Words in Songwriting and their Power as Emotional Triggers

________________________________________________________________________

GET “SONIC WEAPONS: The Official Stereo Thesis Music Sampler FOR FREE.” To get your FREE full-length album…click here.

_________________________________________________________________________

Richard: Everything is hypnosis.

John: There’s a profound disagreement between us. There is no such thing as hypnosis. I would really prefer that you didn’t use such terms, since they don’t refer to anything. We believe that all communication is hypnosis. That’s the function of every conversation. Let’s say I sit down for dinner with you and begin to communicate about some experience. If I tell you about some time when I took a vacation, my intent is to induce in you the state of having some experience about that vacation. Whenever anyone communicates, they’re trying to induce states in one another by using sound sequences called “words.”

…you will discover that somnambulistic trance is the rule rather than the exception in people’s everyday “waking activity.”

-          Richard Bandler and John Grinder, Frogs Into Princes

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Walls and Bars of Words

The unique power that words possess is by having influence over the way we perceive and interpret our experiences. How? When we produce a word in language we are in fact turning a perception about something in reality into a thought, then assigning sounds that transmit the idea as meaning to others. Writing is only slightly different, in that, writing is simply transforming the sound into a symbol (letters or glyphs) that conveys, we hope, the same meaning as the sound. The word, whether written or spoken, becomes the symbolic carrier of the idea. One of the wonders of the mind of man is in conceiving of an efficient method of communication about some aspect of life. In many ways for us communication is life and everything that relates to communication is connected with an idea about reality, or things in the physical universe.

The process of transmission goes even further than just the creation of language. Not only are we turning actions into thoughts, and then turning our thoughts into sounds, and finally turning the sounds into language (symbols), we are also choosing the words that will describe our experience of reality into an interpretation (a sense or feeling) of our experience. In other words, we also choose how we will perceive and act in the world we live in by our use of language. We will train ourselves and allow others to train us to see the world in a habitual manner which over time can become a mental prison – with walls and bars of words.

 

By our words we are also choosing how to “feel” about our lives. So it’s the words we choose and the way we choose to use them to describe our actions and the actions of those who act with us in the world that in turn shapes our thoughts about existence, which to a lesser or greater degree creates our reality. Oddly enough though, reality never changes and our thoughts are only subject to reality or our choice of words where the words are a medium and not the substance of our thoughts or reality.

Emotional states are largely determined by the way we perceive our experiences or by our quality of thinking about our experiences and our relating them to our values. What we emote about and in what manner is set by our thoughts about reality and our values.

 

Values are those things in life which we require and pursue for our personal survival. Words play a major, although not exclusive, role in the process of creating our emotional states and our understanding of reality. Emotions are like words in that they are a sort of barometer for our interpretations of existence. They are important, but they do not set the tone of existence.

 

Emotions are automatically generated within us as we experience reality over the course of our lifetime. Once we set our values in life or when they are set for us by others, our minds constantly compute a sum total of our existence, which produces an emotion such as anger, grief, boredom, or joy.

We have arrived at a point in human evolution where we are no longer able to differentiate these facts about human culture, learning, existence, and the mind very well. So it’s no wonder we aren’t even aware of the fact that now we are turning the sounds and symbols of words into our thoughts and making the mistake of confusing our words (as sounds and symbols) with our thoughts. We are confusing the symbols with the actions.

 

This is what makes words so powerful today and in so many industries. The professionals in these industries have mastered the use of words to such a degree that we are spurred to action in many instances not by our own determinism, but by theirs. This unfortunately places us at the mercy of symbols and makes us slaves to language. This is what also makes words so powerful in music and why songwriters too are among those professionals who use words to emotionally move us, thereby converting us into fans and consumers.

 

______________________________________________________

 Related Music:

Snake

Dutiful Son

______________________________________________________

Related Article:

The Skillful Use of Questions in Songwriting

 

Metaphors as a Songwriting Tool

______________________________________________________

Marc

http://stereothesis.com/

Remember to join our mailing list.

To support Stereo Thesis with a financial donation securely through PayPal, click here.