Would you want to live in a world without music?
For once, not much to explain. No music, ever. How would this affect your life?
Music has saved my life before. I’m not sure I could live without it.
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45 Answers
Obviously, if we never had it, we wouldn’t miss it. But, if it was taken away now, then absolutely would I miss it. I love music. Any kind of music really. It reminds me of memories, good, sad, bad, happy, everything. Music means a lot to me. I wouldn’t die without it, but I would miss it greatly.
No, I would not. it inspires my soul.
No.
@LBM, Even if we didn’t have man made music there would still be music in nature.
No, I could not! I’m a musician. I’ve been musically inclined since I was a small child. At one point, as a teenager, I was banned from any musical activity whatsoever. This threw me into a deep depression, which caused my academic performance to suffer. It took many years to recover from the negative impact on my self-esteem.
No I wouldn’t. I am not musical but music is important to me. Unaccountably so.
Only if I had never been exposed to it in the first place.
Well, since I’m a musician, I’d be kind of bummed.
We could live with out your music, @Rarebear.
They can’t take away the music in my head. There is always a song in there. :)
If there had never been music or songs in your life you could not have songs in your head.
Without music we’d never see amazing stuff like this.
I would be OK, to be honest. I prefer written words to spoken, and while I enjoy music, it’s not a lifestyle to me like it is for, say, my husband.
I would do much worse without my vision, which is unfortunate, since I’m much closer to being blind than deaf.
I love music but could totally get by without it. I would be more upset if TV went away.
Not a chance. I could not handle music being taken away from me.
I probably wouldn’t notice.
What we call music was invented by Christians to glorify their God. Before that there were noise makers but they didn’t really know anything significant to do with them. The Hawaiians originally did not have music. They had chants with flutes and drums to accompany them, but they knew nothing of music until the king was forced to bring in cowboys, mostly Mexicans, to round up his cattle. Some of them played guitars, and the islanders were blown away to hear music, especially when one guy played both the tune and the accompaniment. Emperor Maximilian was an Austrian duke, so a few Mexicans had learned to yodel. Hawaiian yodeling is Austrian yodeling.
Of course the Hawaiians mostly learned Spanish and Portuguese tunes. That is why some traditional Hawaiian songs have Portuguese words. The guitar players didn’t like Spanish tuning. They thought the strings sounded tense, and they wanted to relax them. So they did. They developed five dozen different ways to tune the guitar, all below standard tuning. They called their style “slack key”. During an unhappy period in Hawaiian history, the guitar players decided not to play their music for anybody outside the family. They wouldn’t even play for other Hawaiians. So the music was kept as a family secret for a hundred and fifty years. In 1975 they finally realized that the tradition was dying, so they decided to go public. And that is how a fully developed music tradition got dropped on the world without warning. You can sample this style at http://www.pandora.com by searching “slack key paradise” but you need Flash to play it. You can get short excerpts at http://dancingcat.com
^ What colour is the sky on this planet you live on?
@SmartAZ “What we call music was invented by Christians to glorify their God. Before that there were noise makers but they didn’t really know anything significant to do with them.”
This fully equipped ancient band of string plucking Egyptians from 1400BC seem to know exactly what “to do with them”… Walk like Beatle and git da party started!
unless you think they’re sewing or something
I could not live without it. I’d rather be dead.
I would not want to live without it, but I could. I like silence and living with sounds of nature.
I would be devastated if I had to live without my eyesight. This is what gives me the most pleasure.
@SmartAZ. Interesting story, and no doubt some is true, but I can’t credit Christianity for music….It was here long before.
On natural music:
“Rudolph Steiner has said that for the agricultural process to happen, for seeds and plants, and trees to grow, birdsong is absolutely essential. This is a beautiful truth that very few people know. But we also need to take what he said one stage further, because birds call and sing not only to quicken plants: they also call to awaken the human seed that we are. They are actually singing for our sake as well.”
Music is everywhere. I’m always marking a beat, riffing with notes and patterns, listening to the trees rustle.
I think in songs/music almost as much as Setanta does.
they can’t take that away from me
@SmartAZ chants with flutes and drums
As far as I know (and I consider myself something of an expert on music history), chants with flutes and drums are considered music.
TWhat you have presented is a nice, although incomplete, 20th century history of Hawaiian music. You did not mention any of the poly-rhythmic Polynesian influence, nor did you mention the cultural significance of the sacred hula. This video. shows a complicated chant and an extremely organized rhythm to accompany a dance of specifically organized movement to tell the story of creation.
Western music, on the other hand, was influenced by Christianity, but was around long before. Ancient Greeks, such as Plato and Pythagoras, were aware of harmonics and were exploring the relationships between different frequencies and harmonic sounds.
Music came about long, long before Christianity.
I like music but I’d be devastated if I couldn’t read. I read every day and would always choose reading over listening to music. So I could live in a world without music but not without books
That said music does bring people together and I’d say it does make the world a better place. But books.
I should have specified western music. The founders were Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, all Christians, and mostly writing tunes for worship or about scriptural inspirations. Without those three, music would still be like THIS
@Yetanotheruser If you follow that Pandora link you will get the history I quoted almost word for word.
Why are folks being so unfriendly here? It’s not normal to challenge each other on a subject like this.
Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart were the rock stars of their day, but they did not by any means invent music.
@SmartAZ. Didn’t mean to seem unfriendly.
Peace n love
If it weren’t for music, I’d be dead. The minutes I open my eyes, I start listening to music till bedtime.
So. listening to the nature. Is it not music?
I like music a lot and like to explore it, but silence is highly appreciated too. I would get used to the silence, because I would be left with the birds, wind and rain, crickets, owls, dogs, cats and roosters being heard in the distance…Right now, I heard a woodpecker!
It’s early morning at this moment. It’s beautifully silent. I don’t need music all the time. If it is like today, or any morning, I can totally get used to it.
@SmartAZ
Those commercials are very catchy.
I can easily live without music. The only music I have heard for months is soundtracks on movies and TV shows. Some of them on DVD movies annoy me, so I use the MUTE button and look at subtitles. I just switch channels or turn off the TV if music annoys me on it. I do not own a radio or a CD player, so I never listen to music alone. It just has no place in my life. Music’s sole appeal is emotional, and I am more intellectual than emotional.
It is indeed sad if people cannot live without crude emotional arousal that has no intellectual content.
^Are you perhaps living in a country that has censorship of the Internet? Is that keeping you from most music?
Saying that music has “no intellectual content,” makes me think you don’t know much about music.
Even the best music has mainly emotional content. I see that you do not understand music. Where is intellectual content? Rap music tells of beating women and killing policemen. I hardly call that intellectual. Quite the contrary.
Where is intellectual content?
Tool, Rage Against The Machine, Pink Floyd, System of a Down, Radiohead, Led Zeppelin, Muse, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Queens of the Stone Age, to name a few and this doesn’t even list many current bands.
Classical music is intellectual.
Saying that music has “no intellectual content,” makes me think you don’t know much about music.
My thoughts exactly! As a former musician I know that it takes intelligence to make your own music. How can music not have intellectual content? Sure, some of it is crap but certainly not all.
^Yeah. I am sad for our Russian spy. He may not have access to much music….
@Aethelwine As a former musician…
There is no such thing as a former musician. I’ll bet you still listen as a musician!
That’s impossible. Listen to the trees sing. Listen to the wind howl.
Music is in everything.
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