Music Theory Books: Three Popular Textbooks for Introductory Music Theory Classes

Music is probably one of the oldest activities among us, music was music before it was music. Says Michael D. Lemonick: “From an evolutionary standpoint, however, music doesn’t seem to make sense. Unlike sex, say, or food, it did nothing to help our distant ancestors survive and reproduce. Yet music and its effects are evidently powerful in virtually every culture, so it must satisfy some kind of universal need, often in ways we can’t even begin to understand.” Those words really speak to me because if you look at all my posts most of them talk about and address the amazing and crazy things that music does and can do to humans. Music is very powerful and can do many things for humans and is known to release dopamine in our brains; the things that make us feel good and happy. In the article I’m reading it says that music is a trigger and releases dopamine, the pleasure chemical, in the same way that it would when eating or other things that make you happy.

Some would even say that music can be linked to addictive behavior due to the “feel good” dopamine that can be released just by listening to it. I could say that I am addicted to music because I listen to it every day for hours; while I’m getting ready in the morning, my 40 minute commute to work, while I’m at work and I’m full time so it’s 5 days a week for 8 hours, on my 40 minute commute home from work, and right now while I’m doing homework and that’s pretty much every night for 4 hours so there’s just a little window where I don’t hear music. Sounds like 12-10 hours without listening to music a day. That’s a lot of music! I also switch genres a lot so I don’t get tired of my music because I want to have that “feel good” feeling while listening to music, it helps me to be more in what I’m doing. It helps make my commute to and from work so much faster, and for work I sit at a desk staring at a computer for hours which really gets me through my days and while doing homework helps me stay focused and get into what I like to call a “zone” and just take off and start doing it. Especially when it comes to writing because it is very time consuming and can be very tedious and I easily lose concentration while writing documents and stuff. So music is something that really helps.