On Music

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who couldn't hear the music

- Nietzche

Putting on headphones is a symbolic indication of - why, to quite an extent even literally amounts to cutting the rest of the world off - to take a dip into the emptiness of one's soul - a feat that would seem impossible to the lay man without the aid of this magical entity called music. Without it, who would have known that so much bliss can be experienced in one's self?

Be it during travel, a short nap, a break in between work - at any time, in fact, listening to music is one of the greatest activities of pleasure that man has known. The glamour of watching music being played or sung and the like is not what I wish to talk about here. In fact, for the time being, let us suspend the grandeur of lyrics as well, and concentrate merely on the tune - that magical collection of frequencies that soothe the ear, the mind and the heart. A tune that is produced from the vocal chords that we know so well, perhaps a bamboo stick with holes, a stretched skin or some complicated instrument. Whence it comes is immaterial - the output, the sweet sound is all that matters.

Unfortunately, science fails to quantify the pleasure that man experiences - perhaps pleasure is too obscene a term to describe the pure joy that fills a man when listening to music. As a listener, I am not very keen on seeing the performer; I'd rather close my eyes and hear it radiating (convecting, rather) from within. The key to truly enjoy a tune, according to me is to listen to it long enough for it to sink into your self: and then, the soul sings along. Music is the one entity that can reach the heart straight, for it s not the lips, but the heart that sings along, beating in rhythm to the beats that are heard. Perhaps that's why they're called beats in the first place. I read somewhere that music can make your heart beat in synchronisation with it. Such is the level of acceptance that accompanies music - it is so intense that an involuntary muscle beats in tune with it and the pleasure of listening to is needn't be explained.

To me, a tune is like an amusement park ride that the heart takes. It could be a nice, simple swing or a roller coaster ride - if you pick the ride you like, you'll love the experience. A field that involves just the heart and no intellect can be extremely emotional - overwhelming indeed, but that's the point of it.

In vocals I love how lyrics and tune support each other, with the tune being a springboard of sorts, catapulting lyrics into your heart, and the lyrics being a skeleton for a composer to make his tune. An aerodynamicist will agree with me when I say that with listening to instrumental music, you can have Lagrangian and Eulerian approaches: in the former case, you let your heart follow the tune, stretching and wringing itself in sync with the rhythm, while in the latter you stand by as an observer, merely drinking in all that you listen to. In any case, be it any form of music, love is occasionally at first, um, listen. A listener, and the tune he listens to, evolve relative to each other with every listen - even if one dislikes a tune in the beginning, he slowly begins accepting it. I have heard people say otherwise, but this is my experience. The tune, being insentient, cannot exactly evolve - it is the listener's heart that evolves, getting stirred at its depths by the beats at the background of the tune, and on its surface by the melody - all this makes me wonder if the heart is liquid. The acceptance phase is akin to one starting to like a book, because he tells (reads) the story to himself - or like people accepting their own point when trying to convince another because they are listening when they themselves say it. Upon listening to a tune for a sufficient number of times, one sort of 're-composes' the tune for himself, albeit in a subtle manner, not unlike a professor re-discovering a theory subtly while explaining to his students or while understanding it. This, I believe, is the crux of the process of understanding itself.

Some tunes, I find are natural: if the beginning of a track or song is hummed to me, my heart would want it to take it along a particular direction - a route, if you will, and I find some compositions taking the exact same route. This has happened quite often with AR Rahman, Illayaraja, Hans Zimmer, Salim-Sulaiman, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Vishal-Shekhar, Anirudh Ravichandran and Mani Sharma among others. Hans Zimmer has sometimes surprised me with tunes that take a route that enjoy much better than what I would have chosen to. Some tunes seem forced- a noteworthy example would be John Williams' track titled 'Buckbeak's Flight' from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban's OST. It sounded unnatural the first time I heard it, but I fell in love eventually. A lot of AR Rahman's tunes, particularly in the 90's seemed to connect to tunes that I had unconsciously hummed to myself as a child long before those tunes were released, and I have, hence, always considered him a natural composer. Pretty audacious of me indeed, I truly apologise: this is straight from my heart. There are cases when a tune I could never conceive or relate to, collides tangentially with me, subsequently becoming one with my heart - such as Noor-e-Khuda by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy. Augmented repetition in a tune, such as in Bommani Geesthe and Manwa Laage capture my heart. And then there is the case of the ticking clock - a trick used to indicate the critical passing of time in a film scene, by composers like John Williams in Forward to Time Past, Hans Zimmer in Mountains and AR Rahman in the background score of the upcoming Tamil film, 24. Another repetitive feature is what I like to call the pleasant scream - a tool I find, used by ARR in particular. One can find it in songs like 'Endrendrum Punnagai' (Alaipayuthey), 'Ae Sinamika' (O Kadhal Kanmani). I found another instance in 'Dil Dhadakne Do' (Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara) composed by Shankar Ehsaan Loy.

As a child, I remember having wondered if there were only a limited number of tunes in existence, and, if one day, all of them would get used up soon (I used to think of the limited number of swaras or notes which would impose a limit on the number of tunes that could exist) - quite like I had thought about concepts in science, and even inventions. I have felt a keen desire to have born earlier, so that I could have composed a couple of tracks to have in my name, (and made some scientific discovers too), but today's composers are proving to me time and again that beautiful tunes can always be composed.

However, I don't see myself as a composer in this life. I am, and will always be - an avid music listener.