Exploring how music works as embodied, contextual experience - with AI/tech as recurring character showing us what’s missing when you strip that away.
A series of essays developed through human-AI collaboration. Ideas and frameworks are mine; articulation gets help. Read more about this process.
You’re driving. Song comes on the radio. Suddenly you’re fifteen again, in your friend’s basement, feeling everything you felt that night twenty years ago. Not just remembering - experiencing. The music didn’t remind you. It transported you. This isn’t random association. Your brain tags experiences with sensory markers, and music is one of the most effective retrieval cues we have. The song doesn’t contain the memory. It’s the key to a lock you didn’t know you were still carrying. ...
Composers are emotion engineers. They’ve spent centuries cataloging which mathematical relationships between frequencies generate which physiological responses. The deceptive cadence - that moment when music promises resolution but swerves at the last second - is manipulation so reliable you can notate it. And it works every single time. The Mathematics of Expectation Western music theory is built on tension and release. Certain intervals create instability that the nervous system wants resolved. The V chord (dominant) creates tension. The I chord (tonic) resolves it. Play V-I and people exhale. Their bodies literally release held tension. ...
You’re in a concert hall. The music starts. Within minutes, you’re breathing in sync with strangers. Your heart rate aligns. Your neural activity starts showing the same patterns as the person three rows away whom you’ve never met and will never see again. This isn’t metaphor. It’s measurable physiology. Neural Synchronization When people listen to the same music together, their brains synchronize. This isn’t just “paying attention to the same thing” synchronization. It’s precise alignment of neural firing patterns in auditory cortex, in emotional processing regions, in motor areas preparing to move. ...
I have a friend who builds furniture that plays music. Not furniture with speakers in it - furniture that is the speaker. Transducers embedded in tables, chairs, bed frames turn the wood itself into the medium of vibration. You don’t just hear the music. You feel it through every point of contact between your body and the furniture. Sitting in one of these chairs changes what music means. Making the Implicit Explicit All music has a tactile component. We just don’t usually notice it because we’re attending to the auditory channel. But place your hand on a speaker cabinet during a bass drop and you’ll feel what was always there: music as vibration, music as physical phenomenon that your body registers through touch as much as through hearing. ...
You know that IV-V-vi progression. The “sensitive chord sequence” that shows up in everything from Pachelbel’s Canon to half the pop songs on the radio. Sometimes it washes over you, pleasant but unremarkable. Other times - same exact chords, same voicing - it breaks you open. What changed? Not the music. You did. The Pattern and the Meaning Music theory can tell you why a vi chord feels melancholic - the minor third, the position in the scale, the tendency of certain intervals to create tension or resolution. But theory can’t tell you why this particular instance of that chord, right now, makes your throat tighten. ...
There’s a moment in every dance club, every concert, every drumline performance where you feel it: your body moves before you decide to move. A foot taps. A head nods. Your weight shifts from one leg to another. You didn’t think about it. Your body knew the beat before your conscious mind caught up. This isn’t poetic license. It’s neuroscience. The Prediction Machine Your cerebellum and motor cortex run a constant prediction algorithm, anticipating what comes next in rhythmic patterns. When music establishes a beat, your brain doesn’t just passively receive it. It builds a predictive model and starts firing motor commands in advance of the actual sound. ...
Music isn’t just something you hear. When bass frequencies hit, you feel them in your chest, your bones, your entire body. This isn’t metaphorical - it’s physics meeting biology in ways that reshape what we mean by “listening.” The Haptic Dimension Your cochlea captures sound waves and translates them into neural signals. That’s the textbook version of hearing. But low frequencies - below around 250 Hz - do something else entirely. They vibrate your ribcage, your diaphragm, the fluid in your inner ear’s vestibular system. You’re not just hearing the bass. You’re feeling it proprioceptively, the same way you feel your body’s position in space. ...