The Psychology of Sound

I’ve spent my entire life astounded by the magic of music, appreciating everything from opera and Gregorian chant to bluegrass and every kind of jazz there is. But what exactly is being touched in us and inspired when we listen to our favorite songs? What is this creation of new and complex emotion, the stimulation of sensuality, bittersweet memory, at times even, that awareness of sublime connection to the universe? How full and rich our lives are because of the beauty and profundity of sound waves organized into melody, rhythm, timber, and harmonic tones! Friedrich Nietzsche said it best: “Without music, life would be a mistake.”

Like so many of my generation, I cut my teeth on Elvis and the Beatles growing up in the first half of the 1960s, and then essentially found religion beginning in 1969 with the pop, soul, and rock ‘n’ roll coming out of my radio in that era–Three Dog Night, The 5th Dimension, Marvin Gaye, Simon & Garfunkel, Herman’s Hermits, The Supremes, etc. Eventually, I found my way to the electric blues of Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, The Allman Brothers Band, Led Zeppelin, Hot Tuna, Eric Clapton, The Grateful Dead, and so many more. I wish old Friedrich could have been around from 1965 to 1980. There was some crazy magic going on everywhere as we all learned about the mystery of improvisational expression, dancing like nobody’s watching, and allowing sound to fill us with wild abandon, especially, and I can’t emphasize this enough, the wail and shimmer of highly amplified electric guitar.

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Music has obviously been a big part of every culture for hundreds of thousands of years, but not until sound signal broadcasting, push-button amplification, and recording technology developed the way they did to deliver anything and everything to the masses did humanity become psycho about the power of sound–syncopated sound in particular.

When Elvis was coming up in the early 1950s, commercial recording technologies and amplified instruments had only been around for a few years. Amplified voices and instruments made it possible for small groups of musicians to broadcast songs to large numbers of people. It all started out as dancehall wildness, but it obviously also exploded on radios, phonographs, and, these days, online and in our own private ears everywhere in the world. We don’t just love dancing with each other to Sly and the Family Stone or Maroon 5; and we don’t simply enjoy singing along to Sting or Coldplay in concert. Few things in global culture draw people together so obviously as music (and it’s close cousin dance). We’ve actually gone crazy over the years for The Fab 4, MJ, Queen Bey, Bruce, Tay-Tay, The King, Adele, and that guy who coined the very term “Let’s go crazy,” Prince Rogers Nelson…totally freakin’ crazy. Think about that!

So Why?

The question of music making us kind of psycho (if not always, then at least in our teens) has fascinated me since I first witnessed several hundred teenage girls screaming their throats out at the Hall Theater in my hometown during the summer of 1964, when I was six years old. Our babysitter had been given permission to take my brother and me to the local matinee premier of The Beatles’ newly released movie, A Hard Day’s Night. Each time the lads took the stage in that movie, or even remotely seemed like they were going to sing, every young woman in the theater began to vociferate manicly like she was ready to die quite happily.

I grew up with melody all around me. My grandmother was a high school music teacher. My father was a classical music aficionado and sang us to sleep with folk songs every night for years. On car rides around the Midwest, our family always sang together. I was first completely hooked on those early songs we learned–”Shenandoah,” “Oh! Susanna,” “This Land is Your Land.” Our family favorite was “Green Grow the Rushes, O,” a call and response English folk song built out of cumulative verses counting certain odd poetic things from “twelve for the twelve apostles,” to “one is one and all alone and evermore shall be.”

I may have had music all around me from the time I was born, but I did not grow up adept at playing an instrument (or practicing). Somehow, though, I managed in my late teens to learn guitar thanks to a close friend who was a one-in-a-million “pick up that guitar and rock out” genius.

Here in the 2020s, we live much of our time with soundtracks filtering through our ears and brains, bathing our minds with whatever sound and style we like. Every time I enter a coffee shop I love being surprised by the type of music the baristas are playing. I love, too, the little pockets of competitive sound that occasionally pop up or drift out of headphones. Sometimes it seems, in fact, that our culture runs on caffeine and music. If you pay attention, you might hear classic Joni or early Dylan coming from shop speakers, but underneath and off to the side can be strains of Kamasi Washington, Joseph Haydn, or Meek Mill.

