Nostalgic Healing

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

There was a time, not so long ago, when nostalgia was classified as a mental disorder. Psychology texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries described nostalgia as a form of “melancholia,” an “immigrant psychosis,” and a “monomaniacal obsessive mental state causing intense unhappiness.” These negative views inherited the term’s original connotation, as coined by Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in 1688. He called nostalgia a “neurological disease of essentially demonic cause.”

Nostalgia has accumulated positive associations in recent years. Pop culture “nostalgia dealers,” specializing in vinyl records, comic books, and motion picture reboots, capitalize on the public’s wistful longing for the past. Social media sites like Facebook make it possible to stay in touch with people from different stages of our lives, fortifying links between who we were and who we are today. This healthy sense of self-continuity begins in young children, who fondly reminisce about birthdays and family vacations.

A host of social-psychological studies have found nostalgia to be effective in counteracting loneliness, easing anxiety, increasing generosity, and strengthening relationships. Even when yearnings stir bittersweet emotions, they imbue our lives with meaning and make the end of life less frightening. Dr. Clay Routledge of North Dakota State University observes: “Nostalgia serves a crucial existential function. It brings to mind cherished experiences that assure us we are valued people who have meaningful lives. Some of our research shows that people who regularly engage in nostalgia are better at coping with concerns about death.”

Music is a favorite nostalgia tool for laypeople and researchers alike. An experiment conducted by Routledge and colleagues showed that playing hit songs from the past makes life seem “worth living” and wards off despair. Psychologists in the Netherlands found that listening to nostalgic songs makes people feel physically warmer.

A study from Scotland’s Glasgow Caledonian University tested the effects of music listening on the perception and tolerance of experimentally induced cold pressor pain. Fifty-four participants were subjected to three cold pressor trials. The first was accompanied by white noise, the second by specially designed “relaxation music,” and the third by the participants’ chosen music. When listening to preferred music, participants tolerated the pain stimulus significantly longer than when listening to white noise or relaxation music. They also reported having a much greater sense of control when hearing their chosen music.

While this study did not involve nostalgic music, per se, we can assume that at least some of the favored music fit that description. We might even expect stronger coping from expressly nostalgic music. Not only does this put to question the comparative efficacy of music marketed for healing (the type featuring drawn-out tones, flowing rhythms, atmospheric drones, and minimal chord changes), but it also suggests that the best music for mood regulation may be totally idiosyncratic: my nostalgia is not necessarily your nostalgia. Wistful affection, in short, is a key factor when considering music for pain relief, well-being, and life-affirmation.

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Musical (Nearly) Universals

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Human universals refer to aspects of culture, language, behavior, and psyche found in historically and geographically distributed human populations. These include, but are by no means limited to, tools and tool-making, grammar and syntax, myths and proverbs, social groups and kinship systems, mores and moral codes, facial recognition and psychological defenses, and gestures and emotional displays. Some of these are universals of classification, as opposed to universals of content: they share common patterns and purposes, but not necessarily individual elements.  Myths and languages, for example, take on many different forms and meanings, but their presence in widely varied societies make them universal categories.

Music is universal in this classificational sense. While a universally applicable definition of music seems impossible, no human society, past or present, has been without some type of culturally intelligible musical expression. Anthropologists and aestheticians highlight dissimilarities in styles and sounds, and modern music-makers push barriers beyond what is normatively called “music.” Yet within the overwhelming variety and complexity reside ubiquitous acoustic cues.

Psychological studies have uncovered an array of associations between general musical sounds (i.e., not tied to a specific genre or music-culture) and human responses. Loud music, for instance, tends to increase psychological arousal. Lower pitches are perceived as negative or aggressive, whereas higher pitches are heard as positive or submissive. Vibrato tends to evoke strong emotionality, while sudden or unexpected sounds tend to startle. Auditors synchronize body movements with music’s temporal organization. Cuteness is conveyed through certain resonant cavities (roughly 20 milliliters in volume), such as ocarinas and music boxes, which apparently trigger nurturing behaviors associated with infant vocalizations. Other cues suggest a link between vocal tendencies and musical expression, such as intensified speech (angry, fearful, happy, etc.) with faster tempi.

