Why Music Moves Us
Why Music Moves Us — Even after learning that music is, in the end, a neatly ordered trembling, my being moved by it did not lessen in the least. If anything, it deepened. That what stirs the human heart is not some grand thing but tremblings that fit and overlap well is a strange comfort. Are people not the same? The one with whom words flow easily, the one beside whom we feel at ease, is someone whose rhythm matches ours. As good harmony is the overlap of notes without quarrel, so a good relationship is the neat folding-together of each other grain. Music tells us: beauty is not completed alone; only when things blend does it ring out.
A single line of a song brings tears to the eyes; a certain melody swells the chest for no clear reason. Yet music, when examined, is only air trembling and knocking inside our ears. Some notes sounded together are beautiful; others somehow grate. Where does that difference come from? How can a mere trembling of air move a person heart?
Twenty-five centuries ago, Pythagoras, it is told, stopped before a blacksmith shop, hearing hammer-sounds blend and clash. He experimented by plucking taut strings. Halve a string length exactly, and the same note sounded just one octave higher. Set the lengths in a two-to-three ratio, and a most pleasing harmony rang out. Behind beautiful sound lay simple whole-number ratios. He believed the cosmos was woven from the harmony of number. The beauty of music was the order of numbers.
Later physicists uncovered the reason. Every sound is a wave trembling at a steady rate, and that rate is called frequency. When two notes frequencies form a simple ratio — two to three, three to four — the crests and troughs of the two waves line up neatly and often. Our ears and brains receive that regular overlap as "harmony." When the ratio is complex and crests clash with troughs, we feel tension and unease. The difference between concord and discord was no mystery but a matter of how neatly the waves overlap. Yet why that neatness should feel to us, of all things, like "beauty" — that final reason is not yet fully known.
- When a piano tuner sets the notes, he is matching the strings frequencies to fixed ratios. Pythagoras ratios of thousands of years ago still live beneath the keys.
- Nearly all the digital music we hear is the continuous trembling of air, sliced finely into numbers and stored. Writing sound as number has become everyday.
- In hospitals, music therapy eases pain and soothes the mind. Neatly ordered waves reach all the way to the rhythms of our own bodies.
和는 서로 어울려 고르게 됨을 뜻하니, 여러 음이 가지런히 겹쳐 아름다운 화음을 이루는 음악의 원리와 통한다.
Meet this hanja in Cheonjamun →Even after learning that music is, in the end, a neatly ordered trembling, my being moved by it did not lessen in the least. If anything, it deepened. That what stirs the human heart is not some grand thing but tremblings that fit and overlap well is a strange comfort. Are people not the same? The one with whom words flow easily, the one beside whom we feel at ease, is someone whose rhythm matches ours. As good harmony is the overlap of notes without quarrel, so a good relationship is the neat folding-together of each other grain. Music tells us: beauty is not completed alone; only when things blend does it ring out.
