Companionship in Feeling
Finding Catharsis through Music
The Glas Box usually talks about the world of AI and infrastructure; this one doesn’t. Bear with me.
It is Saturday morning, and it’s my tradition to have freshly brewed coffee from freshly ground beans sourced from a local roaster while listening to my favorite music track of the week on repeat through my pair of KEF LSX IIs. Next to me, in my wife’s lap, is our 5-month-old, wiggling and whining from discomfort caused by a bout of allergies and a cold he contracted from his elementary-going big sister. He is in discomfort and doesn’t yet have the language to communicate it, nor the cognitive ability to know the discomfort is only temporary. Just then I start playing this melancholy number, and he stops wiggling and whining and gives the song his full attention. He is visibly comforted and soothed by this sad song.
Immediately, my brain starts firing on all cylinders with questions like, “Can an infant’s brain, still forming the required cognitive pathways, already understand and empathize with music?”, and “How can melancholy soothe discomfort?” So, I start digging into the questions and go deep down the rabbit hole. That’s when I stumble upon the concept of “companionship in feeling,” and I have an epiphany. Mind you, I am not claiming to have coined the phrase or discovered the concept for the first time; rather, I am claiming to have understood it, to have realized what it really means to find catharsis through music, through a personal experience.
Music moves us emotionally; this has always been known to us, unless one lacks the empathy to feel it. Every time I listen to “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd, or Fleetwood Mac chant “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow,” or hear Shinedown sing “sometimes goodbye is a second chance” in a gritty voice, something stirs inside me; I am elevated to a different emotional plane. But how can an infant even begin to comprehend music’s emotion? It seems they can, because the pathways for emotional response to sound are the oldest in the brain, far older than language, cognition, or even conscious memory. In summary, the part of the brain responsible for emotions is functional at birth and responsive to sound even before birth. So my infant is Jack London’s Martin Eden standing in Ruth’s parlor, perceiving the beauty of everything around him and moved by things he can’t yet articulate.
How does melancholic music soothe discomfort caused by sickness? It seems rather counterintuitive. That’s exactly the concept of “companionship in feeling.” See, the infant is in discomfort and the music, instead of trying to shift his emotional state to something cheerful, sits beside him, like an old friend with arms around his shoulder, saying, “I know you are sad and so am I; let’s be friends and be sad together.” It’s simply beautiful. I’ve heard music transcends culture, creed, skin color, etc.; however, here I am witnessing music transcend language, or the lack thereof, and even bypass basic cognition. I think I now understand when Aldous Huxley said, “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”