From the perspective of acoustics, music is energy that pulsates through and across a medium the structural interpretation and esthetic conceptualization of it occur when the sound has been processed, decoded, and interpreted in our nervous system. Music and by extension all sounds, in this view, are considered in vibrational terms as transferable energy, which impinges upon our body and our senses ( Eidsheim, 2015, p. 16). On the other hand, music may be considered just as sound that impinges on us via our sensory apparatus and our interpretations of the signals we receive. The musical experience, then, can be described in terms of a specific relationship between the material bodies of the listener and the vibrational properties of the sounds at one level while also containing in it a more conscious appreciation of the traditional musical forms and parameters. Music’s ontological status, in this view, should be changed from an external, knowable object to an unfolding phenomenon that arises through complex material interactions of human physiology with the sounds ( Eidsheim, 2015, p. 2). This means that our actual involvement with music is mainly “experienced” rather than being solely “reasoned” and “interpreted” ( Reybrouck, 2014, 2017 Reybrouck and Eerola, 2017): it is drastic rather than gnostic to use Jankélévitch’s terms ( Jankélévitch, 2003). What really matters, on the contrary, is the dynamic, multifaceted, and multisensorial phenomenon of the music ( Eidsheim, 2015, p. 2) with effects that can be “devastating, physically brutal, mysterious, erotic, moving, boring, pleasing, enervating, or uncomfortable, generally embarrassing, subjective, and resistant to the gnostic” ( Abbate, 2004, p. 514). Music, as an informationally rich or “thick” event, cannot be reduced to perceptual dimensions such as pitch, rhythms, etc. We then touch upon distinct issues such as the relation between low-frequency sounds and annoyance, the harmful effect of loud sound and noise, the direct effects of overstimulation with sound, the indirect effects of unwanted sounds as related to auditory neurology, and the widespread phenomenon of liking loud sound and music, both from the point of view of behavioral and psychological aspects. Starting from a vibrational approach to sound and music, we first investigate how sound may activate the sense of touch and the vestibular system of the inner ear besides the sense of hearing. There are, however, two levels of description: the physical-acoustic description of the sound and the subjective-psychological reactions by the listeners. Much depends, in this regard, on the frequency spectrum and the level of the sound stimuli, which may sometimes make it possible to set music apart from noise. Music and sound impinge upon our body and our mind and we can react to both either positively or negatively. In this article, we consider music and noise in terms of vibrational and transferable energy as well as from the evolutionary significance of the hearing system of Homo sapiens.
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