Like an amplifier with its signal, music doesn’t invent emotion; it takes what is there and makes it louder. One might worry that boosting an emotion might at points be risky. After all, not everything we feel is necessarily worthy of encouragement. It is possible to use music to magnify feelings of hatred or to inflate violent impulses – and the culture ministries of fascist dictatorships have been fatally skilled at doing just this. But almost always, we face a very different issue around music: we’re not building up our courage to lay waste to civilisation. We want to strengthen our capacities for calm, forgiveness, love and appreciation.
In our relationship to music we’re seeking the right soundtrack for our lives. A soundtrack in a film helps accord the due emotional resonance to a specific scene. It helps us register the actual pathos of a situation that might be missed if we relied on words and images alone; it helps us fully recognise the identity of a moment.
Exactly the same is true in our lives: we’re constantly faced with situations where something significant is going on; at the back of our minds the helpful emotional reaction is there – but it’s subdued and drowned out by the ambient noise of existence. Music is the opposite of noise: the cure for noise. By finding the right piece of music at the right time we’re adding an accompanying score that highlights the emotions we should be feeling more strongly – and allows our own best reactions to be more prominent and secure. We end up feeling the emotions that are our due. We live according to what we are actually feeling.