Why I do this?

This is a post I did some time ago on the socials and I wanna expand on it a bit here on this newly created blog.

This will be a series of blog posts expanding seperately on the different aspects I mentioned in that post.

First things first:

Why the why?

When starting a question with why we generally want to know something on a deeper level.

But why should I even think about the why?

From my perspective we as human species have been in a crisis of meaningful living. Or put differently: in a “why crisis”.

What do I mean by that?

We often live our lives without really thinking about why we do what we do.

E.g: I struggle with myself if I cannot see or understand why I do what I do over a longer period of time. And I think that in order to build and create something with a long-term perspective it is absolutely essential to know my why. Otherwise it really doesn’t make sense.

Nowadays, the outside world tells us almost everything about the “how” we should live our lives and “what” we should do. Yet how often do we really ask ourselves if this is also the “how” and the “what” we want to live or rather why we should live this way?

A great video to dive into this topic and start off is this TED talk by Simon Sinek “Start with why” where he explains the importance of why on the basis of the golden circle.

So what is my “why” in terms of music, in terms of this project “music to remember”? And how do I express this?

Here we come back to the original post that starts off with:

The language of music

From the original post:

Music is the language we never learned but we all understand and feel somehow. This ability has always been there.

Isn’t this interesting? Whilst we need to learn any spoken language we have some kind of a natural understanding of music. It seems to be a language that just comes with the “human package”. Have you ever considered this? I didn’t for a long time.

Even deaf people can feel music. They are actually quite good dancers because they feel the rhythm, the frequencies etc.

Why? (yes, the why question ;-))
Because we do not only hear with our ears but in fact with the whole body. Our skin and bones listen to those frequencies as well. This then becomes a different kind of listening experience as those frequencies are not processed by the ears solely but by our whole body. Which means that the brain gets its musical information by our whole body system.

And now?

For me, one of many question arising from this observation is: what happens when we are more and more listening to music with earphones only? On streaming platforms that try to keep their data usage as low as possible and therefore cut out most of the frequency ranges we cannot hear but actually would feel. Listening then becomes brainwork exclusively and in fact it is hard work for the brain because it only gets fractions of the information it would need to enjoy the music in a holistic or “wholelistic” way so to speak.

That is one of many reasons why I am a superfan of live sessions and concerts. There we still get the full range of frequencies and can listen with our whole bodies, especially if the listeners are in the same room with the musicians and do not just watch a concert online.

In a way music has been altered into bits and pieces over the last couple of years. Yet it still remains this language we all understand.

But I think we really need to find a balance between the digital listening experience and analog live music. Or is it life music? Or alive music?

By doing so we will return to understanding the true power of music and its true and/or original purpose.

And we will remember why music is the language we all understand without ever having to learn it.

What do you think about this?