I started out my musical explorations as a kid in piano lessons, then playing sax in school until halfway through high school. I never felt confident in playing, didn't feel free to explore, and judged every sound I made as right/wrong.
6 years ago, I accidentally abandoned my preferences and disengaged disgust in an attempt to stop automatically judging. And then I returned to music for the first time in 18 years with the idea that there is no wrong note. Here are some of my observations:
- I wasn't deeply/actively/mindfully listening to music when I was younger. This was part of a cycle of an attention-degrading cycle where I'd hear music and then distract myself with judgements of it, emotions that followed the judgments, and judgments about those emotions.
- Songs that "feel sad" don't. How a person hears/attends to music, how their body has been conditioned to receive different notes/chords/progressions, the meaning given to the sounds/words, the judgments around those things, and how they learned to feel in response to those judgments is what's being described when someone says a song feels a certain way to them. It's not universal and those feelings can be disengaged.
- How I feel in response to music has gotten way deeper and more expansive as a result of releasing all those conditioned feelings. I did this, in part, by pressing a bunch of random keys down on an organ and sitting with the feelings that came up and let them pass. Part of the practice involves letting up on one key at a time and then pressing it again, back and forth, until I can distinguish the note in the cacophony and have reached a feeling of contentment with the sounds. Rinse and repeat for each note.
- Music theory is absolutely unnecessary and in many ways hinders the learning process. I play improvisationally and not necessarily to play a song I've heard. Doing this for a year led to the emergence of a skill where I can start picking out melodies I remember.
- Styles and genres are largely based around preferences. I have a friend whose connective tissue disease (Ehrler-Danlos Syndrome) keeps them from feeling music. As a result, they've developed a strong liking of noise music, which would likely feel very uncomfortable in the body to people whose bodies have been trained on more traditional forms of music.
- The discomfort with dissonance is largely a learned thing, due to cultures of being unwilling to sit with dissonance. It can be turned off.
- If what you're looking to do is make music people can easily like based on commonly cultivated body feels around different sounds and preferences, focus on rhythms that don't change much, avoiding dissonance by default, repetition and also on novelty.
- If you want to make music people can easily ENJOY, repetition, improvisation, and novelty are keys. If you don't know any music theory, novelty will be easy. If you can make some sounds and then vaguely make the same sounds again, repetition will come (this can take a bit of practice, especially if not very connected with the body). Improvisation is such a broad idea because there's improvising around a melody or theme, around rhythm, around volume, around whatever the inspiration is (whether it be sounds, rhythms, feels, words, stories, colors, whatever), and probably more. Allowing and accepting whatever happens is a key to improvisation.
- Music can be enjoyable, even with abrupt transitions from slow to fast, soft to loud, harmonious to dissonant, rhythmic to droning.
- If I want to play what's in my mind, I can sing it and play along with how I'm singing.
- "Wrong notes" played rhythmically can fit into anything.
- If there's no wrong sound, I can play any instrument.
- Everything is a drum.
- Everything is music. Including silence. They cannot compel the silence to cease. So you are music trying to music in some ways and making music without trying. Trying to do that in a way that gains approval or caters to preferences is one way to live. Experimenting in the ways I describe here is another.