By Gabriel Thomas
Emotion, in the English language, isn’t always the easiest to convey. The immediate response to a question of “how do you feel?” is usually the name of an emotion or state: happy, sad, angry, tired; or combinations of these basic emotional states: ecstatic, joyful, frustrated, confused, lost. But these words carry different meanings relative to the individual answering the question. My experience of happiness is different from your experience of happiness and so on, and even though we all mean roughly the same thing when we say happy, my communication of my specific emotional state as happy is not immediately clear when I simply tell you that I’m happy. Because of this, we sometimes add in poetic language to clarify the emotion: “I feel like I’m walking on sunshine” instead of “I’m happy,” or “I feel blue as a river” instead of “I’m sad.” These similes and metaphors that we use to convey our feelings add nuance and experience that the words ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ alone simply don’t convey. But even these metaphors fall short of truly communicating exactly how I feel; they are still missing the essential feel of an emotion. Words can only go so far.
I believe this discrepancy between language and emotion arises from the fact that, in some sense, words are on a different level than emotion. Our language is great at describing physical objects and things that we can perceive with our senses — red roses, sparkly rocks, or a sharp prick being illustrious examples. But when we take these objects to represent emotion, as poets do when they profess “my love is like a red red rose” or “my anger was sharp and hot,” we are still using things from the physical realm to describe abstract concepts like love and anger. There’s a disconnect between the physical and the abstract that our language can’t quite bridge. It gets close, don’t get me wrong. Poetry and poetic language still do a pretty good job of expressing emotion and other abstract concepts, but there still exists that disconnect — I can’t make you truly feel that emotion with my language alone. This is where music comes in. Music itself is an abstract concept: we can’t touch a song just like we can’t touch happiness or love. In this sense, music is on the same level as our emotions.
And this is part of the reason why music is so beautiful. Music is all about the free and intense expression of emotion. Instead of trying to describe a feeling to you, with music I can simply show you how I feel. It’s like the feeling when you remember a happy memory: definitely sweet, an element of longing, and perhaps slightly bitter. This is, I think, a fairly adequate representation of that feeling, but it still isn’t quite there. In some sense, something is missing from that description. But if I were to play you the song Oakland by RAC and say that this song feels like remembering a happy memory, or the song Channel Orange In Your Living Room by Charlie Burg and say that it feels like falling in love, or the song Tommy’s Party by Peach Pit and say that it feels like the overwhelming sadness of lost love, the sentiment would be immediately conferred. These songs just convey those emotions in a way that words can’t. Even if the song doesn’t make you feel exactly what I feel, it will make you feel something, which is more than words alone often do. Music bridges the gap left by language. To put it simply, when words fail, music understands.