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I remember something my ex-fiancee said to me once, when we were walking.. "Don't you think music's over with? It seems like every song that could be good has already been made." I thought about it, and I believed what she meant was that all of her emotions that she felt could be touched, had been touched. Even if this is true, however, I believe it does not mean it's the end of music. I'm even going to exclude the argument that music will not die because of the constant new blood in the scene, and how some people remake old songs. No, my argument is that we really haven't used up all the potential experiences music can give yet.. Not by a long shot. -- Let's say that there are a limited number of emotion types, the same way this computer screen can only display a limited number of colors. This may or may not be the case, but as you can see with your computer monitor, once the number of colors available starts to climb, the less and less people bitch about acuity. If an image has a palette of 1.7 million colors, it's pretty much safe to say it's a good resemblance of real life color. So, in the same way, there may be an unlimited number of emotions to feel, but the difference between those feelings may become negligable once we start counting them in large numbers. So, just for the sake of this writing, let's say a human can feel 1000 different ways.  Let's say blue is sadness, red is love, and green is serenity. -- Now, let's assume that music invokes these emotions, like a key into a locked door. In my ex-fiancee's case, according to her, all these 1000 doors were opened during her life. Perhaps a really sad song showed her what sadness is like, and while she was there, felt some tranquility and perhaps a bit of love as well. Maybe five emotions were unlocked here, maybe 12 the next day as she heard another great song on the radio for the first time. So, she has a point, maybe she really has felt all she can feel with music. But think of this: we still really don't know the key to the mind. Musicians today more or less stumble onto their hits, out of a product of experience and 'feeling' what's best in a song; there's very little science in making good music yet. So, the feelings she felt were probably disjointed fragments. Have you ever heard a song and really got into it, to have it take your mood in a completely bizarre direction? This is what i mean. A song could theoretically make you feel good the same way things in real life do, the way a lover does perhaps.. But instead, music today leads us to these little bits of feelings, which although strong and sometimes life-lasting, are shots in the dark. Although music sometimes makes us feel very profound, music could go much further than it does today, perhaps to heights we might think are impossible. Here's how. Once we finally figure out what the mind is all about, music will become much more broad. There may not be 1000 emotions in the mind; the number of emotions might be 368, or 513 or something, or it may be a continuous blend like the visible light spectrum. Nevertheless, once we figure out what the range is and how to master it, we will use it the way a painter uses different colors of paint to make a painting. By comparison, our society right now is about the equivalent of randomly throwing buckets of paint up on a wall. -- My ex-fiancee may have experienced five different emotions at once with a particular song, but try to see it this way: if we were to see the emotional spectrum as a number range of 1 to 1000, then perhaps she experienced numbers 134, 567, 960, 112, and 56. There's probably no pattern to these numbers; perhaps it was just the feelings that the composer got lucky with and was able to express. Once we unravel the mind, we will be able to do a lot more tinkering, firstly on the basis that there will be much less randomness: maybe I'll write a song tomorrow that uses emotion numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, then 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Or maybe one that uses 1, 101, 201, 301, 401, 501, 601, 701, 801, and 901. I'm pretty sure that combination has never been hit on before in the history of mankind - it'd be like winning the lottery three days in a row. -- To look at this another way (and even more interesting), let's use the comparison of emotions to the spectrum of visible light, instead of using numbers. Let's make a song using a little bit of a brown emotion, followed by some lighter emotions, then some dark ones.  Next, let's layer it so that underneath those tones are some emotions with colors like these:  Building off these, we elaborate the song outwards, introducing these subordinate emotions:    Eventually, the song will form this picture of Crono. What this means is that we'll have the power to draw a picture in your head with a song. Now, I don't just mean this song is the song you find in Chrono Trigger, what I mean is that this is the one mathematically proven song that will render this image into a human's mind. -- I know this is possible... It's just a matter of navigating the mind's trickery. I've experienced certain songs hinting at landscapes within my mind at times, but I always got that feeling so much more could be done. I hope this is the way. If it is, we could benefit by not only creating entire worlds within the mind, but also things like learning - one could theoretically learn a foreign alphabet through a song (it would probably be a very wierd sounding song, but a song, nevertheless), and people could finally master skills in one sitting, rather than requiring college to drill the material into your head until it sticks. I've heard some pretty good songs in my day but who knows what stuff like this would do. It will undoubtedly usher in a new age in the history of mankind. There will be an unprecedentd amount of responsibility associated with this, because we will now have the ability to decipher anyone's mind. We will break that trust, but who knows if we can survive this or not. Love and hate may become rationed to people along with their food. This is one of my life's goals, to find out this missing element and bridge music into this new era. If anyone out there shares this goal or knows someone that may be pointed in this direction, I'd love to hear from you. |