The Music of Love

CEBU, Philippines - There is a soundtrack to the human life experience. It is the sound that dramatizes people’s day to day lives. It has the power to intensify the emotional meanings of certain occurrences in their natural course of living.

Music is an important human invention. It is borne out of the effort to communicate what no words can convey. It is the essential language – feeling evoking feeling.

The royalties of old reportedly employed musical masters to make music to ‘transport’ them to different physical and emotional states. And so there was music to rouse up the palace residents when they were feeling somnolent, and music to lull them down when they were restless. This was the time when the musical genius of the classical maestros flourished.

Today, music continues to serve similar purposes as in the olden times. The various genres of modern music each specialize in a particular ‘state of being’ to bring its listeners into. There’s now music for dancing, music that agitates, music for deep reflection, music for feeling love.

One of the most popular types of music is the love song. The music can stand on its own, but words are added in order to focus the feeling that is being communicated. For example, lovers can be moved by a love song in a unique way – as if the song was made specifically about them.

And love songs take on different feelings still – warm, joyful, sad, resentful. Lovers in a happy relationship would normally have a happy love song to celebrate each other. A jilted lover is likely to be drawn to an angry love song to release his ire.

Anna Salleh, in an article at www.abc.net.au, quotes music psychologist Dr. Sandra Garrido of the University of Western Sydney saying that music is also the primeval human way of attracting mates. It’s probably so that when spoken language was not yet around, human beings would simply make sounds to express how they felt. And these sounds could still be traced even in today’s music – the painful wailing, the exuberance, the sadness, the jubilation, the passion etc. 

In the 1990s, Salleh relates, psychologist Professor Adrian North of Curtin University did a rare study specifically asking people what they considered to be romantic music. Professor North asked hundreds of psychology students what type of music they wanted to hear in 17 different social situations, including a romantic candle-lit dinner.

The responses were surprisingly uniform, according to Salleh. For a romantic date the respondents wanted to hear "quieter, slower music, with soothing tones," she quotes Professor North. It's the sort of music that covers awkward silences but doesn't get in the way of conversation.

And a person’s musical preference also has bearing on his or her personality. There are young people today that like to listen to classical music. These people are often more serious about life; they tend to seek meaning in everything.

By and large, however, the present musical tastes have been so diluted with many factors other than the basic yearning for emotional expression.  Modern media technology has gotten in the way of human instinct such that music or a song can become meaningful to a person simply by association. The song playing on the radio during one’s intensely emotional situation can bring back the emotion every time the person hears the song.

With love songs nowadays, it could be that their emotional significance for lovers simply spring from the fact that these are the songs that the lovers both hear during their intensely emotional moments together. The songs do not have to particularly speak of the state of their love relationships.

But there have also been studies that suggest that a certain type of music increases the levels of oxytocin – the “love hormone” or “cuddle chemical” – in the listeners. Which supports the ancient belief that humans are wired to react in certain ways to certain music types. And experiences, memories, and associations may just be added rivets that keep the relationship between music and humans in place. (FREEMAN)