What is Music
Jacob Moss
MUS 1030-022
TED Talk
2-24-15
It is hard to really understand the “what” and “how” of today’s modern music with out stepping back and looking at it from a point of view of society as a whole. The “what” is still the same as in centuries past, which is "simply” the process of understanding the complex world of the human conscience. However, the “how” has recently changed due to instant global connectivity unfortunately making the answer: to do so in the quickest manner possible. Yet, knowing that the “what” has not altered over time then it is safe to say that music is still pursuing the understanding of what it is to be alive. So when you ask the question, “what happens when the music stops?” you are taking on the oldest question in human existence. That question being, what happens when we die? A person who is deceased is no longer a physical aspect of the world but his or her experiences will still live on through the people they have touched. This is a crazy idea considering none of this is at all real in a physical sense. Through this reasoning we can come to the assumption that music is the Rosetta Stone for our mind; taking the impossible to describe and making it tactile and thus able to be acted upon. I believe the next stage in human existence is the pursuit of communication with our own subconscious. Modern music is a product of all human musical interactions in history. We have arrived at a stage of understanding to which we are able to take the puzzle pieces we have collected and start to arrange them together in order to start to reveal a larger picture. What will that picture reveal to be? The honest answer is that even though we have gained immense knowledge we still lack enough understanding to be unable to even imagine when and what it will behold. I assure you what ever it turns out to be it will change the meaning of not only “how” but for the first time in human history, “what”.
MUS 1030-022
TED Talk
2-24-15
It is hard to really understand the “what” and “how” of today’s modern music with out stepping back and looking at it from a point of view of society as a whole. The “what” is still the same as in centuries past, which is "simply” the process of understanding the complex world of the human conscience. However, the “how” has recently changed due to instant global connectivity unfortunately making the answer: to do so in the quickest manner possible. Yet, knowing that the “what” has not altered over time then it is safe to say that music is still pursuing the understanding of what it is to be alive. So when you ask the question, “what happens when the music stops?” you are taking on the oldest question in human existence. That question being, what happens when we die? A person who is deceased is no longer a physical aspect of the world but his or her experiences will still live on through the people they have touched. This is a crazy idea considering none of this is at all real in a physical sense. Through this reasoning we can come to the assumption that music is the Rosetta Stone for our mind; taking the impossible to describe and making it tactile and thus able to be acted upon. I believe the next stage in human existence is the pursuit of communication with our own subconscious. Modern music is a product of all human musical interactions in history. We have arrived at a stage of understanding to which we are able to take the puzzle pieces we have collected and start to arrange them together in order to start to reveal a larger picture. What will that picture reveal to be? The honest answer is that even though we have gained immense knowledge we still lack enough understanding to be unable to even imagine when and what it will behold. I assure you what ever it turns out to be it will change the meaning of not only “how” but for the first time in human history, “what”.