Samiul Bashar Samin
Maybe you’ve heard a variation on this theme: ‘I can’t carry a tune to save my life.’ Or: ‘I don’t have a musical bone in my body.’ Most of us end up making music publicly just a few times a year, when it’s someone’s birthday and the cake comes out. Privately, it’s a different story – we belt out tunes in the shower and create elaborate rhythm tracks on our steering wheel. But when we think about musical expertise, we tend to imagine professionals who specialise in performance, people we’d pay to hear. As for the rest of us, our bumbling, private efforts — rather than illustrating that we share an irresistible impulse to make music — seem only to demonstrate that we lack some essential musical capacity.
The difference between a virtuoso performer and an ordinary music fan is much smaller than the gulf between that fan and someone with no musical knowledge at all. What’s more, a lot of the most interesting and substantial elements of musicality are things that we (nearly) all share. We aren’t talking about instinctive, inborn universals here. Our musical knowledge is learned, the product of long experience; maybe not years spent over an instrument, but a lifetime spent absorbing music from the open window of every passing car.
Music piggybacks on this ability, using it to choreograph experiences of shared temporal attention, sometimes among large groups of people. Experiences at concerts, dance clubs and religious services where lots of people move together to a beat often create a powerful sense of bonding. When music allows us to perceive time in a shared way, we sense our commonality with others more strongly.
In fact, for all its remarkable power, music is in good company here. Many of our most fundamental behaviours and modes of understanding are governed by similarly implicit processes. We don’t know how we come to like certain people more than others; we don’t know how we develop a sense of the goals that define our lives; we don’t know why we fall in love; yet in the very act of making these choices we reveal the effects of a host of subterranean mental processes. The fact that these responses seem so natural and normal actually speaks to their strength and universality.
When we acknowledge how, just by living and listening, we have all acquired deep musical knowledge, we must also recognise that music is not the special purview of professionals. Without that profound shared understanding, music would have no power to move us.