Music And Sound Quotes

“Music is a mixed mathematical science that concerns the origens, attributes, and distinctions of sound, out of which a cultivated and lovely melody and harmony are made, so that God is honored and praised but mankind is moved to devotion, virtue, joy, and sorrow.”

— Christoph Wolff

“Intent is in the composer, interpretation is in the conductor, rendering is in the instrumentalist, perception is in the listener, sound is in the notes, and rhythm is in the intervals. Music is the harmonious relationship between them all. Relationship is beauty.”

— Dee Hock

“Eyyia?" said her husband, and Eliane bet Danel heard the mangling of her name as music.
"You sound like a marsh frog," she said, moving to stand before his chair.
By the flickering light she saw him smile.
"Where have you been," she asked. "My dear. I've needed you so much."
"Eyyia," he tried again, and stood up. His eyes were black hollows. They would always be hollows.
He opened his arms and she moved into the space they made in the world, and laying her head against his chest she permitted herself the almost unimaginable luxury of grief.”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

“Music was not so very different from mathematics. It was all just patterns and sequences. The only difference was that they hung in the air instead of on a piece of paper. Dancing was a grand equation. One side was sound, the other movement. The dancer's job was to make them equal.”

— Julia Quinn

“The sound world that I created for 'Avatar' had to be very different, really, than anything I ever created before. There is also three hours of music.”

— James Horner

“I've never really been a traditional country kind of guy. I wanted my music to sound more like the end of the '90s and to have the kind of great music, pop or whatever, that radio will embrace.”

— Bryan White

“Ramones music has a Pavlovian effect on me - the song starts, and the world blurs around the sound.”

— Henry Rollins

“Lifting her head, she joined in as the others in the group began to howl in response to Brace's triumph. The sound was ... It touched the soul, the music haunting, starkly pure and yet so very earthy.”

— Nalini Singh

“There were times I used to go to parties when I was, you know, like 15-, 16-years-old, and I'd always bring my guitar, and all my friends would be like, sing one of the Smokey songs. And everything I sang was his music, and I could sound just like him.”

— Teena Marie

“I could read music and sing all the right notes at the right time. And over time, I literally found my voice, found a way to make sound.”

— Caroline Shaw

“I had always loved cartoons, especially 'Bugs Bunny,' and I found I enjoyed making animated films. Even a 30-second commercial involved drawing and painting, storytelling, not to mention actors, music, and sound effects.”

— Mordicai Gerstein

“There was something vampiric about. music. It must have sounded supernatural even to those who don't believe in the supernatural ... the way harmony could be layered upon harmony until you felt yourself dissolving in the sound. So eloquent of dread it was, this music.”

— Anne Rice

“I maintain music is not here to make us forget about life. It's also here to teach us about life: the fact that everything starts and ends, the fact that every sound is in danger of disappearing, the fact that everything is connected - the fact that we live and we die.”

— Daniel Barenboim

“I'm not going to say I'm not a fan, but I'm a fan of house music, essentially, and kind of indie, and I was always into the kind of sub-pop Seattle Mud Honey and Pearl Jam kind of sound. But my kind of big love was house music ever since I was 15/16, going to raves when I was 15 or 16 years old and not going to school, like a naughty boy.”

— Nick Frost

“Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.”

— Plato

“The way we work at Pixar is we write the script, but then we quickly move on into story reel, which is basically like a comic-book version of the film. And then we do our own dialogue and music and sound effects, all in an effort to be able to basically sit in the theater and watch the movie before we shoot it, essentially.”

— Pete Docter

“Last night as your breathing
settled into sleep
what I heard was the half-forgotten sound,
the velvet rush and hiss,
the automatic click
as the record player's arm runs out,
is brushed away
at the record's centre,
the pulse of its subsiding
oddly comforting.
33 1/3 rpm.
The knowledge that when the music ends,
there will not be silence.”

— John Knowles

“I remember singing around the house to records that were playing. All kinds of music. And the great James Cleveland was often in our house, and I grew up with his sound as well.”

— Aretha Franklin

“I was lucky enough to be the lady that was asked to be Maria in the Sound Of Music, and that film was fortunate enough to be huge hit. The same with Mary Poppins. I got terribly lucky in that respect.”

— Julie Andrews

“And he discovered, finally, the source of the honey-sweet sound.
The sound was music.
The sound was King Phillip playing his guitar and singing for his daughter, the Princess Pea, every night before she fell asleep.
Hidden in a hole in the wall of the princess's bedroom, the mouse listened with all his heart. The sound of the King's music made Despereaux's soul grow large and light inside of him.
Oh," he said, "it sounds like heaven. It smells like honey.”

— Kate DiCamillo

“As hard as it is, as ghetto as it is, hip-hop is pop music. It's the sound of music getting out of the ghetto, while rock is looking for a ghetto.”

— Bono

“The music of ABBA is not that happy. It might sound happy, in some strange way, but deep within, it's not happy music. It has that Nordic melancholic feeling to it. What fools you is the girls' voices. You know, I do think that is one of the secrets about ABBA. Even when we were really quite sad, we always sounded jubilant.”

— Bjorn Ulvaeus

“Sound quality was supposed to be one of the big selling points for CDs but, as we know, it wasn't very good at all. It was just another con, a get-rich-quick scheme, a monumental hoax perpetrated on the music consuming public.”

