How is music possible

Woods near Oele, Piet Mondrian, 1908If there is a rapid change in the weather, we can sometimes receive faint radio signals from Poland or Lithuania on the island, once even Finland.1 Out of nowhere these unfamiliar soundscapes will enter the car, evoking worlds I know little about—then we’ll make a turn down the hill, and they’ll be gone.Today, we listened to Swedish P2, where they were playing a mixtape that Sara Parkman had put together of folk music from around the world. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw that Maud, our nine-year-old, had closed her eyes. She does that when something is particularly good. It makes her see things, she says. Little films. Though she won’t say what they are. Parkman played a Sámi joik that had been recorded in Moscow a few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union,and I turned off the main road, down one of the gravel paths through the beech forest, so I could slow the car to a walking pace and really listen. Rolling my window down and leaning out, I looked up at the slowly passing trees—they looked otherworldly wrapped in this music. I had never seen them like that before.How is it possible for music to alter the world like this? It’s like when you take a scene from a horror movie and add funny music and the killer suddenly looks hilarious. Isn’t it strange that that happens? Why can we put certain sounds together that make the trees feel unfamiliar? Music is tones and rhythms in various mathematical relationships to each other—it is almost pure abstraction.2 Why should that move us? It is a realm of patterns largely independent of outside reality, and yet, when Maud closes her eyes, the music leads her somewhere, to some inner landscape.How can these landscapes arise?Looking into it a little bit, I get the impression that people who study musical psychology are fairly confused about this, too. There are, as I interpret it, two broad families of perspectives. One, the more traditional, suggests that music works roughly the same way as painting. We have a very sensitive auditory processing system in our heads that helps us keep our bearings in the world, especially the world of social relationships. We can tell from the sound if something is far away, approaching or leaving, and infer the size and shape of a space from its echo. We can tell what someone is feeling from the slightest pause or change in tone. And music, according to this theory, plays around with these perceptual systems and expectations. For …