It is a common observation that music can cause feelings of transcendence in the listener.
Exactly what the word “transcendence” means can itself be a bit uncertain.
For the purpose of my hypothesis, I will define transcendence as:
- A feeling that one is experiencing something beyond or outside of normal reality.
This definition avoids any assumptions about:
- Whether or not the transcendent feelings are morally good or morally bad.
- Whether or not the trancendent experience is about something that actually is real, in some sense, or whether it is just a mis-perception resulting from consumption of a drug, or some kind of illness, or even from some illusory contrivance.
The experience of transcendence is a very subjective phenomenon – given the current state of brain science, if someone claims to be experiencing transcendent feelings, there isn’t any known experimental procedure to prove or disprove this assertion.
Music itself is a phenomenon that is very subjectively defined, so an assertion about the relationship between music and transcendence is an assertion about two subjectively defined phenomena.
A pragmatic approach to the question of subjectivity is to not be too skeptical about the nature of these subjective experiences, especially if we have those kinds of experiences ourselves – the subjectively observed connection between music and transcendence might be giving us strong clues about what music actually is.
The Perceptual Unification Hypothesis
As it happens, I have recently developed a theory that explains how music directly creates transcedent feelings in the listener.
A very brief summary of this theory is:
- The low-level structure of music contains a large amount of exact repetition.
- This causes the brain of the listener to assume that the higher-level structures of music will also contain exact repetition.
- A melody consists of a sequence of melodic phrases which are not all exact repetitions of the same phrase (although some of them may be).
- Therefore the brain is forced to interpret the different perceptions of different phrases as perceptions of a single ur-phrase (this is the “unification” part).
- The ur-phrase does not correspond to any real thing known to exist (other than as something perceived when listening to that particular melody).
- Therefore the ur-phrase is something that exists outside of normal reality.
- Therefore, transcendence.
Most of the time, when people consider why music might have transcendent effects, they assume that the intensity of other effects of music is what gives rise to the transcendence, ie:
- Music expresses emotions.
- These expressed emotions can be very intense, if the music is “strong”.
- The intensity of the expressed emotions give rise to the transcendence.
But if we suppose that music directly creates an experience of transcendence, then the causality might actually flow in the opposite direction, that is:
- Strong music creates a transcendent experience in the mind of the listener.
- Transcendence implies the existence of something beyond normal reality.
- Experiencing something that lies outside of normal reality causes a corresponding emotional response.
In other words, it’s the transcendence that comes first, and the emotion follows from that.
A variation on this analysis can apply to situations where there is music and at the same time emotions or hypothetical emotions are being invoked by something else:
- Music invokes transcendence.
- Something else invokes an emotional response in the listener.
- The transcendence and the emotion interact with each other, resulting in a more intense experience of “transcendent emotion”.
This analysis assumes that the brain’s perception of transcendence is fairly non-specific, where if it is perceiving one transcendent thing that appears to lie outside of normal reality, then it is more inclined to interpret everything else that it is perceiving at that moment as also possibly being outside of normal reality.
The Difficulty of Composing Music
If the perception of music is the perception of a transcendent reality, then this creates a problem when you try to compose music.
If a musical melody is a series of different perceptions of an ur-phrase, then to compose the melody you would have to have some way of imagining the ur-phrase. But the ur-phrase is something that exists outside your normal reality, therefore you have, a priori, no knowledge that such a thing exists, and therefore you have no way to imagine its possible existence.
The implication is that the composition of music, in practice, might be more often the result of a process of discovery rather than imagination – ie the composer plays some pattern of notes, and if they happen to hear some novel musical quality in what they play, then they can build on that thing to eventually create a full new item of music.
Of course there may be some musicians who can so precisely imagine the rendition of musical instruments playing a new melody that their imagination is as good as playing actual notes on an actual instrument (or perhaps just singing the notes).
Another possibility is that the ability to construct a transcendentally perceived item of music might depend on having a simultaneous transcendental experience of something else, and in some cases that transcendental experience consists of an intense emotional experience that the composer is having, for example due to some extreme events happening in their own life.