The Most Vague Art Form

There is in fact no such thing as an inherent emotional or ideological connection to specific sounds and genres.  On an individual or broader societal scale, there is no music that necessarily is meant to communicate sadness, anger, empowerment, or any other experience.  People either happen to experience or think of these things while listening to certain kinds of music or are accustomed to other people proclaiming the same.  Music is not a language, and certainly not a universal one!  It does not even have to be paired with the words that actually comprise language itself, so music is absolutely not in any way a language, as is the case with other things some people idiotically call "language," such as mathematical ideas (math is about necessary truths of logic as they pertain to numbers, not how to communicate linguistically).  Still, even when plenty of words go with it, music is by far the most vague of all art forms.  As powerful as it can be for its creators and listeners, music lacks the more thorough context of almost all other art forms possess.

It is not difficult to find numerous songs where the lyrics are nonspecific or random, and this is in fact a defining characteristic of a great amount of music.  Some musicians even try to pretend like this is the very nature of music, as if whatever the audience perceives a song to be about is what it really is about.  In truth, it can only be about whatever the artist intended, and even if he or she intended it to be experienced in a diverse, subjective way, this would only necessitate that there was no grand intention behind it.  A song or instrumental track still would not "mean" or be what people subjectively wish it to be about.  Since music with lyrics can be this blatantly vague, shallow, and pointless, mere instrumentals have even less context apart from words, despite this sometimes making the emotional impact of the instrumentation all the more potent.  Music with no words or images is the most vague art form, not that adding words to it intrinsically does anything to make its intended meaning clear.

The best and only way to minimize the ambiguity of music, as much as is possible, is to join it with visual mediums that can portray dialogue, environmental or narrative cues, and events.  In this context, music can be presented in such a way that it heightens an atmosphere already established by things far less vague than music could ever be.  This is where music least vaguely conveys experiences like sadness, hopefulness, peace, dread, or hatred, and this is where music least vaguely accentuates metaphysical and epistemological truths and ideas that transcend emotion.  Never in any other context can the stream of sounds produced by instruments reach this level of lesser ambiguity, though even then, it is not the case that the inherent vagueness of music vanishes entirely.  One can still only tell what it seems to have been intended to convey while other factors do more of the work in establishing this than music itself.

Music can indeed stir up very deep emotions, prompt introspective attitudes, and spark philosophical reflection for people who might otherwise drift aimlessly without concern for truth, yet music is only at its most effective at communicating ideas when it is in the context of other art forms like cinema, television, and gaming--in other words, visual art forms that do or could combine aspects of other mediums (with gaming being the only art form to take music and other audio, text, images, and interactivity and combine them all).  Without lyrics, music can be artistically excellent and listening to it can be a deeply impactful experience on a subjective level.  With lyrics, music has more of an ideological and personal context, but this greater potential for conveying the artist's intended ideas is still squandered in many cases with the utterly pointless, shallow kinds of ambiguity that come with random lyrics.  With the added sensory experience of images and other sounds, however, music is much better at conveying something more thematically accessible.