In what sense? Like ‘why does it have such a profound effect on humans?’ or ‘how to play piano?’, or something else?
Discussion
The response is defo pretty deep in the human psyche. And it’s all just frequencies. We instinctively understand certain wavelengths and the maths of it all, it’s all pretty mind blowing!
Imagine it’s a language, like Chinese. And you don’t speak it. But you go to Chinatown several times a week. And you can kind of understand the Chinese speakers on an emotional level. You can tell when they’re friendly or upset. You can make out their intention sometimes with hand gestures and body language.
You don’t need to speak Chinese for survival. You’ll be fine without it.
But you’d like to be more fluent so you can interact with the folks in Chinatown when you visit. Because when you can speak their language you make your world bigger. More of life becomes clear to you. You have different and deeper insights. Etc.
Honest I think that first part is innate, we all have it. And it’s something like emotional connection but more physical. I don’t know why we ‘like’ and recognise pitch or tuning but even none musicians respond to it and can tell someone with a pure pitch or someone who’s hitting bum notes. But regards learning the language, I think some people have a massive head start.
You can definitely learn a lot of it - how western music works, chords, cadences, harmony - base, tenor, alto, soprano type rules for making music we all recognise. But some people don’t need to be taught it, it’s just obvious, like breathing.
And then there are the ones who change and bend the rules and start something new.
But I reckon ‘musicians’ are just the ones that innately understand sound in a weird way that’s intuitive.
Personally I try not to think about it too much. It’s weird to me that music almost a physical expression of maths, it’s kind of autistic how some people just breathe it and others have to really try.