Music is literally another level of magic

I had a talk with a friend about the different intricacies that turned music into sugar for the ears, and I really just had to write about the beauty of it all.

2/16/2025

I'm a Tamilian, so naturally I listen to a lot of Tamil music. Unfortunately, where I live, there aren't a whole lot of Tamil people, and out of those Tamil people, there's even less that actually listen to Tamil music. Luckily, music transcends language. When you hear exceptionally well-made songs, every piece of the music stack comes together. The lyrics and the tune of the music come together to create sugar. And for people that don't understand the lyrics, the tune still has a real significance.

One such song is "Thuli Thuli" from "Paiya". You might not know this song, but you can find it online. You can see this during the chorus of the song. To understand it's impact, you have to understand the impact of the treble and bass on our emotions.

You hear bass in a lot of songs. It's especially useful in "feeling" words. Most of where the melody lies is in the middle of the music range, so outliers like bass add to the song without crowding the mid-area any more than it currently is.

What you may not notice as much, or at least I haven't, is that treble is used in this same manner. Higher notes that aren't in the vocal range can be as effective in "feeling" the music as bass can. And this is exactly what "Thuli Thuli" uses in the chorus.

The actual lyrics say (translated):

"Go, go, go to her / my legs tell me to / Say, say, say to her / my heart begs me to"

It's rhyme and effect are better in Tamil, but this will do. Compared to the first verse, the chorus includes a bassline and a widened instrument range in the mids (I think it's a piano playing two-sets of interval chords and a violin playing broken chords, but I might be wrong). But most importantly, on the second and fourth line, there's a treble synth of some sort that echoes throughout the line. The effect of that simple synth is a lot. It differentiates the line from the first and third, it adds a sense of intent to those lines. Combined with the lyrics (in Tamil), they make you feel like the character in this song has lost control, that he's going to go to her and tell her everything.

It has a lot of effect in the slightly faster and slightly higher-pitched video version as well, if not more. Yuvan Shankar Raja, the composer of this movie's songs, did very well in its creation. While the big picture of a song matters, so do the small details. This single high note played in the treble had this big of an effect on the feeling of the song.

There's also another song by Anirudh Ravichander: "Un Vizhigalil" from "Maan Karate". The beginning and the end of the song have the same lyrics. You can find them online, and I recommend listening to the entirety of the song. While the beginning and the end (only) have the same lyrics, the beat massively changes in between them.

This beat change is more than just more drums and some bassline and some violin all shuffled everywhere. The entirety of the song builds up to a point. The song's meaning is about a guy expressing his desire to remain with the girl he likes. And it builds up to that point.

The beginning of the song is very basic. There's nothing more than a little bit of synth echo and the vocals. The violin then comes in for a solo, creating the theme of the melody of the song. A small guitar accompaniment and vocal part follow, and the chorus section comes. The chorus increases in speed, with a stronger guitar accompaniment, a treble voice echo, and the "radio-like" repeating of words. Drums, the same violin tune, and a new guitar riff come to the midsection of the song. It later continues with a duet with the girl and the boy, the music continuing to intensity throughout the rest of the song. By the time the end comes, the lyrics stay the same but the song has a completely different outlook.

It goes from a solo from a guy who wants to stay with the girl he likes to a duet with a guy and a girl's love for each other welded together. The echo of the voices, the "radio-like" effects, the stereo-sound of each voice, it all has its own individual effect to create sweetness in the ears. You'd have to listen to the song to really get all these points, preferably with headphones to capture the intricacies, but it's all there. The smallest of effects to the music, the vocals, create such a difference in the feeling the song leaves you. The ending of the song is somewhat incomplete, as in it doesn't end with every instrument slowly coming to an end. The violin leaves one last movement before the song ends, as if the song is still playing elsewhere, and we've come to the end of our own listening session. It gives a feeling that the love these two share is going to stay.

All this is just for 2 songs as well. You could write so much more about just one of these songs, and imagine all the different songs out there in the world, each with embedded intricacies that all mix and merge together so well. The main tune, the main concept of a song matters as well. You can't really have a beautiful song if you just mash random notes. And you can have extremely basic songs with not a whole lot of intricacies that can still remain beautiful. But the exceptional songs, ones that are universally understood and felt without a language barrier, are songs that add the smallest changes, notes, and effects to really put someone in that feeling.

That's the beauty of music.

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