Quotes About Music And Sounds

#1. I've always been fascinated by music and sounds. I was lucky to receive proper classical training as an orchestra player and I'm always learning as a composer, looking to create new flavors and colors.

Lior Ron

#2. I wrote, recorded and produced everything myself. I played the guitars and keyboards while the drums were programmed. As a producer, I think music technology has reached a point, where the results that can be achieved in this way, allows me to create the music and sounds I envision.

Paul Wardingham

#3. I continue to write songs that are topically related to social, political and economic issues of our time, but I also recognize that onstage, I have a lot of fun and audiences have a lot of fun, so I'm trying to package the messages in music and sounds that are fun to perform and fun to listen to.

Aloe Blacc

#4. Latin music has many international influences - pop, rock, country, Brazilian sounds, and alternative styles.

Ednita Nazario

#5. I would love to be friends with Kendrick Lamar because I am just a huge fan of his music, I think he is so cool and he uses so many interesting sounds and has such good melodies and is just a beautiful rapper, his raps are just so well-written and his tracks are so insane, I am obsessed with him.

Alana Haim

#6. All Prodigy music is raw, and that will never change, the production is raw, the sounds are dirty, you can't get away from that. Take it or leave it.

Liam Howlett

#7. How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank
Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony

William Shakespeare

#8. There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals ... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick.

Oliver Sacks

#9. Einstein was attending a music salon in Germany before the second world war, with the violinist S. Suzuki. Two Japanese women played a German piece of music and a woman in the audience exclaimed: "How wonderful! It sounds so German!" Einstein responded: "Madam, people are all the same."

Albert Einstein

#10. Hark, how chimes the passing bell! There's no music to a knell; All the other sounds we hear, Flatter, and but cheat our ear. This doth put us still in mind That our flesh must be resigned, And, a general silence made, The world be muffled in a shade.

James Shirley

#11. I'm always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time. The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you're drowning, and it's there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music.

Tom Waits

#12. I make music from my heart, and from that place, it feels good, you know? I have no boundaries, and no one can put me in a box. If it sounds good, it's good.

Stephen Marley

#13. We are no longer the same after hearing certain sounds, and this is more the case when we hear organized sounds, sounds organized by another human being: music.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

#14. I'm not really entertained anymore, everything sounds the same. We have a crisis right now of innovative music. I'm probably the only person left trying to do something different and brand new.

Kool Keith

#15. I like trying to make sounds that are interesting and are a bit weird. I try to make music that captures people's imaginations.

Sampha

#16. Nothing exists without music, for the universe itself is said to have been framed by a kind of harmony of sounds, and the heaven itself revolves under the tone of that harmony.

Isidore Of Seville

#17. If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

John Cage

#18. For, through the twilight sounds of crickets and sighing trees, a faint, surprising wisp of music came floating to them and all three turned toward it, toward the wood.

Natalie Babbitt

#19. Behind every wall and every mirror and every vent, I hear sounds: breathing, rustling, footsteps, and murmurs. I try to tell myself it's just mice making their nests behind the barriers, but since when do rodents whisper?

A.G. Howard

#20. I was taken in by the bravado and the sounds of Mexico ... not so much the music, but the spirit.

Herb Alpert

#21. My thing is you just have to try to feel young and stay young. Obviously you get a little older, but I still want my music to be young. I don't want to sound like an old dad onstage, so you just have to write music that sounds young.

Luke Bryan

#22. After I came out of surgery - I was in the hospital for five weeks - I found that I gravitated toward very gentle sounds: chant music, solo bamboo flute sounds, a laid-back record of my own called 'Inside.' And the music became a very real part of my recovery process.

Paul Horn

#23. There was a strange exciting smell in the air - the smell of wine, cigar smoke, and perfume, mingled with the scent of the roses. The bright colors merged into one another, and the music rose and fell.

Joan G. Robinson

#24. There is nothing, he tells me, more odious than a German. However, their women are seductive, and they make the world's most beautiful music. My employer sings me a German song. He sounds like a buffalo in distress. Afterward he makes me read to him from the Bible.

Sofia Samatar

#25. I didn't realize what I was even doing when I started to record music. I was just doing it for fun. I picked up whatever recording gear I could get my hands on and I'd sit there day-in and day-out ... experimenting with different sounds and trying to write songs.

