Sometimes, I like to think music as a special form of language. The dictionary describes language as "any means of expressing or communicating, as gestures, signs, or animal sounds". Music expresses and communicates human emotions. The human emotions are universal, so everyone understands music. However, it is not necessary that everyone understands every kind of music readily, because human emotions are so varied that not everyone has experienced all of them. Not claiming as an anthropologist, I am not ready to enlist all the human emotions and assert which is universal and which is specific to a group of people. My guess is that we are all born with a few emotions, such as happiness and sadness. These emotions gradually become more complicated as we associate them with more specific situations. They overlap each other, contradict each other, mingle each other, magnify each other, weaken, follow, intensify, alternate, intertwine, hammer, to the point where only very specific and sophisticated music can describe. Thus, sometimes we have a hard time understanding unfamiliar music, if our mind is not molded in the same way, or our emotion is not synchronized with the emotion embodied in the music. However, this cannot deny our natural born ability to understand and comprehend the same human emotions.
Music is very different from visual arts (which is another special form of language). Music is time based. Its pattern varies with time, just like our emotion changes with time. We cannot stay high and depressed and curious and calm and bored and sexy and angry and disgust and scared and ambitious and sad and all the other countless emotions all at the same time, non-stop, forever; but we can experience a few at the same time, even contradictory ones, just like the joyous and proud sadness a mother seeing her son going away for college can feel. A master piece of music can convey parallel emotions skillfully and seamlessly. Have you ever heard a piece of music with a very soothing melody on the top, but very intense rhythms drumming beneath, like tender love grabbing your heart? Or have you ever tried to listen to the individual parts in an orchestra and see how they play along and against each other? However, it is usually impossible to listen to more than one music at the same time, even if they have similar mood, even if they are actually just different segments of the same music. Imagine listening to Rap and Pop at the same time, and imagine half of the room are always seven and one-third beats slower when singing the national anthem. On the other hand, visual arts, spatial orient and patterned spatially, are easier to overlap, maybe to a point. Have you ever seen the Liberty of Statue being put into hundreds of different costumes and scenes and felt one bit of pity for the poor lady's torture?
Spoken language resembles music because it is also time oriented. We comprehend speech linearly, with one mainline of attention, even though there can be overtone, tactic understanding, or other information not apparent in the line of words. It is difficult to engage in several conversations actively and concurrently. However, our mind can process information much faster than speech, so we can pick up much more information simultaneously or in the gap of words. Have you thought about reading two different texts running next to each other simultaneously? If you want to see how it feels like, the next two paragraphs of the essay are overlapped. Slow down if it seems overwhelming, and slow down even more if it is still overwhelming. Miss the first line if you really have to.
A TV show introduced a non-explosive bomb. We know the neurons transmit information
In the field of computer network, experts are concerned with how much information can
by electric pulses. The bomb works by overloading human senses with enormous influx
be transferred from one end to the other end in a given period of time. We can compare
of sound and light signals. The neurons are clogged by so much information emitted by
this to a water pipe. How much water can be transferred in a given period of time
the bomb's big bang, and it tries to transmit so much electric pulses that it cannot function
depends on two factors: the thickness of the pipe and how fast the water moves. To move
anymore because all the pulses connect into one, rendering the victim in a seizure.
more water, we can either thicken the pipe or move the water faster.
How fast the water moves can also be thought as the delay for the water to move from one end to the other (by the way, how does it feel?). In computer network terminology, the thickness is called bandwidth, and the delay is called latency. Usually, limited by physical constraints, latency is difficult to change. People usually increase bandwidth by compressing data. They agree on a way to compress and decompress (or encode and decode) the data before hand, then transfer only the compressed data to eliminate excessive information. In a way, we can use a day to day analogy. Suppose we agree on that the word "elephant" means the big animal living in Africa, and we have all seen the picture of elephant. When we want to transmit a picture of the animal, we need to transmit only eight letters: e, l, e, p, h, a, n, t.
This is very convenient. Although we speak word by word, each word actually embodies enormous amount of information. For example, the word "green" symbolizes the color, which exists in many places: Spring, leaves, money, flashy clothes, Green Party, politics, etc.. It draws out the sensation of the color from the mind, together with the emotions related to the objects containing the color, and the background and stories of those objects. We transmit all this information in just five letters. Note that even though we have a lot of common understanding about the objects related to the color called "green", we also have a lot of stories about "green" that only we know ourselves. Who knows what happened on that grass field next to the little river in that Spring? A love scene with wine, or a massacre? You see, red can be the overtone of green in different ways.
If we take a sentence as a line in a three dimensional space, we can cut each word into a dot, at the center of a two dimensional plane. This plane represents all the things and non-things related to the word; the closer to the center, the stronger association with the word. The larger the plane is, the more information this word is carrying with it, when it leaves one's mouth and enters another's ear. We can see this whole sentence as a huge cylinder of information flowing from one mind to another. The interesting thing is, because each word unfold into different plane for different people, the cylinder has one shape when it departs, but has a different shape when it arrives.
The mind thinks in pictures. In order to recall the color of lip or the shape of iris, we see them in our mind. However, because we store, retrieve, communicate, and work with these things, or pictures, or concepts, or emotions, or thoughts, or whatever with language, the word and the "whatever" become one. It is hard to distinguish the word "green" and the color "green," unless you learned it artificially, then you recognize it as a symbol to indicate green.
My native language is Chinese. People like to ask me if I think in Chinese or English when I speak English. When I was asked this question the first time, it took me several seconds to realize that
(To be continued...)