The question for me, then, has always been: “Is this music thing just another treat like candy or cappuccino or ice cream or any number of tasty cuisines we all love–good pizza? Or is there more to it? And if so, how far does it all go– this passionate link each of us has to the music that we love?”

My partial answer is that it seems to me there’s more to music than any other art form by far. So much is still under the hood and difficult to grasp. Whatever’s going on with sound and melody and beat is operating on a sublime and even celestial level of human psychology that can link spiritual and metaphysical forms of awareness to poetic, nostalgic, limbic, and connective harmonious sensations of both the body and the mind. I also think it’s likely to continue to be–even with all of our scientific capacity– really difficult and confusing to get to the bottom of everything I’m pointing to here–noisy, shifting volume, meandering harmonies, silence when you’re just about to that final understanding, a dark blank, but always that whisper of the next tune, anticipation.

All of which is to say that beginning in my teen years, I became enamored (maybe even obsessed) with the idea that there is a tremendous amount of real human magic connected to music–a form of transcendence somehow, possibly even answers to questions that paranormal psychology raises and that whole altered state reality everyone keeps stumbling around in.

In those early days, the research still wasn’t out there for us laypeople to explore, but it seemed obvious enough. I began to think of the magic that I felt I’d become aware of as powerful emotional voyaging. What seemed most important to me back then is that the intuitions I felt were there both during moments of altered reality and in this direct, and basic world we call “real.”

Lighting Up Inside

Certainly rock and roll is not a simple form of romantic, sonic confection. That was my experience anyway as I grew up. We all might have started on the surface with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” or “Tears of a Clown,” but once we graduated to “Smoke on the Water,” “Turn on Your Lovelight,” “Riders on the Storm,” “Hot Summers Day,” or “Whole Lotta Love,” it felt like we’d arrived on a supra-human level of unexplored limbic awareness and impending profundity (I am aware of how silly that sounds, but it was the truth). All of a sudden we felt we’d been touched by an inner world of infinite emotional connection to ourselves. A strange musical intelligence seemed to be locked up in our brains. It all raised the bar of what it meant to be alive on earth in every moment of every song, listening with each other.

I needed to know what the heck was happening. Why and how was my mind so damned blown on that one full moon summer night I listened to Jimi Hendrix play “Red House” over and over again and just couldn’t get enough? I had become in that one night fully open to the freedom and inspiration of the electric sound of music–especially improvised instrumental (sometimes vocal) guitar-centric jams. And for that matter, why were so many people clamoring to understand the mental substrait of mind altering drugs, but more or less thoughtless about the impact of music on the collective consciousness of our culture? It was never about listenting to someone expertly whistle “Dixie,” but it’s kind of been treated that way in this modern Western world for decades now.

Obviously, a lot of people have always understood that there is profound human power connected to music (musicians and DJs at least). But no one really understood how far it all goes, or what the potential might be.

Researchers have come a long way over the past two decades in mapping consciousness and understanding how our brains react to song. A good deal of laboratory work has shown that the parts of the brain that light up when people are having a conversation also light up when people listen to music–all the regions of the brain exactly, except the part of the brain that assigns meaning to words. Music is still about communication and meaning, but it would appear that it is more about emotional communication with the self than the semantics and syntax needed to speak with others. The implications of that research seem huge to me, not because of what it shows us about music, but because of what it shows about the effect of sound on human emotion–or maybe more importantly, the effect of sound on the human unconscious mind, which is always swimming with emotion and the full meaning of things–far more significant than what we use words for.

The implications of all of this are hilariously huge. I am stunned that people aren’t more aware of the potency of sound in general and how it affects their minds. Music is, indeed, a confection of sorts and there are dozens of different musical treats we have to choose from everytime we plug into our phones or our laptops. Yes, music gets us high. But there is so much more than a buzz going on and the occasional goose-bump or two. We need to think a bit more creatively about what impact song and groove and melody have on us. Which is kind of why I wrote the novel Sound Effect Infinity. I honestly don’t have the answers. But I certainly have the questions. The book comes out in November this year. You can pre-order the hardcover online right now (Go Here, or Here, or Here). You can also simply head over to your favorite local bookstore and have them order it for you.

Keep your eyes peeled and sign up to receive posts from here directly to your in-box. I will likely be sending out more weird stuff about my thoughts on music for the next six to eight months at least. Maybe longer.

A version of this essay was also published at Medium.com. Go here to check out all of my work there.