Saturday, January 4, 2014

Strength in the imperfect decodability of songs

The Confusion of Tongues is indeed tragic. What shuts away entire cultures from each other, cultures of the same animal, is the distance between them, which creates language barriers proportionally bigger to their shared distance. Thought there is one case where this might happen to be fortunate, and that is through music. Now the paradigms of music instrumentation, rhythm, and more distinctly, temperament vary geographically, but they can be appreciated by any human brain even without familiarity, unlike prose.
Language is used in music around the world and it's impossible for any one person to be sufficiently well versed in the culture of each language to perceive the full meaning of a vocal song, or even an outline of it. However, the emotion evoked by the lyrical and harmonic content of the song on the singer, a person with the same universal feelings as all humans, may shine through, paradoxically, more purely than in if the lyrics were understood. Or even one step further: a banal love song with basic lyrics and naive reasoning may resound more deeply with a foreigner than otherwise.
Could this maybe be generalized to all forms of communication of ideas? The ineffable being imposed on the receiving party enabling him to fill in the holes by himself, directly and personally, and therefore more strongly, feeling the idea as his, rather than having it fed to him as information rather than emotion. Amounting to a mere road-map of would-be-felt emotions clearly outlined outside the individual, clear for him to admire rather than feel them as intended.
Art succeeds in this using varied levels of abstraction by artist, thought inevitably, alienation is proportional to abstractness. The decision of the gamble resides on the communicating entity, he may make a choice between purity/alienation or mass-appeal/irrelevanthood.

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