I still have moments of deep contemplation as to why we as humans, sing? Why music is so very important to a memory. We have all heard the expression that goes “oh I remember this I was such an age in such a place and I was with so and so” we have the new phenomenon that is geotagging for pictures and films alike. But we have never developed a term for attaching a piece of sound to a memory. Or Indeed vice-versa. Perhaps “audmemtag” simple and yet it does the job.

Almost all songs written are to be about unrequited, gained, losing, lost or forbidden love. And yet we have the spoken word with which to communicate to our counterparts with at any given time. We relate times and dates, social situations and even “what was number one when we were born”

Is it that the process of singing to communicate is a long-lost system of wooing the one we hankered for as in the olden days of the balcony serenade. We take it for granted that singing and song will just (happen) we attend opera and musicals and enjoy the filmed version of the song and music, the now infamous sound of music and later the addition into celluloid greatness of Abba the musical to name just the two that I remember, or at least that I am aware of.

My point in all this is, why do we sing at all? what is its real purpose. It was never financial all those years ago, we don’t sing as we walk along and work for profit.

Whether we like it or not it would seem that we sing and like to be sung to as part of the very fabric of life itself I like to hear the radio on as much as I like to have peace and quiet sometimes. My tastes are eclectic with an open mind to any and everything new. We can sing babies to sleep as well as drive others to the brink of insanity with our own tastes that aren’t shared with passive listeners. It can ease the hours on a journey as well as irritate when we feel the need for silence. We even have specific tunes dedicated to the dead at their funerals, as well as weddings and other social gatherings. Children will laugh and giggle on YouTube to specific tunes played loudly in a car.

Even old folk In nursing homes will start to tap a foot to an old tune that takes them back to a time of better health and almost certainly better weather, with a broad smile on their faces and happiness filling frail joints and in their minds-eye remembering the night at the local dance halls where they would start and finish the evening fully dressed and sober (for the most part) and of course the ones who did not in fact finish the evenings fully dressed or sober are the ones with the biggest smile.

We are born into a world of music and song. We attach specific tunes and lyrics to significant milestones in our lives and we die going out in style with chosen tunes at our service. We can’t have knock on wood or come on baby light my fire in the UK as it is deemed bad taste, hang on we are about to set light to a body, why can’t they have what they want. So much for freedom of expression.