Alex Goot

#26. I'm really annoyed by the wave of country music that's just a list of stuff. It almost sounds like L.A. people writing country music, because it's just a list of stuff: 'My pickup truck and my cowboy boots and my Levi's jeans and my girlfriend with the short shorts.' It's so boring!

Kathleen Hanna

#27. I like to go on YouTube to see the underground sounds, what the kids are listening to, and kind of gauge my music around that.

Missy Elliot

#28. In a broader sense, the rhythms of nature, large and small - the sounds of wind and water, the sounds of birds and insects - must inevitably find their analogues in music.

George Crumb

#29. Sweet harmonious sounds give exquisite joy to human beings capable of appreciating music. I delight in hearing harmonious tones made by the human voice, by musical instruments, and by both combined.

Brigham Young

#30. Mozart's music always sounds unburdened, effortless, and light. This is why it unburdens, releases, and liberates us.

Karl Barth

#31. Sometimes music isn't just a bunch of sounds and lyrics, sometimes it's more than that: a time machine ...

Alina Radoi

#32. Grace was pouring out everywhere, from hidden sounds, into Els's damaged auditory cortex. And all that secret, worldwide composition said the same thing: listen closer, listen smaller, listen lighter, to any noise at all, and hear what the world will still sound like, long after your concert ends.

Richard Powers

#33. I always talk about my ambition with music, and it's to sort of seduce people into listening to sounds they wouldn't normally listen to or want to hear.

Herbert

#34. A single radio post still heard him. The only link between him and the world was a wave of music, a minor modulation. Not a lament, no cry, yet purest of sounds that ever spoke despair.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

#35. Trane was the perfect saxophonist for Monk's music because of the space that Monk always used. Trane could fill up all that space with all them chords and sounds he was playing then.

Miles Davis

#36. Watching the rain is as beautiful as watching the sunset or the sunrise and it is even better because in addition to watching you can also listen to it, the fantastic music of the drop sounds!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#37. [I did impressions] of relatives because I heard so many different sounds. My dad was in the music business and of course my uncle was a giant [music producer], but my dad in particular had the house filled with these Dixieland jazz stars.

Billy Crystal

#38. My mum especially listens to music in a way that is incredibly feelings-based. There's virtually no snobbery about what sounds are in it, she just wants to hear a song and that is quite refreshing.

James Blake

#39. I grew up in a kibbutz in the Galilee, but we were surrounded by Arabic villages, so I heard all these sounds and all this music. My father was very close friends with one of the Bedouin tribes, so I would always go there, to weddings, and I was always very fascinated by that music.

Maya Beiser

#40. But there, in the inky dark, half drunk from lack of sleep, with the fire and the endless sea and infinite sky, with the sounds of the music in our ears...and my heart bursting this something I couldn't quite identify, I just needed to dance.

Jojo Moyes

#41. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

#42. What I'm dealing with is sound. I don't pretend to be dealing with music. I'm just dealing with sound elements, textures and sounds.

Bill Laswell

#43. When I was 13, listening to Choice FM, I would listen to a lot of R&B from America, and whenever a British person tried to do it, it didn't really work, they just sounded like they were trying to copy that whole style. Now the music sounds British, something real rather than an imitation.

Katy B

#44. I make the music as if I was scoring it. I do my best that the sounds will fit the theme of that track, but then there are many other times where it can be random and things happen for no reason, just for fun! A storyline can let me organize changes in the music better, like acts in a play.

DJ QBert

#45. Being in L.A. has definitely given me the opportunity to experience how my music sounds in real life because I can drive around and listen to the mixes, which I couldn't do in New York. I get to feel how a song works in combination with a sunset and a drive through the mountains.

Dave Sitek

#46. The raw and natural sounds of Aero music don't subtract from it's beauty, instead it creates a rich soundscape for the musician to create within.

Jim O Rourke

#47. Listen to the unstruck sounds, and what sifts through that music.

Rumi

#48. What I'm trying to do is make impressions. I think of myself as a colourist, adding different colours and shades by using different techniques and touching the guitar in different ways. I'd like to play sounds you can see if you've got your eyes closed.

Lenny Breau

#49. In the U.K., classical music is composed by individuals and written down. Indian music is based on certain sequences called ragas. When I perform live, 95% of the music is improvised: it never sounds the same twice.

