The Miracle of Music

Have you ever noticed that music can change our mood? Music can change the way we feel almost instantly, through vibration and it can stimulate the whole brain because the melody addresses the right hemisphere while the lyrics, are processed by the left unconsciously.

This is one reason why music is such an important part of the human experience.

Music has existed in all human societies since prehistoric times. It is both a form of individual expression (including the expression of feelings), a source of collective gathering and pleasure (festival, song, dance) and a symbol of a cultural, national or spiritual community (national anthem, folk music, religious music, military music, etc.).

The history of music is a particularly rich and complex subject, mainly because of its characteristics: the difficulty lies first of all in the age of music, a universal phenomenon dating back to prehistory, which gave rise to the formation traditions that have developed separately around the world over millennia. There are a multitude of very long stories of music according to cultures and civilizations. Western music (classical music or pop-rock in the broadest sense) only took on the appearance of international reference in the 16th century, and is still very partially.

The difficulty also comes from the diversity of forms of music within the same civilization: scholarly music, elite music, official music, religious music, popular music. This ranges from elaborate forms to popular forms such as lullabies. A cultural heritage of a particularly wide diversity, unlike other arts practiced in a more limited or elitist way (literature, theater…). Finally, with music, the art of the moment, the particular question of sources arises: the absence of a system of notation of a part of world music, prevents us from really knowing the extent of the music of the past, the tradition having probably been saved only by a limited number of musicians.

The realization of a universal synthesis appears very difficult because the history of music deals mainly with the history of western music. It is generally possible only to refer to specialized books and articles by civilization or genre of music.

People like the way different types of music illicit responses depending on their mood; if they are happy, they prefer to listen to rhythmic music, or songs of love or prayer, while if they are sad, they listen to songs adapted to this dark mood and reject songs that create a sensation of joy or love.

Advertisers know this well, adapting the music to the effect their viewer and achieve the effect they want to produce in their audience; they know that once the music is ingrained in us, it stays in the unconscious and influences us, pushing us to remember the product and buy it.

Music is hugely important and using it for its own development is very effective. Indeed, the message it conveys spans the logical mind and penetrates directly into the unconscious, 300 times faster than just having a positive thought.

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