Musicality And Everyday Life

I don't know a single person that doesn't listen to music in some form, whether it's the iPod in your pocket, on the radio or going to clubs. But music has benefits other than providing a backtrack to your daily life.

I'm a musician. I live for my music and I've noticed over the last few months that a sense of musicality helps you in an everyday capacity. You learn rhythm, timing, pitch... You even learn to listen.

Let's start with the basics. If you play an instrument you learn rhythm. This is an invaluable skill when you learn to dance, but is also handy in things like modelling, where you want even, smooth steps. You also learn to predict things more accurately. "1, 2, 3!" If counted at regular intervals, everyone knows when 3 is going to land because the gap between 1 and 2 is the same as 2 and 3.

Timing. The first example I can think of is knowing how long it'll take for a traffic light to change. It's an internal sense of how long things take to happen. It prevents you from jumping the gun, running a red light that changes moments later. It even helps comedians to pause for the exact length of time for comedic effect.

Pitch. If you can play an instrument you can tell when something changes pitch. Did you know that a flat tyre makes a lower sound than a properly inflated tyre? A glass or mug with a chip also produces a different sound.

And this brings me to my last point. You learn to listen. When you study music, they often let you listen to a song and pick out specific instruments or sounds. This skill is handy in all kinds of ways. I've been able to work out what's wrong with my car simply from the sounds it makes. Speaking of cars, I've saved myself from getting run over twice because I heard a car approaching behind me, even through the noise of other cars.

When I was younger, watching TV, I would often turn off the sound and listen for the sounds my mom were making in the house, then guess what she was doing. It was a fun game, but it taught me of the little sounds everyday objects make.

Computers also make sounds. When I sit in bed with my laptop, I sometimes position it in a way that cuts off the airflow into the machine, but withing a few seconds I would notice the hum kick in of the internal fan trying to keep the thing cool, and I know it's suffocating. You can hear the hard drive in a computer churning when it's copying things. When you think the machine has frozen you tend to panic and start pressing buttons. "But wait, the hard drive is still churning. Maybe it's just busy." And invariably it wakes back up when it's done with whatever it was doing.

Besides being a backtrack to your life, music is a skillset. I use my musicality on a daily basis and I'm very thankful to my parents for affording me every opportunity available to develop it.





Words:
"Seriously, we should give up on the idea of anything mainstream because pop culture has splintered into a thousand things and will never be put back together."
-Robert Ashley, guest on Gamers with Jobs Conference Call Ep 126