Why Do We Dance?

Music is a great gift from heavens. While listening to it, countless memories, emotions, sensations are being unlocked. Music makes us feel alive and it has the power to put us down or lift us up into the highest dimensions of existence. Everyone has a main theme song that drives him/her through life and multiple secondary theme songs that play in his/her mind like a record on demand, depicting certain situations, something like a soundtrack to a movie scene. So how can we replay songs just like that without hearing them? The melody is recorded in our memory and is intertwined with a familiar and particularly strong emotion, where it is replayed for a certain scene in the movie that's our life. We don't just hear or listen to music, we feel it very deeply, and the emotions driven by it create such an amazing motions in the form of dance. The first response to the harmonized sound is biological. Our ears and the overall hearing apparatus resembles an old time record player.

The outer ear called auricle or pinna alongside a few more contributory parts, like the helix, the lobulus, antihelix is like a funnel that receives and draws in the sound waves. The auricle is very similar to the trumpet of the record player, don't you think? Just like a drainage system, the sound waves' path proceeds in the ear canal that's connected to the tympanic membrane, where the frequencies are amplified within the range of 3 kHz to 20 kHz. Something like an underground station where the only passenger is the sound, but the trip isn't over yet.

From the tympanic membrane, the sound travels to the middle ear where it hits the hammer (malleus), and just like a domino effect, the hammer hits the anvil (incus) which sends and stirs up the vibrations to the stirrup (stapes). Now check out the resemblance: the elbow of the record player with the ear canal, the tone arm with the hammer, the reproducer with the anvil and the base of the turntable with the stirrup, quite interesting isn't it? You may ask, why all these analogies, well if we start to look closely at things around us we see that everything is connected and it is supposed to work together. Moving on. From here, the sound which is amplified 15-20 times, is transported to the membranous labyrinth in the inner ear filled with a liquid called endolymph, responsible for balancing and transmitting the sound to the vestibulocochlear nerve located here.The sound is then recorded in the temporal lobe in the brain. This is how we hear and process sound. Now, the real question is how do we feel it, how do we paint on the canvas of the dance floor with the palette that's our body? In the article  Sound and Music shape Reality, I have mentioned how sound is transmitted through and how it makes water, paste or other liquids react. Accompanied by music, the sound is depicted with incredible patterns and shapes, like the ones we see in equalizers in music players.

We all know that our bodies are made of  90 percent water on a cellular level and our body consists of 80 percent. Therefore, it is no wonder we react to music like that. We don't just hear with our ears but with every cell of our bodies. They react to the sound vibrations that music sends out and our best response is dancing. Our dance moves clearly correspond with the motion the water conveys when exposed to sound. We can clearly see that effect in long exposure photography of people dancing such as the image on the left. And on the right, we can see dancing liquid in motion. The different frequency the music has, the different feeling (shape, pattern) it spurs. 

It acts therapeutically too. Certain types of music, like soul, instrumental, classical can increase productivity and balance the hormonal levels of anabolic hormones. Dancing has a pleasant effect on our organism as a whole too, it speeds up our circulation, it makes our muscles more flexible and it significantly improves our mood. Now there is the answer why we can not stop our feet from stomping when we hear our favorite song, and no we shouldn't control or stop this natural response, we should totally give in and let the sound take us, break us and shake us :), because dancing is one of the greatest artistic and naturalistic expressions of the force of creation. So it doesn't matter how you dance, just get up and dance!