As this partial list suggests, similar responses to similar characteristics persist across the human experience, even as the music itself can differ dramatically. This seems to go against the “incommensurability thesis,” which posits that because objects, concepts, and behaviors have very specific meanings for the groups that produce them, they must therefore be utterly unique. Without denying music’s irreducible diversity, associations appear to cut through culturally specific signatures. Underlying the wide range of rhythms, tonalities, modalities, and timbres are basic and essentially predicable responses.

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Objective and Subjective Emotions in Music

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

“I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music.” This oft-quoted statement from Igor Stravinsky’s 1936 autobiography Chronicles of My Life remains hotly debated. It seems to fly in the face of intuition, which automatically senses in music a definite emotional quality. Postmodern deconstructionists have taken Stravinsky’s statement to its extreme, discounting an essential relationship between music and emotions, and arguing that music can only express musicality itself. Nonmusical associations—emotional, symbolic, and visual impressions—have nothing to do with music per se, but instead prove the human tendency to endow everything in our environment with animate qualities. Advocates of this view, like Peter Kivy and Malcolm Budd, agree especially with the second part of Stravinsky’s statement: “If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention—in short, an aspect we have come to confuse, consciously or by force of habit, with its essential being.”

Stravinsky’s words might confound listeners of his music, which elicits a range of deeply emotional responses. However, his comment speaks more to process than impact. It articulates a formalist position, wherein music’s meaning is determined by form. Music invariably produces emotions, but it does not embody them. This viewpoint marked a shift from nineteenth-century romanticism, which valued irrationality, spontaneity, and transcendence over Enlightenment ideals of reason, order, and materiality.

Importantly, 1936 was the middle of Stravinsky’s neoclassicist period, bookended between a Russian “neo-primitive” period (1907-1919) and a period of serialism (1954-1968). Neoclassicism was a return to compositional attributes favored in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including light textures, conciseness, conventional forms (dance suites, sonata forms, etc.), and tonality (more a reaction to modernism than to romanticism). It was not simply an imitative movement: “neo” denotes both return and innovation. Even Stravinsky’s dry and Bach-like Octet for wind instruments (1923)—an early effort dismissed in the press as a bad joke—bears the composer’s signature.

Stravinsky clarified his rejection of romanticism and its “supernatural muse” in Poetics of Music (1947): “Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it. For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of achieving full realization of this find.” Fellow twentieth-century composer Aaron Copland saw in Stravinsky’s approach the beginnings of objectivism, which came to dominate concert music as the twentieth century marched toward the twenty-first.

Unlike the overly expressive music of the Romantics, which expands harmony, dynamics, and form to transmit intensely personal sentiments, Classical and modern works, while sonically light years apart, share an air of impersonality. Construction precedes and produces expression, rather than the other way around. Thus, as Copland wrote in The New Music, 1900-1960, there is “no need, therefore, to concentrate on anything but the manipulation of the musical materials, these to be handled with consummate taste and craftsmanslike ability.”

Viewed in this light, Stravinsky’s provocative stance on music and emotion really answers a question of style: Should emotions drive composition (Romantic-subjective) or derive from it (Classical-objective)? The broader issue of whether feelings originate within musical sounds or are grafted onto them seems almost moot. Not to sidestep the debate entirely, but the experience remains emotional all the same.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

 

Music to the Rescue

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Jerry Goldsmith, a top film composer of the second half of the twentieth century, regularly worked on projects unworthy of his artistic expression. His filmography includes over two hundred titles, along with a hefty body of television work. Much of it is stale genre fare: thrillers, westerns, maritime adventures, and war movies. According to Mauricio Dupuis, author of Jerry Goldsmith: Music Scoring for American Movies, “It is almost proverbial, among enthusiasts of this composer and the applied cinematic genre in general, to consider Goldsmith a rare example of talent and technical ability frequently applied to projects lacking in ideas.”

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a case in point. Somewhere between mediocrity and a critical failure, the thinly-scripted and over-budget 1979 film famously strayed from the character-driven saga of the original series. It is a meandering attempt to hybridize Star Trek, Star Wars, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even the costumes are a bland shadow of their former selves. Director Robert Wise—legendary for helming The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music—admitted, “Thank goodness we had Jerry’s score…He really saved us.”