Ravi Shankar

#50. I mean I like pop music, and I like heavy music and, stuff that I like ... the band I've signed on to our label right now; they're called The Sounds. They're kind of like a new-wave pop band.

James Iha

#51. I'd been listening to African-American music since the first record I ever bought, which was by Sam Cooke. And it sounds more like my private thoughts that I never thought I would be able to articulate - I never thought I would be able to express publicly.

David Toop

#52. Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.

Vladimir Nabokov

#53. What I'm doing is basically the same as Bob Dylan did with folk songs and Woody Guthrie songs, the same as folk music's always done. I'm not going to sing about ploughing, but I'll write a song that sounds like it should be about ploughing.

Justin Townes Earle

#54. Music is about people for me. It's not about sounds. It's about people; it's about putting people into challenging situations. And for me, challenges are opportunities.

John Zorn

#55. When I was 4 years old my mother put me into an early music education school. That's where they taught you perfect pitch and harmony and how to write music and all that. At that time, one of the homeworks was to listen to all the sounds and the noise of a day and transfer that into musical notes.

Yoko Ono

#56. The owner of the boom box marches over and turns the music down. He shrugs when he sees me staring. "Hey, noise pollution elicits fewer phone calls to the police than screaming and battle sounds. At least, that's the case in Berlin," he says.

Amy Plum

#57. Communication is not only about words and numbers. Some thoughts can't be properly expressed in these ways at all. We also think in sounds and images, in movement and gesture, which gives rise to our capacities for music, visual arts, dance, and theater in all their variations.

Ken Robinson

#58. Sometimes I listen to music and I wonder how did they get certain sounds.

Sampha

#59. Music gives inspiration ... one that sounds windy with humming sound, such can put you in a trance, only to come back and discover some witty ideas.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#60. I know it sounds corny, but when you follow your dreams, it happens. And if it's music, take it seriously.

Enrique Iglesias

#61. When the musical keyboard was created in the 1970's, you had electronic geeks that had no background in music created these devises and gave them to musicians that had no background in electronics. The result was some of the wierd sounds that came out in the '70s.

David Bowie

#62. I just happen to comprehend the low standards of the majority of the music-buying public, and I don't care how condescending that sounds, it's true. They always go for the shiny gimmicks. Always.

Tiffanie DeBartolo

#63. I'm a man of different types of flavors and tastes. I like listening to things that inspire me. Older music, when instruments were being played, not just people hitting buttons. It's manlier. You're touching things to make sounds appear.

Action Bronson

#64. There's no doubt that there's certain songs and arrangements of music that release a chemical reaction in my brain. This sounds a little goofy, but I really believe that. It's such a euphoric experience that I sort of want to chase that experience as often as possible.

McG

#65. Let us pick up again these lost strands and weave them again into the fabric of America, sort out the music from the sounds and again respond to the trumpet and the steady drum.

Eugene McCarthy

#66. When all of this music sounds like you know what you want to say, then it will have been of all worth, ever. You will be something complete unto yourself, present and unique.

Jeff Buckley

#67. The thing that's good about Hip Hop is that it has experimented with a lot of different sounds and music.

Afrika Bambaataa

#68. Art isn't just paint and music, art is breaking glass and the sounds we make without realizing.

Joey Comeau

#69. I approach music- and this sounds crazy- as though I'm Phil Spector, and I'm cranking out these pop stars and forcing them to do all this stuff-except they're all me. But I'm not, like, transgendered.

Grimes

#70. The music I want to hear in my head sounds somewhere between Jimi Hendrix and Massive Attack. It's not really like my dad, but there will always be similarities because we have the same vocal cords, and I learnt the guitar the way he taught me.

Dhani Harrison

#71. The Clash were innovative, radical and helped drive a change in music that was ground-breaking. In comparison to some of the music today they sounded like they meant it. I still listen to their music today to remind myself what music made with commitment sounds like.

Chrissie Hynde

#72. And even in my panic, I hear the music in his deep voice, the sounds of singing. I close my eyes, imagining my breath is his own, that he is with me

Ally Condie

#73. These things I sample, or clip, are things that we share - music, films, sounds. It triggers a layer of participation from the audience as they recognize the material and remember it.

Christian Marclay

#74. Don't forget that in the midst of all your pain and heartache, you are surrounded by beauty, the wonder of creation, art, your music and culture, the sounds of laughter and love, of whispered hopes and celebrations, of new life and transformation, of reconciliation and forgiveness.

