"Why does music cause us to feel deeply?" asks the podcast in its beginning.
According to one of the experts on sound interviewed in the podcast, sound travels to the ear and "touches" the brain by rattling tiny bones, which bend like trees in the wind, which then touch hairs that set off electrical impulses, which then fire in patterns that either make sense or do not make sense in our brains. If the electrical impulses are disorderly, unfamiliar, and not in a pattern, it's known as dissonant. Patterned, comfortable/comforting, and familiar impulses are consonant.
As someone who is deeply moved by musical nuances, I am very curious as to how the concepts of comfortable and uncomfortable come to pass in the electrical impulses that we literally are feeling as we listen to music. How synonymous, in this, are what is considered comfortable and what is considered familiar? Dissonance and consonance seem like such simple concepts, but in reality, comfort and discomfort must be entirely subjective concepts in music as they are in all other aspects of life. For example, although I love music currently, there was a time in my life where certain kinds of music - specifically, music that sounded too "empty" or "dead" - would make me feel exceedingly anxious. I experienced such deep discomfort with music seeming "dead" in my mind that I listened solely to the radio for the next few months, because the radio hosts speaking in between each song put my mind at ease. This discomfort wasn't caused by scientific dissonance, it was caused by some other malfunction in my brain at the time. It's interesting how our experiences affect our perceptions of beauty.
I wonder if, knowing that some pitches provide comfort and others do not, that to feel something deeply when listening to it for the first time with no prior emotional connection there must be some harmony of consonance and dissonance within the song - some unfamiliar coupled with the familiar, some uncomfortable paired with the comfortable - that gives a new song mysterious emotional connection.
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