What is the Future of Music?
Music: the universal language. Many have stressed this in talks about the presence of music in every culture around the world throughout time. It is shown in the way that humans are genetically made up that we recognize and respond to music. While listening to pitch, melody, and rhythm synapse fire in our brains and these rhythmic oscillations contribute to cognitive functions like perception, information transfer, motor control, and memory. Even animals possess the limbic system in their brains that responds to music. If many living things on earth are able to hear, understand, and respond to music, could extra-terrestrial life respond to combinations of tones and rhythm? You may remember that Stephen Spielberg portrayed aliens as communicating with music when they came to earth in the 1970s movie, Close Encounter of the Third Kind. Was Spielberg’s idea that far off? NASA didn’t think so, based on the fact that in 1977 they launched NASA’s Voyager Golden Record that included a sampling of music from Chuck Barry to the Brandenburg Concerto by J.S. Bach. Although NASA realized it was highly unlikely anyone or anything would find the record and be able to listen to it, Carl Sagan said that the record is a “symbolic statement rather than a serious attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life.” In reality, Sagan was probably right that the music will never be heard by extraterrestrials. To assume that aliens could hear music means that they look and have the same inner structure that we do. We all want to believe that there may be others out there that have evolved in the same way that we have, but it is highly unlikely. Even on earth, many species do not understand sound through the complex three-bone inner ear structure that we possess. Snakes feel sound through vibrations in the ground and dolphins have a sort of external ‘ear drum’ type hollow structure at the top of their head so that they can interpret the high frequencies that they use to communicate with each other. So the future of music may not be ubiquitous sound for everyone to enjoy, but it surely is meaningful to many on earth and will continue to be for years and years to come.
