Patterns & Metaphors
Music
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The production of melody by created beings of various categories, as, for example, birds, men and angels (accoding to some); or by objects such as the heavenly spheres (according to others). Music, the euphonic and esthetic modulation of sound, is, the evidence suggests, inherent in nature. It may exist in the motions of atomic particles in the nucleus of matter (waver-forms), but man's music making is not a speculation, rather an observation of what has to be most certainty, an instinct. The functions of music that are universally conceded are that it serves as a manner of communication, and, on the human level at least, as a means of emotional expression. Less understood, on human and other levels, are the regulatory functions that music making may provide in the system in which it is produced. For example, the physiological and psychological effects on people of singing or chanting is different modes or rhythm, etc. The work song is an illustration of how rhthmic bodily movements evoke music and how music in turn can be an external or internal regulatory mechanism. The vast quantity of musical entertainment, both production and consumption, exemplifies the fact that music is a basic human need. Musical form therefore is an element of cultural history and undoubtedly relates to stages of societal development. In its universality it functions as an integrative element among the world's disparate communities of nations.
