you will be absorbed into that scene and would crave to know what would happen next.
Curiosity. That millisecond, your mind would simulate and assimilate the numerous possibilities of what would happen. All that in a matter of a millisecond. Most of the time music shuns this process to let you stay in that pre-defined awe state as long as you can and delays the decay of such states. Music as of now have been able to, in most of the cases guide to connect the dotes of what we think it is as the random pattern. Catching up with today's internet slang the term braingasm or mindgasm are just that ecstatic lightning realizations you experience when you finally get that your eureka moment.
There is this series called Brain Games as a part of the National Geographic Channel which puts to this particular myth about Mozart. Does listening to Mozart really increases your throughput ? Turns out it's neither Mozart nor the heavy metal which makes us think better but music. Music levitates our state of mind which is why we sometimes perform better and think better.
It's this urge that the human beings have and when crude words fail to meet, we have to translate it into symphony. Because it is the music's capacity to express the ineffable, the inexpressible. While listening to Jazz music or akin genre when the treble emerges from the beautiful bass, those goosebumps, those cognitive emotional ecstasy or to simply put the awe states you enter into a surreal atmosphere or sometimes..... astral projections. I remember when i saw the microscope for the first time when i was in my ninth grade to study the structure of amoeba (irony i know) i saw that cosmos revealed for the first time of the microscopic and when I first looked up at the telescope and all of the sudden you see the cosmos of the macroscopic. That pure awe moments which drives the passion to know, to understand what and how things are and when I realize them, underwstand them i connect the dotes I expeienced this cognitive ecstasies or the neuro storm, that self realization is what matters. And you know what ? That is exactly what music does. It awakens our ontological senses.
Music with lyrics gave way to songs which converges the thought of the poet straight into your head. Sometimes you cry listening to certain songs, sometimes you get all pumped up or happy. It is the way of Music to amplify the essence of the lyrics, to make you feel, to make you aware or at times get yourself lost so that you can find your flow states. Although Mozart and Beethoven's mortal era has been over long before you or I were born, their music pierces through time and still resonates in our ears. That is why music as assumed by common man isn't a smaller thing. We can say we are lucky to be proud to be alive during the era which gave musicians like A.R.R and Hans Zimmer.
Ecstasies beamed from brain to brain, from someone's heart to someone
else's. This is music. music inspires and indeed that line is spot on :
Proof that the human race is greater than it knows. That is why such a
smaller than life can be placed right next to something larger than life
inside a sentence. That is where both the extremities meet. In the
mind.
