My Ode to Music

For some reason I feel like it's a lot harder to write blogs lately. Maybe it's because something is lingering in my brain and feasting on all my neruons and not allowing me to think of anything else, or maybe because I'm not in an "acceptable creative environment," or maybe because I'm realizing that people actually take time to read my writings (thank you so much, I appreciate it greatly) and now feel an obligation to write osmething that is nothign short of being a combination of, life changing, moving, inspiring, and entertaining. But this week in my screenwriting discussion, my TA kept stresing that a writer's best work usually comes from when he writes about what he knows and cares about so I decided to take his advice and write about one of my greatest passions.

Whenever I'm walking to class or en route anywhere, you will most likely see me listening to my beloved ipod focused entirely on the melodies it transmits. I think that God engineered me with the personality and ears to appreciate and relate to music on a very specific level. One trend by which I can describe myself is definitely my constant pursuit of balance (strictly in the internal sense because I'm not much of a surfer or ice skater...). Whether it is majoring in English while taking all these med school requirement classes or abbreviating a majority of my notes with math symbols (my favs: < / > signs, the operations: + / -, the "therefore" sign with three dots in a triangle, the greek letter delta meaning "change"), my heart always leans towards some sort of equilibrium.

The amazing thing about music to me is that it acts as the epitome of balance. At the foundation, music is completely mathematical and based on distinct patterns amongst the notes with every melody and chord structure ever imagined stemming from the octet, eight notes that make up the scale of a particular key at a particular octave. And even on the sonic plane, sound waves are ultimately sine/cosine graphs with varying amplitudes and frequencies. But the products of these integral (pun definitely intended) mathematical functions are various and unique sense of emotion. The beauty of music for me is that specific mathematical changes in graphs of various functions and sound waves have the ability to somehow resonate significant feeling within my soul.

And of course genuine and meaningful lyrics help too.


Jon Foreman: one of the most honest musicians



and I thought this picture was hilarious: