I suppose not,
it's a very complicated subject, which probably requires many thousands more words than I originally wrote.

The best I can offer you is my own personal viewpoint, which is that music and emotion are (or should be) intrinsically linked. The best example of this that I've seen is that James May program about robots, where he talks about a computer that can "write" like Beethoven. To all intents and purposes it could be considered a Beethoven piece, but it lacks the feel and emotion that Beethoven injected into his music.

To me, the vast majority of music I hear on the radio and in the top 40 sounds the same. I can't hear any passion or feel in it, mainly because it's all so over-produced, the entire thing sounds like it was written and recorded by a computer. Especially when you get all those talentless fuckers that have to use autotune the whole way through a song.

Someone who is emotionally affected by a piece of music like that, in my eyes, is totally missing the point or applying their own emotional value to something which has none. Which is like falling in love with a carrier bag.

At best it's plastic, disposable crap, and the people who put it out know it is. They're businessmen, not artists. They don't give a fuck if people "get" their music, they just want it to sell. Simon Cowell is the king of this way of thinking, and he's quite open about it. He's a businessman. An extremely clever and successful businessman, who has never once claimed to be interested in creating "art".
( PMGT -Bacon., Tue 4 Jan 2011, 18:50, 1 reply)

I largely agree, but...
I guess that one complication is that music as a medium is such a powerful emotive force in itself. To give an example, I have quite a few chairs in my house. One was handmade using a really interesting method by someone I've met. I therefore appreciate it as something with a history into which someone put a lot of themselves in terms of time, imagination, energy etc. The rest of them are just places to put my arse and I don't think about them much as long as they keep it off the floor.

With music I do appreciate songs more if I know that the musician has put more of themselves into it. Whether it be purely emotionally or through their desire to create something technically amazing or novel. But even shitty mass produced music can still make me feel sad/happy/energized/angry etc. if it has the right combination of melodies, harmonies, rhythms etc. I don't need to know much about it's background to have an emotional response to it.
(flimflam_machine, Wed 5 Jan 2011, 14:14, closed)