For just a moment, think: What were you doing at the best concert you’ve ever been to? Did you close your eyes in rapture, allowing yourself to be carried into the world created by the music? Maybe you felt the throb of the bass in your chest and it moved you to dance so hard you felt the warmth of everyone around you dancing, too. Maybe you were in a decommissioned church with light streaming through the stained glass and a hint of decades’ worth of incense clinging to the stone walls. Or maybe it was as simple as sipping on a glass of wine on the Hollywood Bowl’s wooden seats next to someone you’ve just realized you’ll spend the rest of your life with. 

Though we like to think of music as an invisible, nearly mystical force, it is a fact of physics. When a rosined bow is pulled across violin strings, or when a speaker cone vibrates, the sound it transmits arrives in literal, measurable waves. Sound, in this way, has a body. So do you. And when you encounter a piece of music, it’s not only your ears that are engaged, but all of your senses. You don’t merely hear music: You taste, smell, touch, and see it, too. 

On an intuitive level, this is something we all know. Consider how a song you might find beautiful in everyday circumstances becomes transcendent when it’s played as part of a wedding ceremony. It’s not simply that the declaration of love changes how the song is heard. It’s also the sensual context: the boughs of the trees laced with streamers, the warm line drawn down your cheek by a tear. You may not even be paying attention to the music—another of your senses might take primacy in the moment—but you are hearing something fundamentally different from what you hear when the same song shuffles forward on your weekday playlist. 

Composers and musicians have known for centuries about the ability of the other senses to alter music’s power and have long considered it another tool in their expressive kit. Opera, which takes for granted that sight and sound enhance one another, originated in the 16th century and was itself a revival of classical Greek musical theater. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral,” is meant to convey not only the sounds of a rural morning but the sights, too. When the rolling timpani and tempestuous strings mimic a thunderstorm, Beethoven is relying on both your immediate experience of the music and your previous experiences of the weather to inform its effect. He wants to evoke the prickle of rain on your skin, the ground vibrating with thunder, the petrichor smell of damp earth, the mixture of fear and awe in your guts. When you hear an orchestra roll out the undulating waves of Debussy’s La mer, your body might feel itself bobbing with the memory of floating in the Pacific on an overcast day. 

Experimental and non-classical musicians have always incorporated the other senses into their composition and performances. The earliest Grateful Dead concerts featured elaborate projections, swirls of colored oily light slurping over one another and the band in a way that enriched the psychedelic exploration of the music being made. Industrial and shoegaze artists like Throbbing Gristle and My Bloody Valentine have played with the audience’s visceral reaction to particular kinds of heaviness and noise; the influential drone-metal band Sunn O)))’s unofficial motto is “Ever breathe a frequency?” 

Some artists’ approaches are less confrontational. The experimental ambient musician Tim Hecker is heavily influenced by the architecture of medieval churches and the sound of classic hymnody. For a concert in Montreal in 2015, he commissioned a special scent—part frankincense, with an overtone of tarnished brass—that was pumped into the theater during a performance. The effect was doubled by the thick fog that delivered the scent and the pastel lights that were diffused throughout it. With these augmentations, Hecker’s ecclesiastical compositions felt freshly attuned to church history and suggested a new kind of sacred music for the 21st century. 

For some composers and listeners, the relationship between sound, vision, taste, touch, and smell is overt. Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which people are able to experience sensations through a seemingly unrelated sense, like tasting numbers or smelling sound. Olivier Messiaen had what is known as chromesthesia, in which chords and notes would appear to him as specific colors—he said that his piece Couleurs de la cité céleste was meant to represent a heavenly glow “like crystalline jasper.” Alexander Scriabin, meanwhile, took things much further, developing an entire composition system based on the particular colors he associated with keys. His masterpiece Prometheus, Poem of Fire, which will be performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic as part of the Body and Sound festival, calls for a color organ that projects the colors of the music as it’s being performed.  

It’s worth noting that synesthetes do not experience sensations in the same way. While Scriabin was sincere in the creation of his system, he apparently sparred with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov over precisely which notes produced precisely which color; they experienced the same notes in dramatically different ways, which means, in effect, that those notes produced different music for each of them.  

It can be tempting at times to view extramusical affect as nothing more than spectacle or distraction from the music—a way of dressing up or masking lower-quality work. After all, we’re here to listen to music, not to watch a film. But return to the thought exercise from a few moments ago. Consider that we are always experiencing music as a multisensory phenomenon. The late Frank Gehry didn’t intend Walt Disney Concert Hall to be an acoustical marvel only. He knew that the concertgoing experience, and thus the music itself, would feel different, set apart from daily life, in a space that transported the audience somewhere they’d never been before. The temperature of the auditorium, the lighting of the stage, the pre-concert drinks—every time you come to Walt Disney Concert Hall, they’re all factors that influence how you hear what you hear.  

Whether you’re at your favorite venue, stuck in traffic, or dining at your favorite restaurant, the next time you listen to music, look around you. Tune in to your senses. Try to hold on to what you’re hearing, but notice, too, what you see, what you feel, what you smell. How differently would your meal taste if you were eating in silence? How much freer would your favorite song make you feel if you weren’t hearing it while jammed on the 405? How might the orchestra sound in impenetrable darkness? Take these things in, be conscious of them, and you’ll never hear music the same way again.