Awe полностью

This analysis dovetails with old ideas about the power of sacred music, which so often shares the acoustic features of vocalizations of awe. When we hear sacred music or we chant, sing, or play it, we are moved toward awe. We sense in such embodied experience that we are related to the provenance of the music, or part of it, most typically a spiritual figure or force. In Hinduism, uttering the sacred sound om is thought to connect those who chant it directly to Brahman, the universal soul. Reciting the Qur’an in the Islamic tradition transports the individual to a state akin to that of the prophet Muhammad in his moment of Divine revelation. As is true in many Indigenous cultures, the Kalapalo of central Brazil ritualistically chant, sing, and engage in a particular kind of dance, the experience of which transports them to a state in which they are in relation to the Divine.

If you listen carefully enough today, you might hear traces of whoas and aahs of awe in a choir’s performance during the holidays, a transfixing moment in a raga, monks chanting in Japan, or the exalted singing of Aretha Franklin or Bono. And the movements of your body and mind, chills, and sense of communitas signal to you that you are encountering an enduring life pattern, that we are connected to something vast, if only for the duration of a song.

Come Together

As humans walked out of Africa some fifty to sixty thousand years ago, we did so as a musical species moving in unison in small, wandering groups. Our most basic social interactions—those between parent and child, friends, flirting teens, and group members laboring together—were often structured within the patterns of music. We made flutes from bones, rattles from gourds, shakers from seeds, and early drums from tightened animal skins. Music would interweave with dance and storytelling. Music became a medium of being together.

Music moves us to synchronize our movements. From the age of one or two, children will move their bodies, bobbing the head, tapping feet, clapping hands, and swaying hips, in tight synchronization with the beat of a song. In one illustrative study, West and East Africans were better able to tap to their own culture’s music than to a song from another part of Africa, a sign of who they will find it easier to sync up with.

And when strangers tap to the same beat, as opposed to different beats, they experience greater compassion and willingness to assist. Listening to music that brings us the chills, or awe, inclines us to trust and to share more with a stranger.

Around the world, music does have deep universals, as we have seen—how the temporal structure of notes gives music a beat; the use of pitch to convey meaning; the singing of words; descending sound contours; the use of percussion, repetition, and nonequidistant scales (such as C major). At the same time, cultures develop specific rhythms, beats, pitches, tones, contours, and timbres in their music—their own archive of life patterns, of what love is, for example, or power, or the Divine. In being moved by our culture’s music, we are moved to its ways of perceiving, of feeling, of being, which can strike us with the awe of epiphany—of recognizing who we are. For example, adolescents gravitate to music that expresses themes that speak to their emerging identities: in one study, working-class students were found to prefer music that centers upon the struggles of life—rap and country; upper-class students found their identities, and no doubt some musical awe, in music that expresses individualism and freedom—alternative rock and jazz.

Music locates individuals within broader cultural identities to such an extent that the acoustics of one culture’s music will resemble those of another culture to the extent that those two cultures resemble one another genetically. This has been observed in analyses of the music of thirty-nine African cultures, choral songs of nine Indigenous tribes in Taiwan, and the melody and pitch in folk songs from thirty-one Eurasian cultures, ranging from the Mongols to the Irish to the Navajo.

Musicians create music to express their feelings about life patterns in ways that unite them with other members of their culture. This certainly is true of Diana Gameros.

Diana grew up in Juárez, Mexico, one of five children in a boisterous family. Sensitive to sight and sound, she began playing music on a little toy organ that her mom gave her, which transported her to a quiet space of the imagination. She would learn the piano, and then the guitar, but rarely sing. In her family it was her two uncles who sang, with the full-chested, deep timbres of Mexican folk songs.