Different threads in music

Yes I completely agree. One thing which threw me a bit when I was researching AS was that people on the spectrum are supposed to be averse to loud sounds and bright lights. So this confused me as I've always loved gigs. It seems so many people on the AS love music and live performances! 

Are there subcultures anymore? I used to be fascinated by subculture,  music and identity. I think the internet has homogenised everything.

You're right, music has the power to unite people, as you say, in their thousands! Sounds like it was a good gig!

When I go to gigs to see my favourite bands I feel at ease in a massive crowds with very loud music. Any other circumstances with the same criteria and I'd retreat to a safe quiet place! 

I've no idea but I think music is very much a social thing....celebrating, worshipping, sitting round the campfire, football matches. It brings people together.  ...I went to see Noel G last month. It wasn't just the music, it was the atmosphere - thousands of people singing along and coming together as one.

Unknown said:

I think music's one of the greatest achievements of humans.

100% agree. It's one of those subjects I sometimes completely over-think. Like why are we genetically programmed to feel emotion to certain sounds? What is the benefit to that in nature? Some music is so beautiful it makes people cry. Does anybody else find this absolutely fascinating? I struggle with words and emotions when communicating with other humans yet I can be moved to tears by a piece of a music? I have no  problem expressing emotion to it... Weird.

We're instinctively afraid of the colour red, we're instinctively afraid of loud bangs - I get the benefit of this with regards to survival. So why on the flip side are we drawn to beautiful sounds/music? This type of stuff can't be taught, you can't teach yourself to become emotional to a certain genre of music - you either are or you aren't.... I like to think we're programmed to be happy, we have a code that ensures we can find happiness in this odd but amazing world we live in. Or maybe it's because I've had a large can of energy drink....

I love paying attention to individual components too. I went to a gig last week and it was great to close my eyes and just focus on different parts.

Ive always loved music but feel over this past month I've rediscovered my passion for it. I have been listening to Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds continuously (it's like some sort of thirst I need to quench every otherday). And since Tuesday have listened toseversl times a track from 1983 by Monsoon called Ever So Lonely - it has so many parts to it....it's great to pick out each one but equally as great to get immersed in every aspect all at once. (Original not remix version)

I like listening to music in the car. I hear extra details which I hadn't noticed before.

I think music's one of the greatest achievements of humans.

I love singing along to backing vocals for this very reason (I can't sing at all though!)

I love getting lost in music, it's one of the reasons I love playing final fantasy games. The music is amazing and sucks you in. My particular favourite is "Aerith's theme" from Final Fantasy 7... beautiful

I like all kinds of music, but usually just one or two tracks by any particular group or artist  I have a preference for a strong beat, which can be in anything from Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" to "When the Levee Breaks" by Led Zeppelin. I can listen to a particular favourite on repeat for days or weeks, at the moment it's "Bittersweet Symphony" by The Verve.  Often, I can change or enhance an emotion by listening to a particular track, and sometimes I realise that the lyrics are descriptive of feelings I'm having but couldn't articulate.

Definitely an interesting topic............I think you quite rapidly lose something as you start to strip things away (although if the music were quite simple to start with maybe.....). A bit like (if I remember my chemistry) acetone smells like pear drops - but wouldn't compare to an *actual* bag of pear drops, especially if smelled whilst standing in an old-skool sweet shop............

There's something about the "space around notes", where you get a sense of the acoustic environment revealed by the decay and reverberation - & probably parts of the music that audiophiles used to berate mini-disc for (ATRAC coding?) taking away.

Psychoacoustics is both a lovely word and an interesting topic!

Yeah - but doing the Fourier Analysis and stripping out all of the harmonics to pare it down to maybe 5 or 6 basic tones - just how much can be stripped out and still get the same effect.

Well in one sense, it *is* a selection of sine waves - just many of them, superposed with the appropriate phase and amplitude. They are certainly masters, especially when using music to pull in the opposite direction to the visual.

I think the people who do good film scores are the masters of using our emotions against us.    I suspect it's the visual stimulus as well - but the music can crank my emotions around at will.

I wonder if it was just a selection of Sine waves, would it have the same impact?

Hehe. 100% agree on that. I haven't read a fictional book since school when I had to. It just doesn't sink in and takes far more effort than it is worth, yet I love reading reference and technical material.

On the music front I find different music causes different emotions, regardless of the style or lyrics, etc. I love playing the keyboard and find certain keys and styles let me get emotions out.

My theory on this is that we have a deep seeded subconscious relationship to sounds and sequences of sounds that we probably used before we discovered a word based language.

I keep experimenting to see if I can minimise the emotional sequences to the bare minimum with a strong impact. I am sure there is some researched science on it somewhere but haven't gone down that route yet.

Yes, and the filler / bridging words in that sentence above are pretty much "The of at to the of from" - in other words 7 out of 27 words;  26%.

Something else I'm fascinated by is chord progressions and how linking certain chords in a certain way causes me to spontaneously cry.     Now as chords are just a set of frequencies and beat frequencies, can just randomly supplying those same frequency interrelationships split by many octaves have the same result?   (A bit like DX7 voice synthesis.)

This is a repeatable result every time - within seconds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G4NKzmfC-Q

Yeah - technical documents are much easer to read - only the big words are important - the rest is just filler and bridging/linking words to hold it together.

Fiction is difficult - so many words, so little content and it can change direction within a sentence.   Hate it..   Sometimes have to read the same page a couple of times to 'get it'.

Give me a Haynes Manual any day.

As an aside, I find that reading scientific papers like the one I linked to can be so easy, with the meaning flowing at high rate into my brain quite effortlessly, whereas if I read fiction I sometimes just don't get sentences despite reading them several times. As an example, "The analysis of low-frequency phase locking at soundless strong-beat positions enabled us to further disentangle the manifestation of neural synchronization from stimulus-driven evoked responses." makes instant sense to me, and I know that many people would find it to be nothing but a jumble of long words.

Yes I've noticed/like this too, and it's been studied scientifically. I'm not 100% sure this link is on exactly the same topic as I'm digging in my memory by about 20 years to find what the response is called (N-something or P-something?) but it looks like it covers the ground (haven't read it yet): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5490067/

Yes me too about the visualisation. I perceive (in a way that I can't quite explain) bass lines as a fuzzy, rubbery, brown, vibrating thing and cymbals as blue-white splashes.

Pretty much all music *can* have this kind of effect. But I'm on a loop of Carly Rae Jepsen at the moment (have been for about 18 months!) and love the way the music is constructed - rising baselines counterpointing melody (e.g. "Higher", 2:25 onward - it's quite subtle as the bass sound is in the background quite a bit), percussion, different vocal styles & carefully-chosen ways of annunciating for rhythm. Also thinking of Rita Ora "I just wanna kiss girls" - *really* love the different vocal sounds and how they fill gaps in the rhythms so neatly. Another one for the "little twiddles" is the acoustic(?) guitar in "Bucket" (Carly Rae again) - e.g. about 27 seconds in.

I do listen to Baroque orchestral/strings and stuff too, but I find modern pop so fresh & energising & it helps lift my mood as well as being really well orchestrated in my opinion. 

Me too - I disassemble records in my head to understand the styles of each of the musicians.

I particularly like the missing notes where the other music around a space creates a false impression in your brain that a note has actually happened - but it's not there - it's a space - you're brain doesn't like the gap and wants to hear it so creates a phantom note - every time.

I sometimes visualise music and I love the patterns, what music has this effect on you?  this happens with me with any genre but not every song/piece of music, when ive spoken about this to people they either completely agree or just look at me like im crazy haha