to me, music is freedom. music is one of the most abstract art forms, if not the most abstract art form. there are no limits to music. you can do anything because every sound is music. you can make any story with it, any feeling with it, all kinds of exploration with it, you can even listen to it in different ways: actively (listening to it) and passively (putting it in the background while you're working). all of this makes music one of the most free art forms.

music is when the notes go brrr

music is gay and for nerds

ephemeral vibration

Music to me is a way to express myself. It's really just sounds tied to emotions.

serious answer: music is one of the means i can express my feelings, emotions, thoughts, etc into a realm that people can comprehend and be there for. it's a beautiful way to say many things in one piece or another.

i have no fucking clue

...no really i dont know

i just lik music alot

:skull:

as a composer: music as exploration/experimentation, music as self-expression, and really just music as satisfaction (i.e. making things you yourself want to hear), these are the sorts of things that drive me to create. really this all applies to performance, too, with self-expression maybe taking the top spot

as a listener: to me, the most powerful thing about music is that it can make you feel something, or even feel what you were already feeling more strongly, as in it puts you more in touch with your own emotions in a sort of deep visceral way that other mediums don't quite reach.. at least for me! when music resonates it's so much stronger than even a powerful movie/show/book making you think or cry or whatever. anyway, that emotional connection to music is an important through-line for me, basically all of my favorite music has some of that

its a love hate relationship, now hear me out..

i love going on little adventures, and consistently getting my mind blown by Large sounds or Little details, or anything in between really.
tuning out the world's stupidity (and my own) to listen to albums and albums of 13 minute songs.
at work tho, its a whole nother beast, cuz im there for 8 hours and have 1 earbud in, with mono sound (rly takes away from the experience. but hell, im working), and my mind craves smth new like every day. ive resorted to asking my coworkers for music but its all rap, country, and punk. not hating on em or anything, i love most selections, but tbh when u listen to like 3 genres when ur working full time, uhhhh u start to lose it lol. im at a point rn where im constantly craving new music but its like a bad desperate kind of craving yknow?? and when im finally home im too exhausted to listen to stuff anyways

when i share music, its either to my gf, ex, or just another coworker, since thats pretty much my entire social circle now. i usually dont get responses when i share with ex or coworkers, but here are some comments. "wow its youtube music" "ok" "nice boobs" "drifting music" "is this undertale" "korean beatles? i thought you were chinese" "ok but listen to this AI cover of mr krabs singing billie jean"

and as for creating music, i currently hold myself to a very high standard: "you know that fifths are hollow, and if you use this chord you will be unoriginal, you will likely be labelled as touhou or miohcore--" nahhh shut up i just wanna make a song and my own mind aint letting me nahhhhhh. when i Do Create, i feel great abt it tho. satisfied. "you clda done this and that," yes, but satisfied and feel comfortable showing it off until it gets tagged as "calm, relaxing, piano, touhou" again
but holy shit i love music omg it makes me nut. pls share Very Long Albums that can be listened to with One Earbud

almost all i have

This is an interesting question to me. Sometimes I get in debates with my friends about emotion in music, because for me having a clear emotion is not really a necessity for the music I like to listen to or make (and sometimes this makes me feel guilty). To me it tends to be more about doing interesting things with the art form, almost treating it more like a science.

Now of course I still I love emotional music, and when a song can be emotional/self-expressive and do so in an interesting way it especially resonates with me.

This may also speak to the abstractness of emotions. For some of my non-musician friends, they really struggle to connect to music that has no words or only consider music to be "emotional" when it involves negative emotion like anger or sadness. I personally have a bad habit of not even paying attention to lyrics at all when they are there. Mainly, listening to a well-constructed song gives me such an immense feeling of satisfaction, even when the song in question is sad or angry for example.

Music to me is also just a super fun way to connect and communicate with people.

As a composer, lyricist, all around musician, music is the thing I've found helps me process events, spit out emotions, and feel even slightly happier. As a listener, music is a way i make new connections, gain inspiration for my own works, and enjoy the sounds other people's complex minds have created.

It's the real life equivalent of magic, and I want to be a wizard.

i think it used to mean more, and now it means less, but in an appropriate way, like its found its rightful place. its no longer an obsession.

legal drug

For me, the music is like talk with no words, no language, just sharing feelings and emotions. small pieces of ambiguous information that can make a story, a complex emotion o just a funny silly melody, after all, like many of the diverses art, is just a way to transmit a message, and like all message, no one have the original message or even may there isn't a message, but its funny make own one and hang out while, dont think it too hard :p

[This n00b ashamed of what written. - BotB]

Connection and understanding with self, and connection with the outside world. Connecting the dots personally helps me feel seen, like my experience is meaningful because someone somewhere gets it or simply because they made something that appealed to my senses.

Music doesn’t have to be emotional or profound to accomplish the above, which is amazing in itself.

@roz: You phrased it beautifully, but I don't think that experiencing music in its pure form is desirable even in principle. If I could, I'd lose the ability to enjoy it.

For me, the layers of imagery, tropes and cultural context that I come to associate with various musical elements aren't a distraction from the purity of musical experience - they're where the value lies. Pure theory serves only as a skeleton on which the flesh of meaning is layered. And the skeleton is not even solid - music theory is in a sense a cargo cult, but that’s crucial to its value - if it was down to an exact science, it would no longer be fun.

