I was picking the subjects for my second year in university (studying Computer Science) today, and it really prompted me to think about my future.

I realised that I should be utilising my university time as best as possible by studying subjects that would best help me in securing and performing in a career I would most enjoy. This is obvious: the dream of doing what you love for a living. I know that I really enjoy using computers, especially the problem solving aspects of computers – which has historically consisted of fixing the damn things and getting them to work properly.

I could definitely see myself working in some big software company happily coding away, or designing the new database data structure, or the new standard in wireless networking. But no matter how many computing professions I think of, something nags at me and pulls me away from them.

Music.

There is a great PASSION that I feel for music that seldom is matched by my enthusiasm for computers.

In my spare time I like to waste time on the net, watch downloaded TV shows, and occasionally read novels. But most of the time you would find me listening to music, and/or singing and/or playing along with a crappy guitar. I’m not a great singer, but the act of expressing the feelings I get from listening to music by singing along with it is just amazing… I wish my voice would never get tired and I could reach any note I wanted, and that I could keep singing forever – in these moments everything else in life simultaneously doesn’t matter and also matters an order of magnitude more.

Have you ever listened to music that you enjoyed so much, that you could actually feel the endorphins coursing around you body? Music can be so powerful that it carries you away from reality, somewhere where your ears and your brain and your consciousness resonates with the sound. You get carried away, you rise and fall as the music reaches its highs and lows. You can sense the climax of the song approaching, and when you get there you can even experience a kind of audio induced”orgasm”.

One of the other awesome affects of music is to transport you to another time and another place which you associate with that particular band or song. Sometimes memories you didn’t even realise you had will come to the surface just from hearing a certain song again. As it is with memories, you not only remember it like a visual image in a photograph, but you remember the state of YOU in that moment – you might remember what smelled, or heard in the moment. You will probably recall your mental state in that time – what you were concerned about, your loves and hates and your mood. Even if it was decades ago, memories triggered by music can make you feel again the emotions you felt in the memory. That can be confusing: having the consciousness and emotions of your past self re-appear in the present. This is nostalgia. We can realise in these moments just how much time has passed, how little or how much we have changed, and all these thoughts are mixed up in a big mess with that seemingly unimportant one-hit-wonder that just came on the radio

The most  powerful aspect of music is how it conveys emotion. The intricacies of the English language allow beautiful poetry to be created which can tell a story or make you laugh but can also attempt to make you feel what the writer is feeling, or at least give you a sense of it.

But even without being able to understand the language the lyrics are written in, or listening to one which has no lyrics – emotion is still conveyed. This is because music has a language of its own. Most people would describe the same song accordingly, whether it me lighthearted and bouncy, or sensual and powerful, or intimate and painful, or furious and erratic etc. Through the language of music – tempo, texture, voices, melody, harmony and keys – we can convey emotions to people who take the time to listen. They will have some sense of what the writer felt when he/she wrote the piece. Through the use of lyrics, music can also give us context, meaning, explanation and lessons to go with the emotions.

These are some of the reasons why music is great. These are some of the reasons why it is worth it to dedicate to and fill your life with music. Sometimes, I am so inspired by music that I write things like this instead of studying for Foundations of Computer Systems or Integral Calculus and Modelling. But music draws me in and causes me to dream more than anything else, and I wonder how I should proceed to make it a bigger part of my life?