Clickbait title: My OCs are having crazy fights to the best soundtracks.

God forbid I know what art actually is, but I would describe myself as a person who has had little artistic training. I have neither learned how to draw, write or play an instrument beyond standard education, in which I was mainly trying to survive art classes.

In stark contrast, I harbour impossible respect for the arts, maybe even jealousy. I love to read, look at and listen to art. Additionally I am one of the people who gets stung by the project bug. I need to be on the active end of creating something new for the world at all times. And so I have tried writing (somewhat successfully?) and drawing (unsuccessfully), but I have found music to be completely impenetrable.

And I’m very alright not being a modern renaissance man, if every medium could conjure every emotion equally well. But what I’ve found is that in all my writing, I could never replicate the raw emotional energy that I have listening to music sometimes.

I’ve talked before about how I think writing is special because the act of reading is such a complicated process. In contrast, looking at things is a very strong broadband connection to the internet. But the visual arts tend to need to contend with the real things of position and colour. These can be very well-blended and I love myself some deeply abstract art.

I think nothing comes close to just how alien music can be. Music feels deeply ingrained into my brain structure (not looking up studies if this is true anthropologically) but a lot of music is sounds which clearly would never happen in a cave hiding from dinosaurs (this is a test to see how bad you can bad faith interpret my intelligence vs. if you assume I made this is a joke).

My apologies to all the music people, because I’m about to use non of your very exact words to describe music.

I think music has the benefit of movies where the experience is foisted upon you by a timeline. You may have not processed the intro of a song but the song does not care and is already continuing. Some of my favourite songs are ones that are throwing new things at you every second. On the other hand I’ve never seen anything as good as music at iterating on just a single “concept” like a melody. “Movie but all scenes use the same words” just is not the same at all.

In total, music is the best at making me feel things I’ve never felt before, very strongly. The intensity of music combined with the ability to create alien sound signatures means that I continue to be delighted by it and hope to be so forever.