Every day, I found myself listening to tons of music, and if I focus on why, that’s not easily explained. Think about it: what is it that really pushes us to go back to the same tune, or to just spend hours with Spotify on?
We could go really deep into the technicality of it, but for now I’ll just leave an extract from Curtis Road, which in his book ‘Composing Electronic Music’ explains: “Aesthetic understanding engages mental agents that seek to differentiate between good and bad: beautiful versus ugly, original versus ordinary, engaging versus boring, etc. These are not rational judgements. It is obvious that aesthetic meaning is as much about feelings as it is about logical rationalizations. As Varese (1937) observed: Art is not born by reason. It is the buried treasure of the unconscious - an unconscious that has more comprehension than our lucid mind.”
“A fundamental example of aesthetic meaning is the mysterious process of human attraction. The aesthetic reactions of lust and disgust, love and hate, are basic to the human spirit and are clearly a survival mechanism. […] Yet why is something desirable, delicious, or beautiful? Why are we attracted to one thing and not another? It is not something that we can always articulate; we just know. Aesthetic perception is dominated by subliminal and unconscious forces.” Curtis Road
