Music & God

Donald Miller writes, "Music is the Soundtrack to life" (Through Painted Deserts, 38). I couldn't agree with him more. Whether we have mastered an instrument, compose our own tunes, or have no clue how the mechanics even work, almost every person on this earth can somehow identify with music.

Music has always been one of those things to me, like beauty or love, that no matter how much we can explain it with science, it's just miraculous how it all works. It's miraculous that several different pitches played together makes a chord. It's miraculous that that several notes or chords played one after another can evoke such strong emotions from us. It's miraculous that the right words or images set to the right tune can often times be as perfect as a painting. These reasons, among others, are why I find a very evident fingerprint of God within music.

THE SCIENCE:
Ask any fourth grader about sound, and they probably just recently learned in class that sound is essentially a series of physical vibrations that move at different speeds. When sound is produced, vibrations between molecules in the surrounding atmosphere take place. Strength and pitch of the sound affect the magnitude of the vibrations. Once the sound reaches our ears, electrical signals are sent to the brain, which then processes the sound.

The specific things that typically allow us to determine the difference between sound and music are pitch, pattern, and harmonics. Sounds by themselves are often shrill or dull, and lack a pattern. Continuous sounds, however, that make a recognizable pattern, are what we would refer to as "music". This is why we find patterned sounds more pleasing than just individual sounds alone. Harmonics are created when higher pitched sound waves and lower pitched sound waves "cancel each other out", creating a solid and pleasing sound. This explains why harmonies are so pretty, and it governs how we determine chords.

Beyond this explanation, there is no real reason why music is often so powerful to us. Once you get past the specific scientific complexities of music, it is difficult to comprehend exactly why certain sounds are so pleasing to us, and what is even more baffling is how subjective the term "good music" is. Yet we all enjoy some kinds of music, and we all could do without others. Why is this? Where does this connection come from? And how do we explain this?

THE SPIRITUALITY:
As I stated earlier, there are certain things in this world that I can't just take science's explanation for. I need more. I need a reason why the chemicals in my body are telling me to like this, that this is pleasurable. Visual beauty, love, and music are the three areas where I find this enigma most prominent and most alluring. When we get beyond the science of these things, when we realize that, yes, there's a scientific order to them, there's a physical explanation as to how they work, we are left with no scientific reason why they work the way they do.

Yet we all have certain songs that just blow us away. Be them songs with lyrics or merely just tunes or orchestral pieces, we all have those specific musical numbers that launch us into serenity. Music is such a powerful tool of communication. Even music without lyrics has the ability to pump us up, calm us down, make us think, make us lust, inspire us, make us angry, etc. Yet often, poetry can be crafted in harmony with some hammers and strings to give us a perfect story, emotion, or idea.

And all this power starts with a sound.

The ability for music to be a form of communication is something that astonishes me. Music provides an emotional backbone to films. It serves as a representation of the soul for many artists. Collectively, it represents the culture of a group of people; an ethnicity, a community, a nation. Music allows ideas, stories, and emotions to travel from one soul to another. That, in and of itself, is pretty miraculous.

I believe that God leaves a little bit of himself within music, a region of this universe that was perhaps created solely to sweeten life, to give it a bit more flavor, more color. Music has taken so many different forms throughout the centuries, yet it has been around since the existence of time. We find culture, history, and cyclical emotions found within music, and it is something that will be around forever. While it's an age old argument that will perhaps never be proven by any living soul for some time to come, I think that the existence of music and everything that it encompasses is analogous to the idea that there is a loving creator out there. Whether you share this belief or not, it's food for thought. The next time you find a song or piece that makes you feel any certain way, ask yourself...why?

"Everything is like a symphony, if you think about it. Birds are perfect, and crickets come out of the wet woods like a choir. And this is another accident, I think to myself, that we have ears to hear, and that nature itself worked perfectly to calm the soul, and a wind from a tornado has that perfect pitch of fear, that train rumble of death, and music, music if it is an accident, may be one of the greatest miracles of them all, as beautiful as romance or color or the power of water."
-Donald Miller (Through Painted Deserts, 39)

A LITTLE SOMETHING EXTRA:
I keep a playlist on my Ipod of about 10-20 songs that make me think about God and my spiritual life, for whatever reason. Whether it's the music or the lyrics of these songs that inspire me or make me think, to me, these specific songs are tonally perfect. The lyrics fit perfectly with the music. This playlist changes from time to time, but a few of them have been on there for as long as five years. Here is my most recent listing on my "God" playlist as of June 2009, just in case you're interested in some of the tunes that inspired this AC entry:

"Forgive Me" - Missy Higgins
"To Build A Home" - The Cinematic Orchestra
"Designer Skyline" - Owl City
"I Sing I Swim" - Seabear
"Hallelujah" - Rufus Wainwright
"Oviedo" - Blind Pilot
"Uppers Aren't Necessary" - Rocky Votolato
"Undeclared" - The Dodos
"Straralfur" - Sigur Ros
"The Gravel Road" - James Newton Howard
"Click, Click, Click, Click" - Bishop Allen
"Pilots" - The Collectors
"For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti" - Sufjan Stevens
"Winter" - Joshua Radin
"New Slang" - The Shins
"Hide and Seek" - Imogen Heap
"Skinny Love" - Bon Iver
"Behind Your Eyes" - Jon Foreman
"Where You Belong" Kael Alden
"Coalwood" - Mark Isham
"American Pie" - Don McLean
"Reckoner" - Radiohead