— John Mellencamp

“I like to find music that shares a rhythm with the sentences I'm working on. And though I'll probably regret saying this, I think some songs actually don't sound too bad when they're played through lousy speakers.”

— Rosecrans Baldwin

“Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression - these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.”

— Floyd Skloot

“If you're going to keep the music in you, Jonah, you've got to play a little bit every day purely for pleasure. Otherwise, you'll lose the joy of it, and if you lose the joy, you won't sound good to those who know piano - or to yourself.”

— Dean Koontz

“Music without a message is just sound”

— Jake Miller

“Several times a day, stop and just listen. Open your hearing 360 degrees, as if your ears were giant radar dishes. Listen to the obvious sounds, and the subtle sounds—in your body, in the room, in the building, and outside. Listen as if you had just landed from a foreign planet and didnÂ’t know what was making these sounds. See if you can hear all sounds as music being played just for you. Even in what is called silence there is sound. To hear such subtle sound, the mind must be very quiet.”

— Jan Chozen Bays

“Ayn Rand called her novella Anthem a "hymn to man's ego." My approach to Anthem the play was to provide the story a further dimension through music and sound. The work is now larger than a hymn. It's really "spoken opera."”

— Jeff Britting

“My music is kind of laid back, it doesn't have super crispy, shiny production, and I'm not singing my heart out or whatever. But that whole idea of blogs declaring: "this is the new denomination for this sound" is ridiculous to me.”

— Mac DeMarco

“Recording in Nashville was absolutely essential to get the sound, the musicians, the atmosphere, the warmth ... There are just cult places like that in the world, like Chicago for the blues or New York for jazz. Nothing sounds the same in Nashville as it does elsewhere. Nashville is the Mecca of country music and everyone knows it.”

— Roch Voisine

“Since the one thing we can say about fundamental matter is, that it is vibrating. And since all vibrations are theoretically sound, then it is not unreasonable to suggest that the universe is music and should be perceived as such.”

— Joachim-Ernst Berendt

“Everyone has a fantasy of what they want their band to sound like. However, because I knew nothing about making music, I was unable to describe what I wanted properly.”

— Joe Casey

“I like New Orleans music, I like Memphis music and I like the way that the sound like those places. I like how there are stars and there are people in those cities that are revered in the community.”

— Joel Plaskett

“If you're serious about singing or acting, which are two art forms that get repetitive, the way to keep the music fresh is to recognize that it is totally impossible for it to ever be the same, night after night. You open your mouth and you'd like a certain sound to come out of it, but it doesn't always come out exactly like you thought it was going to come out!”

— Mary Travers

“If there's loads of material going by you don't notice the individual things quite so much. Also it really foregrounds the sonic dimensions like electronic ambient music, it's pushes all of that colour to the foreground so you hear little every atom of sound.”

— Max Richter

“The good thing is that there is a constant need for innovation, which is important in the evolution of music and sound.”

— Shreya Ghoshal

“To me, I took a militant attitude towards sounds. I wanted sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a human being might be free. That was my idea about sound. It still is, that they should breathe ... not to be used for the vested interest of an idea. I feel that music should have no vested interests, that you shouldn't know how it's made, that you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know anything about it ... except that it's some kind of life force that to some degree really changes your life ... if you're into it.”

— Morton Feldman

“I don't listen to a huge amount of music generally. Partly because you've sat in a studio for 10 hours and then when you come home you just want to read a book, and listen to the sound of your central heating system.”

— Herbert

“For me, music and sound are both the language and underlying architecture of the cosmos.”

— Tom Kenyon

“Music is like painting in sound. You take it into your inner heart and never lose it. It's eternally mysterious.”

— Van Cliburn

“I had ideas about music and sound and listening and time and so on that I wanted to pursue as an individual, and by doing that book, Brian [Eno] opened the door, and he decided to do a record based loosely on the book.”

— David Toop

“Deep inside I feel that this world we live in is really a big, huge, monumental symphonic orchestra. I believe that in its primordial form, all of creation is sound and that it's not just random sound, that it's music.”

— Michael Jackson

“The medicine of the future will be music and sound.”

— Edgar Cayce

“My music doesn't really sound like punk music, it's acoustic. And it doesn't really sound like folk music 'cause I'm thrashing too hard and emoting a little too much for the sort of introspective, respectful, sort-of folk genre thing. I'm really into punk and folk as music that comes out of communities and is very genuine and very immediate and not commercial.”

— Ani DiFranco

“I love silence. And one of the paradoxes about the way I live and also about my work is that definitely one of the reasons I went into music, and especially into composing is that I love setting up an environment where I can be by myself for long periods of time and have everything as quiet as possible, either to think about sound, or to think about ideas, or just to focus on things that are important to me.”

— Tod Machover

“Well, what we do is we have a script, of course. But for us, writing is also like storyboarding. It's drawing. And so we will cut all of those drawings together with music, sound effects and dialogue. And we screen this kind of stick-figure version of the film.”

— Pete Docter

“A lot of people are like, "How are you going to re-do it?" I'm not worried about what people are going to say because you know people are gonna be like, "It doesn't sound like this ... It sounds like this." I'm just going to make music that I know I'm supposed to make.”

— Justin Vernon