When we create music, we express life. But the source of music is silence, which is the ground of our musical being, the fundamental note of life. How we live depends on our relationship with death; how we make music depends on our relationship with silence.
—Paul Hillier
Arvo Pärt/Oxford 1997
I think the visceral joy of music grows from two dynamics that are embedded in musical experience.
Because they're so obvious, and just part of the way music feels, they are easy to overlook:
Music is temporal, it unfolds through time
Sound is physical vibration (touch from a distance)
Music shapes our experience of time. And to hear is literally to be touched by sound. We don't just hear sound, we feel its vibrations through our whole body.
In a real sense, music makes it possible for us to feel time. Music gives time a tactility and texture.
I think one reason music matters so much is because time and touch matter so much.
This has changed how I listen and how I make music.
All music is temporal, and different music is temporal in different ways.
Every piece of music shapes time and feeling in its own way. Another way of saying this is that every piece of music combines remembering and expecting in its own way.
At the root of all musical experience is the process of feeling time. But traditional musicology and music theory don’t give us any way to think about musical time (which is much more than just ‘rhythm’ or ‘meter’).
Approaching music as an immersive sensory experience—and music composition as sensory design—helps me better understand the ways we experience musical time.
Like the idea of Sound as Touch, this has changed the way I listen and the way I make music.
Through the physical vibration of sound, we’re immersed in the flow of time. Music lets us feel a sense of our selves unfolding in time and it lets us share the visceral, joyful feeling of synchronizing and unfolding-in-time with others.
Sound is a fundamental enabler of connection—to ourselves to others, to the circulation of energy in the universe. This kind of entrainment is a crucial part of musical experience.
Creating a mutually shared immersive time world is one of the things music is really good at. These amazing experiences of time aren't accessible in any other way.
I approach music composition as sensory design, a way to orchestrate the flow of sound, silence, time, touch and gesture to create specific shapes of feeling that can be shared.
This helps keep my musical language grounded in physical, emotional and social experience. I believe this is also the best way to approach the spiritual aspect of music.