Why is Music Important to our Society (synthesis)
Through out history we have used music for many different purposes. Wether it be for entertainment, intimidation, or communication, every know civilization has used music in some shape or form. In the words of the great bassist Victor Wooten, Music is a Language and most people start learning it at a young age, from birth in one way or another we are enveloped in it. Maybe your mother sang to you or played you music, either way from birth you were taught to recognize this amazing language. The very idea of Music is
a uniquely human one. When you think about your relationship to music in a technical sense, you tend to think about a lot of things that make up a musical phrase. Some of these include rhythm (anticipating when the next beat in a sequence is going to come), pitch (subjective relation of sound waves), timbre (your ability to differentiate between two voices), among many others. According to Vox’s series Explained: Music, finding a species that can identify one or more of these qualities isn’t difficult, however, it is extremely difficult to find a species that can have all of the ones that we do, we have found birds that can bob along to music, however, they can’t differentiate between two or more voices even if they’re singing similar songs. One of the uniquely human traits that comes from music is that we can connect emotion to the different songs, our views on what notes sound sad and happy are different in different cultures, but every known culture has its own set of scales and notes that they perceive as happy
Throughout our evolution as humans, music has tagged along, as the first signs of cave paintings from early humans was found, we also found flute or recorder type wind instruments. As our brains have grown more complex so has our music, the turning point in human thought came around the renaissance, until that point human innovation had been relatively low, and music can show us this, music was divided into very basic categories and musical ideas were mostly centered around religion. Most people can’t name many composers from the medieval period, however, after that period, many of the greatest composers were brought into prominence later on. In present day we have also seen a shift in our culture and intellectual capacity, now we live more fast-paced lives that have a lot of complexity, and our music matches that. A study done by The Echo Nest shows that songs are much shorter than they used to be, tempo is overall faster, it has more energy, among other things. Music is important because it shapes our moods and emotions and not only that but historically music has followed us at all times.