Film music accomplishes a number of aims: establishing atmosphere, setting a mood, building anticipation, amplifying gratification, aiding characterization, shaping narrative, unifying images, and so forth. A well-written score (or well-constructed compilation score) naturalistically undergirds and interacts with the visuals and non-musical sounds. On screen as in life, music is interwoven into human experience, at times underscoring activities, and other times transcending them.

Just as a thoughtful score can “save” a lackluster scene, good music can mitigate a less-than-spectacular day. “Good” is used here in the utilitarian sense of serving a need or function; or, as Baruch Spinoza wrote, “By good I mean that which we certainly know to be useful to us” (Ethics IV, Definition 1). A soundtrack for film or daily life is essentially Gebrauchsmusik: music for a purpose outside of the music itself. When the action is intrinsically compelling, good music enhances it. When events are droll or disappointing, good music provides a ray of light. The latter might be called “Gebrauchsmusik plus,” with the effect surpassing the reality of the moment.

University of Groningen researchers Jacob Jolij and Maaike Meurs touched on this in their 2011 study, “Music Alters Visual Perception.” They found that emotional stimuli, like music, influence not only how listeners feel, but also how they see the world. When music stimulates something positive within, the world tends to improve accordingly. (Of course, the opposite is also true.) A favorite song on the radio can temporarily brighten a slog in heavy traffic; a well-chosen playlist can ease the toil of washing dishes. And, as Jerry Goldsmith often discovered, incidental music that exceeds the quality of a film can improve the cinematic experience.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Tastemaking

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

In The Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto, or This Year’s Masterpiece—one of several story synopses in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Breakfast of Champions—a government official spins a wheel to assign cash value to works of art submitted by the citizenry. The wheel lands on a painting of a house cat by Gooz, a humble cobbler who had never painted before. The simplistic portrait is appraised at eighteen thousand lambos, or one billion earth dollars. Crowds flock to see it at the National Gallery. Meanwhile, a bonfire consumes all the statues, paintings, and books the wheel has deemed worthless.

This satirical vignette highlights the disproportionate and arbitrary role of industry officials (governmental and corporate) in determining aesthetic values and tastes. The top-down model lampooned in the parable is not distant from commercial radio stations that weed out music before it ever reaches our ears. Cultural critics contend that decisions to promote or bury certain songs too often rely on extra-musical factors: image, celebrity, markets, studio backing, etc. This results in a homogenized soundscape, where listeners have limited volition over the music they hear. In Vonnegut’s hyper-cynical scenario, a completely random process shapes the masses’ artistic sensibilities. They flock to see an amateur painting of someone’s pet, and think nothing of other works—no doubt many of high quality—going up in flames.

To an extent, Vonnegut’s bleak parable was more applicable in 1973, when Breakfast of Champions hit the shelves, than it is today. The online availability of music, access to independent radio stations, and platforms for compiling digital playlists provide unprecedented opportunities to short circuit the music industry’s control. Democratization has dented the industry’s historic role in pre-selecting sounds. Individuals more directly determine what they hear and what becomes popular. Adrian C. North and David J. Hargreaves are optimistic in their essay, “Music and Marketing”: “the digitization of music means that psychological factors will become more important than economic factors in explaining the music that people listen to on a day-to-day level. In decades to come we…suspect that the importance of economic explanations [for listening preferences] will diminish” (from Oxford’s Handbook of Music and Emotion, 2010).

