So this one time, at band camp, my old high school honor band director said some very deep and profound words that would stick with me all my life. He said, “music is all about tension and release.” And although he didn’t actually say those things at band camp, and I know that references to American Pie must really show my age, I still think those words provide an really interesting window into the nature of what music is, how it works, and why we like it so much.

But hold up – what does that even mean, “music is tension and release”? Well, the idea is that every piece of music is, at bottom, a play between elements that produce tension and elements that release that tension. The pleasure we get from a piece of music is, at least in part, a product of the release it gives us. And in order to give us that release, first it has to provide some tension, it has to wind us up. And not by calling us names (hopefully). 

Here’s a super simple example to see this in action. Imagine the opening sound of the THX logo that used to be at the start of so many movies. It’s essentially one long note.. As you listen to the note drag on, your mind will start to sort of get uncomfortable – why is this lasting so long? Where is it going? Why is it getting louder? That’s the tension building. And then, as if by magic, suddenly the tone shifts and starts to fade out. Ahhhh, sweet release. 

But that’s just the most basic example. Every melody creates some tension and then, if the song is any good, releases it. Listen to all your favorite classical musicians for great examples. Rhythm, too, creates tension. In fact, a song’s beat is usually a bunch of tiny tension-release repetitions; even just a beat that goes loud-short-short-short creates tension as your body and mind tense up to hear the next loud one they’re expecting.

And good musicians are masters of manipulation on this front. They love to play with what you’re expecting by first giving you a steady beat and then bam! cutting it out and leaving you floundering in the tension of Hammertime. Then they give it back to you and you get that sweet sweet release. 

So volume, rhythm, pitch – all of them are essentially tools for creating tension and release. That’s why the ‘drop’ is so effective and pleasing. It’s essentially a ramping up of volume, rhythm, and pitch all together for maximum tension. Maximum tension means maximum release, and that’s what makes the drop feel so good when it finally comes.

At this point maybe you’re wondering where this is going. Cool observation Kourosh, but who cares? Well here’s the real kicker. It’s not just music that is about tension and release. In many ways, the dynamic of tension and release is the fundamental dynamic of our lives. From our biology to our psychology and even to our religious and philosophical worldviews, tension and release are everywhere. Music, then, isn’t just some weird tension and release game we play for fun. Not at all. Instead, it’s the purest expression of the dynamic essential to all living things, to life itself.

But ok, let me slow down a bit and explain myself. Take your biology, for example. Your heart pumping – that’s the tension of the heart muscle followed by its release as it draws more blood in. Your breathing too is a continuous pulsing of tension (inhale) and release (exhale). Every muscle in your body works by either tensing or relaxing. Digestion, exercise, sex… all of them follow the same pattern. 

In fact, this pulsing of tension and release is such a core feature of all life that the psychologist Wilhelm Reich used it as the basis of a form of psychological analysis and therapy. He argued that past traumas and present anxieties manifest themselves in the body as points of rigidity in the otherwise flexible pulsing of tension and release. These rigid points make up what he described as our ‘character armor’ and he believed you could read someone’s psychology literally from how they move and carry themselves. The idea makes some sense – we all know that our jaws and shoulders get tense when we’re worried, for example. 

But this rigidity is fundamentally unpleasant, since it represents a blockage in the healthy pulsing of tension and release. Reich’s work was aimed at clearing these blockages, and because of the connection he posited between the body and the mind, he believed that things like massage could help us work through past traumas. This could explain why music and dancing is so nice; when we dance, we force ourselves out of our rigid postures and rediscover the healthy dynamic of our bodies.

But you don’t have to get theoretically dense like Reich to see that thinking, like breathing and eating, includes this dynamic of tension and release. When you are purposefully thinking about something, you’re usually explaining or wondering. That’s tension. The moment of realization or understanding brings with it the relaxing ‘aaahhhh’ of release. Of course, some people prefer their release physical, others prefer it to be intellectual. The former might be dancers or athletes, the latter scientists and philosophers. 

If we stay on this point a little longer though, we can see that tension and release isn’t just some cool thing we noticed. It has to be there. It’s included in any purposive activity. Whenever we want something, there’s tension. Tension between the way things are and the way we want them to be. And when we get what we want, that tension is released in the form of pleasure. 

Observing that this dynamic of desire and satisfaction is all around us, is essential to just being someone who has goals, could lead some people to imagine a kind of ultimate release. What if we could just set aside all our goals forever, achieve them all? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate satisfaction, the ultimate release, a kind of supreme bliss? Well, boys and girls, that is what religions often aim at. Buddhism does this directly by trying to literally break the cycle of desires and find the ultimate release of Nirvana. More theological religions do this by positing an afterlife where those who have behaved properly get eternal release, and those who did not do so well are damned to never-ending tension. So basically Hell is just a really long dubstep song, forever building to a drop that never comes.

But luckily, life doesn’t have to be that way, doesn’t have to be an endless ramping up of tension. By turning back to music, we can actually learn a lot about life itself, since they both have the same fundamental dynamic. In fact music is, at bottom, the expression of that dynamic in the abstract language of sound. It builds us up only to drop us down, but hey, that’s what life is all about. Not the building up, nor the easing down, but the joy of moving from one to the other, of playing with different tensions and different modes of release. In that, music has a lot to teach us.