Have you ever gotten goosebumps from a piece of music? That feeling like you’re suspended at the highest point of a swing in a park, weightless for only a fraction of a second, excited and ready to burst out of your skin right from that single point of the solar plexus?

It means the music was good, really good, and good music is different for each one of us. That specific piece that lifted you of the ground, without having to detach your feet from gravity, is showing you something about yourself. It was constructed by someone who’s had the same intimations of meaning. Meaning is exactly why we love music. It is a nonverbal structure of order with the optimal mix of variation and consistency, perfectly predictable and unpredictable at the same time. What music can do is astounding. It can sync up your heartbeat to itself, which is the same thing that happens when you look into the eyes of someone you truly love. It can make your brain more alert and agile by what is called the Mozart effect. Developed by dr. Gordon Shaw, its basic premise is that classical music stimulates spatial reasoning used in math, engineering science and infinite other life areas, literally making you smarter. Once you focus and really listen with your whole being you unlock things that were waiting to be found. Music is also a healer; it can repair a broken heart just as easily as it can repair physical brain damage. If a person was in an accident or had a disease that took its toll on the brain neurogenesis (the growth of new brain cells) can be achieved by listening to music or, even better, by learning to play a new instrument. Autism symptoms are also greatly relieved by music and playing an instrument showed to be a great way for autistic children to learn to interact with their surroundings and peers. No other human behavior lights up the entire brain as much as listening to music does. Once believe to be separated in their respective hemispheres, language and music are actually complements both hinged upon structure and pattern recognition.

If you could only have ears sensitive enough to hear your own body and the universe on the submicroscopic level. It is a symphony, the notes, the rhythm, the perpetual crescendo of life experiencing itself and a disembodied universal intelligence wanting to be experienced by it. We’ve began creating rhythms with sticks long before we harnessed fire and propelled the species out of the dark and we’ll continue to do it for as long as humanity exists, because it is deep, embedded, primal and utterly human to move, dance and listen to the world. It’s all a symphony.