Humanities- Music Reflection Paper
Humanities: Music Reflection Paper When thinking about the question (can music affect the listener?) many thoughts and notions come to my mind that can either refute or agree with this purposed question, but the opinion that I will explain in detail with clear and concise evidence within the body of this paper is that music does in fact affect the listener in many positive ways. People tend to listen to a genre/style of music based upon his/her mood or feelings at that very point and time, for example if I were to listen to a song from the genre of rap or R&B I would become in a more upbeat, happy mood if I already wasn’t feeling that way; but if I was listening to a Punk Rock or Country song I would probably be or become in an angry/depressed mood. My notions that music does in fact affect the listeners’ mood/feelings will be explained with my own examples of 2 songs that have a major affect on my mood as well as the ideas presented by Aristotle in relation to that of music and its purposes/forms. I feel that Aristotle brings up very important ideas that go along with my thoughts on the strong affect that music does have on a listeners’ mood and/or state of mind which I will go into great detail in the preceding paragraphs of this reflective paper. So for the first portion of my paper I will discuss the 2 examples of songs that I strongly feel affect my personal mood/ state of mind when I hear and closely listen to beat/tempo that are included in the particular genre/style of these 2 particular songs. The 2 songs that I will be discussing within this paper that ALWAYS have strong, positive effect on my own mood are “Turn Up the Music” sung by Chris Brown and “Who Says” sung by Selena Gomez. First, I will talk about the effect that song entitled “Who Says” has on my mood/ state of mind when hear and intensely listen to the lyrics of the song. When I first heard this song on the radio I instantly felt happy and like No one or nothing could stand in my