Ambiguity In Music

Music can excel at expressing the emotion of its maker, even though no one can know what someone else's music is truly supposed to inspire, and yet, with or without lyrics, it is the worst medium when it comes to conveying any sort of detailed or accurate philosophical truths.  Films have the option to rely on spoken dialogue, visual imagery, and music, while video games have all of this and the additional component of direct input from the player.  Songs or instrumentals typically last far less time than even shorter films and games, and even with words, the exact things being conveyed are very often vague--either intentionally because of artistic and ideological stupidity or because of the much more limited nature of the medium.

Without lyrics, music only has instrumentation that might wonderfully express the ideas and feelings of the creator in one sense, yet another listener might perceive it to establish a different atmosphere, one objectively different from the musician's intentions.  However, everyone can distinguish between their subjective perceptions of the ideas behind mere instrumental music, the music itself, ideas themselves, and what the creator might claim to have meant by their work.  With lyrics, many songs manage to paradoxically compound the ambiguity for listeners.  Words could be and are sometimes used to provide more context or genuinely provide key details about the philosophical stances or psychological state of an artist.  This would of course still be more restricted in its communicative ability than other forms of art like gaming and cinema.  Still, music with lyrics is often more about combining random words that rhyme or match a musical rhythm than even trying to convey a specific, coherent concept.

The song Holy Diver, to give an example of a song that exemplifies this, is supposedly about a Christ figure who comes to a planet with an extraterrestrial species, offers salvation, and then is selfishly asked to not depart to bring deliverance to other planets.  This is according to the singer himself.  Do the lyrics even hint at this?  Not exactly!  The opening lyrics go as follows: "Holy diver, you've been down too long in the midnight sea / Oh, what's becoming of me / Ride the tiger / You can see his stripes, so you know he's clean / Oh, don't you see what I mean".  The remaining lyrics do not come any closer to clarifying if there even is anything particular the songwriter had in mind beyond putting together words that rhyme enough to fit a song but that do not communicate anything effectively.

Songs can be philosophically accurate or deep, as unrelated to the artistic quality of the instrumentation as this is.  The song Hell by Disturbed is another rock/metal song that, while artistically strong in some ways, has absolutely pathetic lyrical depth due to its lack of any sort of conceptual focus (though Disturbed avoids this pitfall in plenty of other songs across its discography).  It is not true that music and its accompanying lyrics cannot ever communicate things more precise than the type of utter linguistic nonsense found in the likes of Holy Diver or Hell, but the norm in many cases is to not even attempt anything more.  It would still be true that even if its greatest lyrical precision and most consistent artistic quality were more persistently achieved, music remains the least effective medium at communicating specific details about reality.  Only when overlapped with imagery or additional factors, as might be found in a movie or video game, is music able to rise above its greater capacity for ambiguity or randomness.