Music is one of the most powerful of the arts partly because sounds more than any other sensory stimulus create in us involuntary reactions, pleasant or unpleasant. It may be difficult to connect analysis with the experience of listening music, but everyone’s listening, including performers, benefits through understanding of some of the fundamentals of music. Music can be experienced in two basic ways hearing and listening. Hearers do not attempt to perceive accurately either the structure or the details of the music. They hear a familiar melody, which may trigger associations with the composer, time era, or places dedicated to the song. Aside from melody, little else, such as details or chord progression is heard. The listeners, however, concentrate their attention upon the many elements of the music. They observe the form, details, and structure of the music, focusing upon the form that created the content. Even the most avid listeners will be hearers under certain circumstances. No one is always up for concentrated attention. In order to continue, some important terms and concepts must be introduced to arrive to a clear discussion of music. Some of the basic musical terms include tone, consonance, dissonance, rhythm, tempo, melody, counterpoint, harmony, dynamics, and contrast. Each one is essential to the analysis of music. Most music contains at least one, if not all, of these variations within a piece of music. That is primarily what creates a pleasant or unpleasant experience.

If music is like the other arts, it has a content that is achieved by the form’s transformation of subject matter.  It is difficult for music to refer to objects or events outside itself. Therefore, it is difficult to think of music as having some kind of subject matter, just as a painting or sculpture might have. Composers have tried to avoid this limitation by a number of means. One is to use sounds that imitate sounds heard outside of music. Another means is a program, usually in the form of a descriptive title, written description, or an accompanying narrative. Feelings are composed of emotions, sensations, moods, and passions. Any awareness of our sense organs being stimulated is a sensation. Emotions are strong sensations felt a related to a specific stimulus. Passions and emotions elevate to great intensity. Moods, however, are sensations that arise from no specific stimulus. Moods are normally aroused by emotions and passions, mixing in with them so thoroughly that we are unaware of their origin. This is often the result when we listen to music. Music seems to be able to interpret and clarify our feeling primarily because the structure of music parallel with the structure of feelings. Music can change an individual’s state of mind, attitude, and tone just by the beats of a melody. It can sadden or excite its audience and enhance their pleasure.

Nevertheless, how can music interpret feelings? First of all, music can possess an exceptional power of sound that evokes those feelings. Second, feeling is heightened when a tendency to respond is in some way stopped or inhibited. Musical stimuli activate tendencies that are frustrated by deviations from the expected, followed by meaningful resolutions. We hear a tone and find it lacking something that resolves it “needfulness.” Thirdly, it may be that musical structures possess more than just one general resemblance to the structures of feelings. “The tonal structure we call ‘music’ bear a close logical similarity to the forms of human feelings forms of growth and attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation and dreamy lapses one joy and sorrow perhaps, but the poignancy of either vitally felt. Such is the pattern, or logical form, of sentience, and the pattern of music is that same form worked out in pure, measured sound and silence. Music is a tonal analogue of emotive life.

These structures of the close similarity between the structure of music and feelings are fairly convincing because they are extreme. Most listeners would agree that some music can be associated with gloomy moods, and others associated with exhilaration. Undoubtedly, these associations are the result of cultural conventions that we unconsciously accept. However, perhaps within music there is the basis of all these associations. Bouncy music would not evoke feelings of peace, but rather of happiness. Likewise, soft vibrating string instruments would not evoke the feeling of happiness, but of calm. The associations of feelings with music do not seem to be entirely conventional, but are made because music sounds the way feelings feel. No art reaches into our life or felling more deeply than music.

A part from feelings, sound might also be thought of as one of the subject matters of music, because in some music it may be that the form gives us insight to sounds. This is somewhat similar to the claim that colors may be the subject matter of some abstract painting. However, the similarity of a tone of music to a tone in the nonmusical world is rarely perceived in music that emphasizes tonal relationships. In such music, the individual tone usually is so caught up its relationship with other tones that any connections with sounds outside the music seem irrelevant. Tonal relationships in most music are very different in their context from the tones of the nonmusical world. However, music that does not emphasize tonal relationships gives us insight into the sounds that are noises rather than tones. Since we are surrounded by noises of all kinds, we usually turn them off so they do not distract us. That is why we are surprise and sometimes delighted when a composer introduces such noise into a musical composition, and for once, we listen to rather than them away, therefore discovering these noises to be quite interesting. As you already know different kinds of music initiate different moods and can create different mental pictures that vary from person to person. There is a multitude of music and each style is distinctly different from the others.