How do you perceive meaning in music?

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This issue came up when the person I live with told me, in reference to some music she was listening to, "you don't care about what they're saying!" . . . To which I replied, "I just pay more attention to the instrumentation and the patterns and rhythms..." and blah blah blah, etc etc, AS rambling.

But she had a good point. I really do not get a whole lot out of the words in most songs. It's not that I don't care, which most NT people would think. There's also nothing wrong with my hearing. It is superb. It seems to be because the words just don't carry much emotional weight for me. The music does. It's almost as if I can't derive a great deal of meaning from hearing the words. They don't raise emotions. My brain appears to be wired to respond emotionally to the elements of music: pitch, frequency, rhythm, melody, and so on. A good long round tone inspires me more than a superbly written verse. I have been moved to tears after hearing a particularly complex and beautiful harmony. Yet, lyrics that obviously have deeply emotional content don't seem to affect me much at all.

To sum, the basic comparison I am drawing here is this:
What comprises meaning in a song to you?
Is it the words or the music?
Why?

Also,
Do you believe that traits of AS might be responsible for not getting meaning out of song lyrics, or having a predisposition to have emotional responses to elements of music, as I described?

Thanks for your input!

I don't know what else to add to what you just said Acacia---that's me exactly. It is the sound of the instrumentation, pitch, combination of chords, rhythm, etc. etc. that moves me. I don't pay much attention to words either. I find if I try to listen to the words to get meaning, it causes me to lose the emotion in the song. Thank you for this interesting post. There should be research on this.

Some songs are really emotional for me too. "The National Emblem March" is one such song---and it is all instrumental. The Carpenter's single "We've Only Just Begun" is another song that I find emotional. "The Fields of Athenry" is an Irish song I find remarkably emotional to me. And there are many others.

Lyrics are always the last thing I notice about a song. I think your description of the way you pay attention to music has been charted as a "left brained" trait.

I'm considered "left brained" and my parents are instrumentalists as well, so it makes sense that I'd pay more attention to the melody, harmony, tone, ect. of a piece than the words.


I think aspies are traditionally more left-brained, but I'm sure someone will debate me on that.

I LOVE music (the music I love that is). It calms me, motivates me, excites me, relaxes me, takes me to other worlds.

And for me, it very much depends on the music and the piece. With some songs, it's all about the lyrics, although I might not always interpret them the same way others do.

With others, it's all about the instrumentation. My senses are particularly stimulated by a good bassline, minor chords, and percussion which sounds less like percussion and more like ... well ... the English language fails me here.

And maybe it's the Aspie in me, but with songs I listen to a lot, I'll find myself picking out parts of the song; following one specific instrument this time, another instrument the next time I listen to it, or one particular backup singer, etc.

So again, it depends on the song for me.

- Jo

________

"The one sad thing about Stevie Wonder's blindness is that he'll never know just how beautiful his hands look on a piano."
- My sister, at a Stevie Wonder concert.

I like it, but I don't tend to overanalyze it much. I listen to the works, but I hear so much music....

Songs like those in Nine Inch Nails instrumental albums I love. The instruments seem to invoke their own emotions. If I ever listen to the lyrics, I end up needing to look up the authors meaning on wikipedia.
I can usually tell the mood and some kind of meaning from lyrics.
If it were only lyrics, then it would be poetry, and I'd be lost if the lyrics were not literal.

I personally miss 3/4 of the words in songs anyways, so I pretty much stopped listening to songs with lyrics. I will only listen if the voice actually sounds nice.

Part of my love for music is definitely the melody, but I also have to enjoy the lyrics too. I don't really care what the singer's original meaning is; I like twisting around the lyrics and taking them out of context so that I can apply them to my life.

But there is one song where the melody gives me chills and the lyrics don't have much meaning to me: "Walking in Memphis" by Marc Cohn. Although I suppose the second verse, in which the singer describes seeing the ghost of Elvis and following him up the avenue, vaguely reminds me of my own imagination.

I just love the sound of the music I listen to. I hate most mainstream what your mother would listen to on the local radio stations type music though. Anything that the average teenage NT female would listen to is generally a turnoff... I love country, as long as it is a male singer, with a couple of exceptions. I love the The World Ends With You OST, which is a game playing on certain Japanese styles, and modern hiphop sounds and culture in Japan, just not sure how Japanese the soundtrack really is. I love all the Ozzy stuff I've heard, as the music has a very beautiful flow to it, and can always make me feel like I should. Any 80s rock and metal is generally nice. I love Great Big Sea, it just reminds me of my true home, back in Nova Scotia. I quite enjoyed the soundtrack for Final Fantasy X, and similar orchestrated stuff.

EDIT: as soon as I was done typing this post, I started scratching my head to the beat of When I'm Up I Can't Get Down by Great Big Sea. Such a good song, I love the instrumentals of that band, and their voices are so good too.

I listen to the words and the music. But I've noticed that the words I hear are often different from the lyrics, which makes me think that some songs are sung to have multiple meanings so more people would like them. I also like music without words.

I have often noticed "nice looking" people listening to music with absolutely profane music and imagined that they were too deaf to hear the words, as I noticed this when people drive cars with music so loud it would even be too loud in a house, and the Bass seems to make an earthquake in the neighborhood as they drive by.

But I suppose people don't have to care what the song is about. Many song lyrics don't make much sense anyway.

It's the timbre, the rhythm, and the way different sounds are layered together that evokes the most emotion for me. Lyrics are always secondary to music. When I do enjoy lyrics I like them more for the mental imagery they can conjure up. I don't care as much about the story or meaning behind them.

If the lyrics are simple enough to have a literal interpretation then chances are they will be more detrimental than beneficial to my enjoyment of the song - unless the lyrics are extremely sincere and I can personally relate to the situation, but that's pretty rare.

For me, both. I get meaning out of lyrics. Or at least can. Emotional meaning, that is. But the music adds to it. And I can get emotional meaning just of the music. I recall one instrumental album where, after listening to it for the first time, I dreamt about a romantic encounter with the performer. Not someone I'd ever found attractive, and not someone I knew. It was a reaction to the music.

Lyrics.

The tones mean nothing to me. Very much to abstract for me to put any kind of meaning into. I'm the what-you-see-is-what-you-get type. Music is music and that is all.

I find meaning in lyrics, though.
I also easily remember lyrics. I know the chorus of a song after the first time listening to it and the rest of the words perhaps the second time around.
I like to sing.

I've always been a musical person and I notice the music before the lyrics. My wife has always tuned into lyrics while I am the opposite. For the longest time she'd sing certain songs and I would say, "what song is that?" Then she'd tell me and I'd think, "no it's not" ... but she was always right. It took me most of my life to realize that in just about every song I've ever heard, I've always missed the lyrics. Except for a short while as a teenager when a friend and I thought we could sing and did it all the time. But still, he had to teach me most of the lyrics we would sing.

Today, some songs grab my attention to where I will notice the lyrics, but I still miss them in most songs. In general, music takes me away to a land where there are no lyrics!