We are not there yet; the old tastemakers still operate. As the digital age has broadened listening options, corporate interests have narrowed their palettes. In a high-stakes industry faced with escalating costs, intense competition, and a perpetually volatile youth demographic, safe bets overwhelm the airwaves. The complaint that “everything sounds the same on the radio” seems truer now than ever before. Listeners who do not explore digital or other options, either by choice or by circumstance, are left wading in an undifferentiated pool of cookie-cutter consumerism. They are stuck gazing at the cat.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Symmetric Sounds

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

According to science writer Philip Ball, roughly ninety-four percent of music lasting more than a few seconds contains verbatim repeats. This is true of music-cultures scattered throughout the globe. Indeed, despite the astonishing variety of expressive sounds culturally defined as music, repetition appears to be a unifying characteristic. On the micro scale, repetition derives from alternating longer and shorter note values, sometimes with pauses in between. If extended, these temporally balanced blocks merge into macro patterns: ostinati, verse-chorus form, sonata form (exposition, development, recapitulation), thirty-two bar form (AABA), and so on. Repeated rhythms and melodic/harmonic lines are also heard in through-composed works, flowing ecclesiastical chants, and patchwork songs, such as “Fingertips” by They Might Be Giants, comprising twenty-one short songs of five to twenty seconds apiece.

On the small and large scale, repetition yields symmetry: a sense of pleasing proportions. Symmetry is a fundamental aspect of beauty. Biologically, left-to-right symmetry in the face and/or body is a generalized indicator of physiological and psychological health. Thus, the most symmetrical people are considered the most beautiful (eye-of-the beholder arguments notwithstanding). Likewise, we are attracted to well-proportioned patterns of nature—flora, fauna, and geological—and repelled by their opposite.

To a significant extent, art is indebted to the mathematical symmetry present in nature. Nature-imitative patterns are woven into pottery, poetry, architecture, and musical repetition. Contrastingly, modernist movements that intentionally frustrate our pattern-seeking brains tend to provoke negative responses. (In the works of Pierre Boulez, for instance, references to other music are expunged as far as possible.)

However, over-redundancy has its own problems. Occasional deviations can be welcome and gratifying surprises, so long as the pattern is quickly retrieved. In music, agreeable breaks are typically achieved through truncation (subtraction of metrical units), prolongation (addition of metrical units), or elision (overlapping of two symmetrical units). It can also result accidentally. For example, during a performance of Juan Tizol’s “Perdido” at Carnegie Hall on January 19, 1974, Charles Mingus and his band of all-stars (George Adams, Hamiet Bluiett, Jon Faddis, John Handy, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Charles McPherson, Don Pullen, and Dannie Richmond) botched the AABA form under Bluiett’s baritone sax solo. The musicians played three A sections in a row in one chorus, and just one A section in the next. In Montréal, these gaffes are known as a “three-headed monster” and a “one-eyed beauty,” respectively. The “three-headed monster” emerges again in the last chorus of Pullen’s piano solo. These errors, hardly unusual during jam sessions, rarely spoil the music. They are (usually) amusing anomalies, which temporarily rupture, but never dismantle, the predictable pattern.

The attraction of symmetry in music is self-evident. All human cultures have music, virtually all of that music contains repetition, repetition creates symmetry, and all cultures consider music aesthetically rewarding. Moreover, music that discards symmetry is often called “ugly,” with some challenging its very musical-ness.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Childlike Ears

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Childlike wonder is for many an idealized virtue. Aristotle’s inquiries often begin with innocent amazement. Poet and scholar Kathleen Raine advised, “rather than understanding nature better by learning more, we have to unlearn, to un-know, if we hope to recapture a glimpse of that paradisal vision.” J. Krishnamurti, the self-styled twentieth-century sage, was moved to tears at the sight of withering branches. These approaches simulate a pre-jaded, pre-cluttered stage of life, when openness and sensitivity are natural conditions. The shiny new brain is neither capable of boredom nor stress. It is receptive to all shades of experience, unconcerned with the illusion of self, and attentive to the world as it is.

Intellectual maturation and social conditioning quickly do away with this pristine state. The schoolchild is taught to label and conform. A grown man weeping at a tree is abnormal. But, say the romantics, by retrieving (or reconstructing) childlike innocence, we can salvage a life-enhancing sense of awe.

The distance between the child’s perception and our own can be demonstrated musically. Unlike adults, young children do not typically describe or define music. They derive benefits from the music they make and listen to—joy, solace, safety—but to them, music just is. Infants instinctively move to the beat and respond wide-eyed to lullabies and infant-directed song-speech. However, as children mature, their ears become more discerning, and the external influence of family, peers, and consumer culture narrow tastes and heighten judgments. By middle childhood (ages 6 to 12), spontaneous engagement is typically replaced with self-consciousness. Words begin interfering with experience.

