Robert Wyatt Quotes

The way the mind decodes music is an individual mystery. But the physical circumstances can change the way you listen.

I definitely associate music with color. For example, my first record has a red cover but it is totally green and blue to me.

With sad music, or music that's perceived as sad, there's a sense of solidarity that can be really powerful. My songs are all joyful to me.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

The people need to feel the music.

For some reason, the evolutionists have not come up with an evolution-based explanation for why human beings react so powerfully to music. But surely they will.

I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise.

The score, which comes often quite later in a film, can help reinvigorate your emotional engagement with it.

I just enjoy the sound as I hear it in everything around me. The high and low frequencies of sound bewitch me. Whether I am in a shop, in the bathroom or listening to noise that my fans make... everything is music to my ears and drives me. I just put all these things in rhythm when I'm playing.

Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.

I like music because it's the only invisible art form.

My husband is a composer, so he plays piano all the time and I sit there and clap telling my unborn child, 'Hear me clap, hear the music.' I know music, in general, is supposed to be good for babies to hear.

Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

Music is essentially an emotional language, so you want to feel something from the relationships and build music based on those feelings.

Most babies know how to win us over. We cannot help but smile at them and watch them smile back.

Artists are overcompensating with this aggressive, energetic, hyperstimulating music - it's like someone shaking you. But it can't move people on an emotional level.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

I think music, in my opinion, is not about motivation in the way it's - it's not a running base. It's art. And my whole philosophy of music is different. It's almost like cooking and serving to people, seeing them smile and enjoying the food, really.

I like any music I can feel.

A baby's existence for the first three months is a one-way street. One person is doing all the work and the other is crying, sleeping and pooping. So the first moment when you're actually able to do something and they acknowledge your presence, that's a big deal. A very big deal.

You can say what you think music is, but the only way it really is, is how people experience it.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

It's wonderful when music is intellectually stimulating. But ultimately it has to be a visceral experience.

Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.