I stopped when they started wanting you to detail the colors that you sense with each key...

slartabartfast
...
If you do not feel any emotional response to music (some people do not) then you are at a great disadvantage. If you do, then you have all of the knowledge you need to evaluate your own music, and if you can evaluate it you can shape it. Music psychology is an interesting study, but again you are confusing an explanatory model with the thing itself. You can have a PhD in the psychology of love, but it is neither necessary nor particularly helpful if you are falling in love. The emotional ear is what you need to listen to, and practice listening to your feelings is helpful, but you do not need perfect pitch.
 

I'm not sure about this. Saying that a deaf person is at a disadvantage because they can not hear music in the way that we know and understand. That's actually not true.
 
One of our friends in Santa Barbara, had a huge collection of music, and he was almost all deaf, sort of like Beethoven if you will, and he said that there was something in the albums that he got out of it, that was hard to express. My contention, still is, that he had another vibration of feeling that is not something that we know or understand. Remember that "blind" people, often have the other senses amplified to do more than we normally do. Samething for someone that is blind, and yet the music is not an issue.
 
Music "psychology" is a good thing. But it is limiting to the "top ten" and academic pursuits have a tendency to take out the top 5% and the bottom 5% because they distort their "results". This was the case with autistic children in a series of tests at the Speech Dept at UCSB when I was there, and only the visual folks, like us theater students, could "communicate" with them ... and they decided to not use those results because they could not finger them and define them as it was way too individualistic!
 
Advantages and disadvantages, is something that we have created in our heads, I tend to think. Likewise, another blind freind we had, used to hitchhike to Moby Disk and get the new Tangerine Dream, or Klaus Schulze and then hitchhike back to Santa Barbara ... and we think that being blind is an issue? Not for Loren! And he could wire black phones, then! Go figure! That suggests that they see something else that we don't know what it is! Likewise for feeling music, touch or anything else.

Zonno
Music in commercials is always targetted to the the audience. Commercials selling teabags or sanitary pads have (in my country) cheerfull songs with grils singing accompanied by simple chord progressions on a ukelule.
 

God I hate that generic "jolly" ukelele music in commercials. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd set a nursery rhyme to. Between TV commercials and hipsters, ukeleles have been ruined for me.

It's called "Avant-garde" and a lot of people will probably think it is weird unless done in a proper venue, like a movie.
Otherwise more people would probably listen to this kind of music. After-all he did end up somewhere with his paintings like in New York or somewhere and one of his albums (which is really weird) ended up in the top 500 albums made (according to some) - "Trout Mask Replica" - of all albums ever done.
Early days:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyZtlgnu9nw
 
Even Ry Cooder played some with him.
Later it was even this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb9AU6_pTv4
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqRHr5pEIFU
single track of the name of the album.
 
Nowadays it is just beat the bass-drum on the beat and trance music, I guess, who knows. Creativity ends up ending up at the medium, less resistance.
 
And then there is other music that has been done, but anyone usually going out there (wherever that is - outer space I guess) too much, ends up waiting years to finally be recognized if at all.
 
Just one of a few over the years, perhaps the strangest one to some with the way he did music.
Depending on perhaps where you live and how you were brought up.
Old blues music can be similiar in that respect.
 
In the end, most people can not play his music, or anyone like that, and sound like he did (or she - whomever).
(if they wanted to anyway).
 
Where else can you hear a song with him and Zappa with words like "I woke up with beer and puke in a banana bin".
 
 

Starise
Usually in artsy poetic circles, I come across some darned strange lyrics, set to pretty good music. Where else can you get away with that and have it be accepted? In almost anything else I can imagine we expect something at least understandable. 

 
Have you even tried to read Pedro's posts? 
 

Starise
One common trend I'm noticing, although it's been around for a long long time, is music that really makes no meaningful sense to the average listener, yet it conveys  emotion. Usually in artsy poetic circles, I come across some darned strange lyrics, set to pretty good music. Where else can you get away with that and have it be accepted? In almost anything else I can imagine we expect something at least understandable. 
...

 
Actually this has been a very strong tradition going back to the late 60's when Burroughs and many other writers kinda made this famous. In Germany, for example, Peter Handke was writing what should be called "word plays" and he went on to write for Wim Wenders and others. Davie Bowie, Eno and many others also used the same process I call "52-pickup" for any words and sentences within lyrics, and it came out fine. The Canterbury folks were very good at this stuff, but it is not as well known. Heck, one listen to Robert Wyatt, and you feel like you are listening to a 5 year old banging on something or other! And the lyrics are the same thing! Pointed? Maybe. To what?
 
Only in America, because of the radio controls by the media, is this not as well known. Today, with the Internet, none of this is invisible anymore, however, there are not many, if any, artists around that have any inkling at how to do this, and the Coffee House Band, is not exactly a prime example.
 

Starise ...
I have read authors of this say, " I really can't tell you what it means". Apparently the emotional impact of music generally supersedes the importance of meaning, yet an understandable lyric with wide understanding coupled with the associated emotion is greater. If the musician can't feel something and then convey that to someone else, then the music has no reason to be shared.
...

 
From a theatrical aspect, it is not as much about "meaning" as it is about HOW it is stated and said and the context it is used under. Think of it as a foreign language and you have no idea what is being said, but you know there is a conversation taking place.  This is the part I have been telling you guys works, when you can put together 2 people that do not speak the same language, or music, and they can still co-ordinate and play and come up with something different. A lot of the early ECM recordings were about this kind of stuff, within a white room context. You never knew what was going to happen.
 
But it is something that most musicians will NEVER experience or try in their lifetime, because they are not around enough creative folks that spend their time coming up with new and different things to try. Even here, in my mentioning exercises on a parallel world with acting, folks don't seem to enjoy it, or consider trying it. 
 
Learning is almost ALL based on what you don't know! Not what you do!
 
 

Starise ... 
The way to convey emotion is simply to feel it first and then let the music happen. This is the core of it. Training in music  is always helpful because it gives you the tools you need to make that happen, but if you don't feel it you don't have any basis for creation. 

I don't think so. Why? Because there is only one core. AND that core belongs inside the composer himself/herself and sometimes they created something that was instinctive and they themselves have no idea what it meant, but it came out alright. Everyone else's, is an idea of what that core is! Sort of like there is one tree in the middle of the room and we're all around it. The only "core" is the tree! And the rest is all our observations on it.
 
The idea that everything has meaning, is based on the "ego" thinking that we have that music, like all the arts, has to be a mind exercise, and not anything else. For many, and sometimes most, it is not a mind exercise but a "doing" it exercise. Sometimes it just is. Maybe the astrophysicist in Bryan May will find why a certain string is so different than the other in the cosmogony of the universe! And figure out how to tell us!
 
Can that be done with music? I say YES all the time, but the issue I run into, even here, is that folks are too self-conscious and tied to what they know, to try something they don't know, or understand. I keep telling you all, that the main secret to "learning" how to use, and play music is based on this intuitive lesson, because from that point on, you will never ask what it means, and you will simply play it as the moment asks for it, and it will sound magnificent and your touch will stand out ... because most can only play notes and chords!

craigb

sharke

Zonno
Music in commercials is always targetted to the the audience. Commercials selling teabags or sanitary pads have (in my country) cheerfull songs with grils singing accompanied by simple chord progressions on a ukelule.

God I hate that generic "jolly" ukelele music in commercials. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd set a nursery rhyme to. Between TV commercials and hipsters, ukeleles have been ruined for me.

Pain is an emotion, ya? 

Nahhhhh ... pain is a SCREAMMMMMMMMM!