Vladimir Jankélévitch romanticizes infant ears in his 1961 classic, La Musique et l’Ineffable (Music and the Ineffable). An exceedingly perceptive and prolific contributor to the philosophy of music, Jankélévitch nevertheless admits the uneasy application of words to the musical experience: “Directly, in itself, music signifies nothing, unless by convention or association. Music means nothing and yet means everything.” He espouses “a great nostalgia for innocence,” promotes “a return to the spirit of childhood,” and reminds us that “music was not invented to be talked about.” This is not a contradictory position. Musical subtleties were of great interest to Jankélévitch; he was captivated by the slightest gradations of sound. Yet, his responses were more testimonial than analytical or explanatory. Study led him to a profound gratitude best expressed in silence. He encouraged readers to enter the “mystery” for themselves.

Like Aristotle, Raine, and Krishnamurti, Jankélévitch was a deep thinker aware of both the merits and demerits of the thinking brain, which affords exploration and reflection, but obstructs the purity of experience. His desire was to reenact the clean exposure we unconsciously sweep aside with accumulating years. From such a state, fresh and novel insights are possible.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Music and Supernaturalism

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

The companionship of music and supernatural speculation appears to be almost as old as humanity itself. Paleolithic cave paintings, possibly created by shamans, are often found in the most resonant parts of the cave, implying their use in a chant-infused ritual. Hurrian song tablets from the city of Ugarit (c. 1400 B.C.E.) are not only the earliest examples of written notation, but are also hymns. Anthropologists observe that all cultures, ancient and modern, exhibit some partnership of singing/chanting and religious ceremony. Explanations for this pervasive phenomenon typically focus on the spiritual-emotional quality of sound. The ineffable essence of music simulates or stimulates the ineffable essence of the supernatural. While intuitively valid, such inferences overlook a more fundamental link between music and supernaturalism: the desire for order.

The Future of an Illusion (1927) presents the emphatic culmination of Sigmund Freud’s lifelong thinking on religion. Among its many proposals is the role of gods and spirits in the “humanization of nature.” The human psyche is uncomfortable with uncertainties. The precariousness of nature and uncertainty of life events suggest a cold and uncaring universe. “But,” Freud writes, “if the elements have passions that rage as they do in our own souls, if death itself is not something spontaneous but the violent act of an evil Will, if everywhere in nature there are Beings around us of a kind that we know in our own society, then we can breathe freely, can feel at home in the uncanny and can deal by psychical means with our senseless anxiety.” In other words, if otherwise inscrutable happenings, good and bad, can be attributed to evil spirits and the deities that combat them, then a sense of purposeful organization can be obtained. The inexplicable becomes explicable.

As a theory of the origin of religion, this is perhaps too reductionistic—a charge Freud himself was willing to entertain. However, its logic does play out in all sorts of theologies and cosmologies. Anthropocentric projections onto nature are instinctual and often subconscious. They underpin descriptions of the weeping willow, raging storm, wise old owl, and pleasant valley. Such humanization brings comprehension to an unstable world. That this impulse would generate religious conceptions seems inevitable.

Music can be understood as a sonic consequence of the yearning for order. Natural sounds, like visible phenomena, can give the impression of disarray and erratic spontaneity. The earliest human-made patterned sounds—what is minimally defined as music—were in all likelihood imitations of sounds from the local habitat, generated by rain, wind, insects, birds, critters, and the like. By mimicking these sounds, humanity could achieve psychological control over them, and, in turn, hear their own sentiments expressed in nature.

Admittedly, this musical conjecture has the same reductionist shortcomings as Freud’s proposal. Neither theory addresses the full picture of why and how human beings invented religion and music. No single theory can do so. Nevertheless, their shared motivation adds some clarity to the age-old union of music and religion. Both aid our largely fanciful quest for reason and order.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Unreal, Real, Ideal

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

A chord played in isolation is ambiguous. It might be the tonic of one key or a degree of several others. Without additional chords on either side, it cannot establish a definite mood or meaning. Likewise, a string of chords splayed randomly into the air does not have a perceptible purpose. Without pointing in a specific direction or outlining a reasoned path, it is basically functionless. Only when chords occur in a progression do they have a discernible goal, whether establishing a key, modulating, transitioning, or reaffirming.

