07.+What+is+Intelligence+(February+2006) - Get a Free Blog

What is Intelligence? 36
(note: timbre means tone colour in music, e.g. that of the quality of the
drum, the saxophone, the flute, the voice, etc. e.g. a sombre drum, a
blaring trumpet, a sensual saxophone, etc.)
The issue is choice of emotions.
Different people like to indulge in different kinds of emotions to others,
just as some people like to watch a romantic “weepy movie” and others
prefer a tough guy “action movie.”
Music evokes diverse emotions within us, in that it stimulates different
centres or aspects of our body and/or mind.
For example, heavy metal music’s pounding and aggressive rhythms,
vocals and screaming guitar solos are clearly of a “passionate” and
“aggressive” nature.
The aforementioned “Whole Lotta Love” is obviously sexual in its
“thrusting” rhythms and guitar riff and is almost like a “hot” and “wild”
sexual encounter in sound – particularly the middle section, which uses
tape loops, screaming vocals, echoing throbbing drums and disorienting
phasing effects to stimulate the “mind blowing” nature of a powerful and
animalistic sexual encounter and orgasm.
Compare what this is doing to the human body, “emotions” and “mind”,
with the effect of listening to a Bach fugue, which is almost wholly a
mental or “cerebral” experience which doesn’t really “reach the parts”
below the neck, except perhaps the “heart.”
Music, and we can likely say emotion in general, is directing itself to
broadly speaking four aspects of our being – mind, heart, gut and loins.
We experience meaning, or lack of it, in the mind; we experience joy or
sadness in the heart; we experience a feeling of strength or weakness in
the abdominal area (as in ELP’s song Pirates “If you’ve the stomach for
a broadside, come aboard me pretty boys”), and we experience sexual
desire in the loins.
But interestingly, there is a “hotline” to all these zones of feeling via the
medium of words.
This makes the song the most powerful musical form because it can
stimulate us on two levels – adding the descriptive and suggestive power