The Music of Nature: A Perpetual Performance

Music, in general, is defined as the art of combining vocal and instrumental sounds (sometimes just one of them) to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion. But the more we explore about music, just then we would realize that it is not only a rhythm, a melody or harmony produced through vocal and/or instrumental means. It can be every single thing around us, like the sound of birds singing, the croaking of frogs, the bursting of buds, courting of salamanders, butterflies in flight, wriggling of the creatures in a pond; all of which can act as a subset of totality of music that can be felt inside when one just gives in to music, where nature takes you on a lullaby.

As we move close to nature and start to tune into nature’s music, it gives us a sense of exaltation to be moving about in the woods, to be looking at the green, to be standing near the running water, all of which has its own rhythm. Its tone and harmony are more fitting than that of the art, as every object we see is revealing and open, each with its own symphony which it plays ceaselessly, undeterred by aspects like the lack of monitors, flying speakers, or for that matter, an audience even. Our job is just to learn how to optimize and align ourselves to be open enough so that we can actually listen to nature. When camping beside the promising waters and studying the aesthetics of nature’s song, we are in fact submitting ourselves to a perpetual performance that goes on ever-flowing, without intervals and with much more variations than you would find in that album of yours. Then, the song takes a grand crescendo as new and interesting members of the orchestra seem to emerge best just after dusk, when the air cools down and vapor collects in the canyon bottoms to enhance the bass tones concealed by the dry heat of the day. Even the water falling over a rock may produce distinct intervals of notes, essentially rhythms that either harmonize with or cancel intervals.

Therefore, it is clear that the music is not only in these outward things, in the IPods and in your computer library; it exists everywhere around us. We do not need to actually spend so much on music in order to enjoy it, we only need to open our ears to the music that is playing in nature all around us. It is only the music of the cosmos, through which the beauty and order of everything around us, including ourselves, which awakens in us, a deep appreciation for the harmonious cosmic orchestra that we are all inherently a part of. Once we start playing our part in the orchestra, we grant human imagination a free reign to pick and choose the notes to create an actual song.

Image Sources: [1], [2]