Not surprisingly, the chord progression is the most universally satisfying—and thus the most ubiquitous—Western harmonic tool. This owes to its fulfillment of two psychological needs: structure (beginning, middle, and end) and the resolution of tension. Logical progressions convey the order and predictability we strive for in life, but often do not achieve. It is no accident that the most common progressions are also the most comforting, such as I-V-vi-IV and “Pachelbel’s Progression” (I-V-vi-iii-IV-I-IV-V).

In contrast, a single chord, no matter the type, has no analogue in actual life. Unlike the chain of cause and effect that drives every natural process, the isolated chord has no antecedents or consequences. It is irrelevant to our interconnected world. As John Muir famously wrote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” A chord without a “hitch” is un-relatable.

An unsystematic succession of chords falls between progression and isolation. Although there is movement from one chord to the next, it lacks the gratifying impact of anticipation, pattern recognition, and closure. This sort of harmonic series hits perhaps too close to home: it resembles the aimless meandering of existence. Instead of affirming a desire for order, it holds a mirror to life’s frequent chaos and seeming randomness. It is relatable in a negative way.

To put it simply, an isolated chord is unreal: it is alien to any physical or psychological process. A chord succession is real: it reflects the unpredictable nature of existence. A chord progression is ideal: it embodies the direction and design we seek.

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More than Words

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Communication is usually defined as the exchange of information or ideas. The expansiveness and nuance of modern languages is such that almost anything can be put into words. Vocabulary helps us make sense of the world and process our experiences in it. Contrastingly, nonverbal communication is very limited in range. While it takes many forms—from gestures and facial expressions to posture and speech patterns—it mainly operates on the level of feelings. Nonverbal cues typically do little more than reinforce or contradict what is being said (like saying “thank you” with a smile or “everything is fine” with a frown). Nevertheless, psychologists have long known that the wording of a message is far less important than how the words are expressed.

In 1968, UCLA professor Albert Mehrabian published an influential paper, “Communication Without Words,” which examined the relative effect of verbal and nonverbal communication. He found that the impact of speech is fifty-five percent facial, thirty-eight percent tone of voice, and only seven percent verbal. This comes pretty close to arguing that it doesn’t matter what we say, but how we say it. Of course, the formula applies less to purely factual statements, like giving directions or one’s stating name and address; but in ordinary conversation, nonverbal communication carries disproportionate weight.

While the 7%-38%-55% Rule might seem exaggerated, proof is readily found in our day-to-day lives. Just think of how sarcasm can flip the meaning of a phrase. Positive words are reversed with an eye roll or resentful tone. It is an entirely extra-linguistic trick, making it notoriously difficult to put into writing. Without vocal or facial indicators, “nice going” just means “nice going.”

The power of nonverbal communication is also felt in song. The musical content of a song is often thought of as additive—that is, as a vehicle for clarifying and transmitting lyrics. However, in many cases, the opposite is true: lyrics can simply be an excuse for making music. If spoken messages are thirty-eight percent voice tone, then song—a medium that accentuates the voice—is swayed even more by sound. Add to this the visible aspect of a live performance, and the importance of words dwindles further still.

There are many songs in which words have an exceedingly small impact. We all like songs with lyrics that, if merely spoken or read, would not interest us in the least. These come in six basic types, though there may be more: Songs with trite or sophomoric lyrics; Songs that make little sense; Songs with themes we do not condone; Songs with ideas we do not agree with; Songs in a foreign language; Songs about things with which we have no experience. In each case, words probably account for less than seven percent of our attraction.

To be sure, plenty of songs include thoughtful poetry. But they are not the majority. If, for instance, we were to comb the extensive Beatles catalogue, we would find that most of their lyrics are simplistic, some are nonsensical, and a small number are truly exquisite. These lopsided figures do not impact the band’s popularity, just as the words we say do not make or break how others feel about us. Communication is much more than words.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.