Wm. Paul Young

#75. I think it's important for people who love music to retain physical CDs or even vinyl, because it sounds so great and so much warmer than music over the internet.

Norah Jones

#76. There is in souls a sympathy with sounds:
And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased
With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave;
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies.

William Cowper

#77. I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence.

Paul Valery

#78. The rain picks up outside. It hits and slams against the window, but I think it sounds like music
a light mix of tambourine and cymbals. The wind sounds like a guitar, all low, melancholy notes. Thunder takes the drums. I'm quiet as I listen to the song.

Katie Kacvinsky

#79. It seemed hardly feasible that anyone could tune an oil barrel, and even less credible that the barrel could make music like nothing else in the world. She thought those sounds were magic.

Stieg Larsson

#80. My music must be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades. That is, the sounds of human speech, as the external manifestations of thought and feeling must, without exaggeration or violence, become true, accurate music.

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky

#81. I have always been far more interested in sound than technique, and how sounds work together, how they can be layered. I think electronic music, in its infancy anyway, allowed us to create music in a way that hadn't really been possible before. It created a new kind of musician.

Gary Numan

#82. I'm all for in my production, creating really unique textures and sounds - for me that's what I love about music.

Flume

#83. I'm very interested in music and where these sounds of Western music come from.

Ben Katchor

#84. Music to me, still to this day, is this wide open landscape of potential sounds (and I have more words for it now as a grown person), but as a little kid I used to think, "oh, you can just make up melodies and sometimes when you make certain melodies it makes you feel a certain way."

Josh Garrels

#85. It seems that the brain always has to be active, and if the auditory parts of the brain are not getting sufficient input, then they may start to create hallucinatory sounds on their own. Although it is curious that they do not usually create noises or voices; they create music.

Oliver Sacks

#86. The music industry's actions at the time of 9/11 and since have been actions driven by patriotism in most instances, and greed and stupidity to a lesser degree. Sounds like real life doesn't it?

Ronnie James Dio

#87. I think that technology has both introduced new sounds but also allowed an increasingly painterly approach to recording music as you can now paint over what you've done and more and more refine an existing performance.

Jerry Harrison

#88. What I really miss these days in music - is the music. I prefer to listen to melodies and songs, not just sounds.

Dave Grohl

#89. Rhianna don't want you to give her what you think that she wants. She needs you to give her something that's fresh. So you have to bend your voice and bend your personality and bend the music to make sure it sounds like it's new to everybody.

Ester Dean

#90. As your relationship with the music gets stronger, so does your motivation for playing it and finding different sounds. If you have the idea that you can find a colour that is better for one composer or another, even if it's an illusion, this generates enormous pleasure.

Maurizio Pollini

#91. Well, I am not sure of when my album will be released but my music has a lot of different sounds. I'm a hip-hop/R&B girl at heart, but I love pop music as well, and I even have an affinity for country music. So I would say my music might have something for everyone.

Zendaya

#92. While a man is stringing a harp, he tries the strings, not for music, but for construction. When it is finished it shall be played for melodies. God is fashioning the human heart for future joy. He only sounds a string here and there to see how far His work has progressed.

Henry Ward Beecher

#93. You can make sounds and music out of pretty much anything with a little imagination and putting your mind to it!

Stan Freberg

#94. I often begin movies with music in my head; it's a very important dimension to me. Not just the music itself, but how to use music in film: when and how and subtlety. I don't like to be too sweet in my stories, and I like the abrasive clang, the contrasting of sounds and cultures.

Mira Nair

#95. The moment when one thing turns into another is the most beautiful moment. A combination of sounds turns into music. And that applies to everything.

Vik Muniz

#96. I believe the use of noise to make music will increase until we reach a
music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make
available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.

John Cage

#97. Music always sounds better on Friday.

Lou Brutus

#98. I'm aware now over the last 5 or 10 years that when you do an accent, you really have to kind of get down to the nitty gritty and go into the phonetics of it, if necessary. Find out not just the sounds but the rhythms and the music - or lack thereof - in a particular accent.

Brendan Gleeson

#99. Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.

John Ruskin

#100. If a composer is to reach his audience emotionally - and surely that's what theatre music is all about - he must reach the people through sounds they can relate to.

Richard Rodgers