From Vibration to Meaning

Explaining why a melody moves me is much harder than noticing that it did.

Music is often called a universal language. I like the comparison but I’m not sure it’s exactly right. A language can be translated; music can’t. When I want to hand you what a song left in me, all I have are words, and they all come up short. Maybe music isn’t a language but the thing that takes over where language ends.

In physics we know every sound is a vibration. It’s tempting to turn that into a metaphor: if everything vibrates, and music is vibration too, then music must be touching the essence of existence. I made that sentence for years. I’m more careful with it now, because it ties two separate things together — something measurable and something that can’t be measured. The bridge isn’t as solid as I thought. I still can’t dismiss the feeling; a comparison being weak doesn’t mean the thing it describes wasn’t lived.

What happens when I write music feels like finding, not making. When a melody appears in my head I don’t think I invented it, I think I noticed it. That could of course be an illusion; a mind presenting its own output as something that arrived from outside is a known effect. But calling it an illusion doesn’t explain what happened in that moment. It only gives it a name.

So I won’t write a conclusion here. I’ll leave the question. If a melody opens a meaning in me, was the meaning in the melody, or did I put it there?