There is a scientific explanation for everything; from why salt and vinegar crisps taste so good with a glass of champagne, to why your teeth hurt when you listen to Pauline Hanson.
But that fine electric buzz that flickers up your arm and across your scalp like dancing sand when someone a few feet away starts playing an instrument and then, God forbid, starts singing – is something else.
Live music holds you in a moment that stretches back through a linked DNA chain to a log fire in a cave on a mountainside or to an oasis on a vast desert plain surrounded by prowling lions.
Apparently, it’s something to do with those ancient parts of the brain like the amygdala, which processes things like fear and aggression and triggers physical responses like raised hairs when you’re chased by a lion; or the hippocampus, which stores memory and emotion and links the two together so you always remember where you were when 9/11 happened or when you first heard your most favourite song.
But that all sounds horribly clinical as an explanation for something as mysterious and magical as a shared night of live music.
When I was a child, my dad would sometimes invite friends and family around to our place for an evening concert of him playing our lounge-room piano.
This was when music was something special.
Music wasn’t played in supermarkets and cars and shopping malls, and a record player was an uncommon thing in ordinary families.
So, while I perched on my mother’s knee, about half a dozen people would sit around the fireplace in our flowery little lounge room and listen to my dad play the classics with an occasional jaunty little sea shanty or a Vera Lynn sing-along thrown in.
But the one I most remember is Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
When those dark, haunting minor chords flowed out of the piano and filled the room, I felt something strange happening to the hair on my scalp and arms, while everyone went quiet and watched the cigarette smoke drift across the ceiling.
Years later, I would play the same music on my record player, and much later through my phone streaming into my stereo system, but it wasn’t the same.
It was still beautiful music, but it was never a physical experience.
Then last weekend I went to The Vault in Shepparton for a Winter Session.
The irrepressible Jamie Lea introduced three musical acts: The Hootie Tooties, four twenty-somethings who jump out of their skin with musical joy and encourage everyone else to do the same; Shepparton teachers Matt Head and Amanda Sibio, who warmed the whole room with crafted gentle songs; and finally, seasoned Beechworth singer-songwriter Liv Cartledge brought her soaring voice and raw, poetic stories and somehow made this small space in a Shepparton back street seem like a mountain cave or an oasis in an endless desert.
Each performance gave me a hair-tingling moment that returned me to my mother’s knee listening to my father play the Moonlight Sonata in a small room with my tribe.
There is nothing quite like a few people in a dark room sharing the experience of music.
A current flows through the audience, on to the stage and back again like a double helix of twinkling light.
In a grey age where music becomes content data, we are blessed that Shepparton allows us these precious moments of human connection through music.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
5°C