What I’m saying is - being biased is an integral part of my enjoyment of music. I listen to old albums differently from new ones and to popular albums differently than unpopular ones. Sometimes my impression of an album is colored by its artwork, or by its history, or by the context in which I came across it.

My favorite thing about music is its ability to evoke synesthetic experiences. It makes me imagine landscapes, scenarios, people, creatures, fragments of stories. It is the web of associations in which music is mired that makes those experiences possible, and its their complexity which makes it magically unpredictable.

i like the noises

music is fascinating to me in that it is the only gateway to the human conscious (aka senses) that doesn't directly require sight to enjoy. Touch, Taste, and Smell are all senses that are associated with specific objects and their visual counterparts, but the actual soundwaves that we process in music are completely invisible to the naked eye. Although this may make music seem pointless from the occipital lobe's perspective, I find myself being able to communicate me and my ideas easier through the artform than any mouth or set of words could. It is for this reason that music is nothing yet everything to me.

a way to experience emotions, empathize, forget about or be snapped back to reality, heal, and dream.

I would say its an escape, it gets tiring around here from time to time, being able to composer or cover songs is a way to just stop worrying about everything else and just focus on what I have in front of me.

a music is a kind of bird

imo another thing that's really interesting about music is that the feedback process of its creation can be very different depending on the tools the musician is using -- like, think about how different it is to write music on a guitar vs a modular synthesizer vs a sequencer vs jamming out with some pals vs writing a score from something you're imagining in your head. i think most art forms are not like this, but visual art comes close sometimes?

more personally, making music is usually difficult & taxing for me, and i'm not really sure whether my relationship with it is healthy. but i also really like the niche i've carved out over the past few years and would love to keep exploring it!

@Jangler: I think all art forms are like this. Writing feels different if you do it by recording yourself speaking and then putting it to text. Films feel different when they skip the script and are written as a screenplay. 2D animation borrows artistic conventions from fine art, while 3D animation borrows more from live-action films. The very different technical limitations of N64 and PS (low storage space and long loading times respectively) led to different game design strategies.

I used to underappreciate the extent to which it applies to music, and had a somewhat piano-chauvinist view of composing. Namely, I downplayed the importance of articulation, ornamentation, pitch bending and sound modification, since those aren't really a thing in piano. I also thought that piano roll is better as a notation system than the classical one.

ya i do notice people falling into that sort of trap sometimes! it reminds me of when a composer at a concert was talking about the piece he had written for organ + orchestra. he said that it in a way it was a little difficult to figure out what to write because "the organ can do everything the orchestra can do", which makes me think that at some point he forgot that music is more than just what's notated in a score

Before, it was a cool thing to experience other people's talents and a fun way to express myself when I had trouble to do so in person.

Now, after my break and some serious soul searching, it just feels like a handy time waster/brain stimulus at best.

so hard to put into words, music being one thing that allows to communicate while bypassing language.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_i4FbzaYww

From listening perspective it's more of a thing i put on to draw out other noise from my environment as mostly they are cars driving by most of the time and ehh.. i don't want to listen to those. Also i think i just learned a habit of listening to music to whatever i am doing, i go somewhere outside, i am far away from home, or i am cooking or doing whatever, i feel like listening to music helps with my daily tasks? (tho sometimes it kinda makes things difficult. for example when i change my clothes to go to sleep i can't take my shirt off cos i still have headphones on my head which i CAN'T take off because bass solo hasn't finished yet and i can't interrupt the music playing currently in an inappropiate moment hahahhs)

As for emotional perspective when listening to music, i rarely have strong emotional reactions when it comes to listening to music. I have the habit of listening to the same stuff every time (even if. i listened to it for a few years now and heard it many many times), and when someone recommends something to me, i often get caught up on all the new melodies and lyrics and arrangement and such that it feels like hitting a wall, and i can only think in the aspect of maybe thinking of it as an object?????????
idk how to explain it but i mostly then think of what i like about each instrument and the groove of it if there is one. And then after i listen to that new piece of music i start to develop emotions while listening. How does that song make me feel? And i have many pieces of music that i have listened so so many times and depending on the specific situation they can reflect how i feel at the time which can help process some emotions or when i am feeling nice they can make it even better. And not be a usuall noise-cancelling tool as it is most of the times where i do feel comfortable, but also not really feel..anything?

From perspective of creating i have really mixed feelings.
I more treat it as something i experiment with, and my style of music changes drastically from song to song sometimes which i can't really control. So it's less of a way to express my emotions more of way of "how do i make this sound good and in this specific style" which uhh. makes my creative output really really low sometimes, and can lead to some annoying to me situations where i can't really continue making something because it will for uknown reason not sound how i exactly wanted it to.
Which then results in many projects that are finished but not released because ig i can't get rid of the thought of "oh i mean this is good but it could have been better and how i wanted it to".

On the other hand the projects that managed to do that and fit that cryterium feel really satisfying and even more when there are more people involved (even tho i have so so little projects like that cos idkk collabing with other ppl is stressing sometimes) and is probably the reason i keep going making music. Althou still i don't i think i have a healthy relationship with making music right now.