Every now and again I submit to my geek cravings and buy a copy of a magazine called SOS (Sound On Sound). It’s a recording magazine, it’s quite heavy, and much of the stuff inside goes over my head, but there are some very interesting things to be found in there. The editor, Paul White, wrote an editor’s note (I didn’t really need to specify that…) in this month’s issue called ‘Music – a human right?’. His article is much about the government’s recent rulings with regards to live music regulations and radio-frequency licensing, but I won’t tire you with that – besides, White writes better than I could on the issue on the SOS website which you can find at www.soundonsound.com. It did, however get me thinking whether or not the arts should be a human right, or at least how fundamental and important music (and dance, theatre and fine art) is to the world population. I can’t think of a single culture the world over that doesn’t include music as an integral part of who they are.
Where I live, you can’t go a day without hearing music of some form, and normally it’s far from minimal. Music is piped in to the atmosphere in any shop or restaurant; many of us are wired up with a music player on the bus or in the park or walking down the street. We sing to ourselves in the shower, we ‘whistle a happy tune’ while we walk or work, we play music to celebrate or to mourn. There’s even those musical warriors who will not rest until every person on all of Britain’s public transport have heard their new “wiick3d chewn” played from the modest 2cm speaker in the back of their mobile phone. It would be a weird experience to even see a documentary about something unrelated like queue management without some musical backing.
It’s funny, isn’t it, how when you look at what music fundamentally is, all that’s there on a physical level is a series of vibrations. How is it that small differences in the series of vibrations that a piano emits when it plays a minor chord compared to a major can make us feel different on a much higher level? How come the series of vibrations that I allow into my ears on the way to school in the morning can set my mood for the next few hours? There’s been much research done on the links between music and other brain functions, whether music makes you more intelligent or requires intelligence, what effect music has on health, et cetera et cetera. The results vary and there’s still a lot we don’t know, but it’s easy for all of us to say that music does affect us in some psychological or emotional way – there must be something more to it than just a series of vibrations, some special way in which the brain interprets these waves that makes the whole thing a lot more significant to us as a species.
People don’t say “I don’t like music”. They say they like some types of music more than others, they say they find it hard to understand music, but I don’t know a single person who actually dislikes it. If the powers that be were to take music away from us, the effects would be very significant. I wonder what would be done about it, if we would see some kind of mass uprising, or if it would even be at all possible to entirely stamp out music in the first place – I doubt it would.
I’d like to write a conclusion here but I’m not sure I’ve made any point in particular here – just food for thought I suppose. This is just me stopping to recognise how fundamental a part music (and of course the rest of the arts in similar ways) plays in our society.
To read Paul White’s article of the same name, visit http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr10/articles/leader_0410.htm
