I do not speak Italian. I have never been to Italy. I know nothing about opera. But when I first heard Pavarotti sing “Nessun Dorma,” I cried.
I was in a taxi. The driver had the radio on. This voice came through the speakers—enormous, aching, building toward something I could not name. I did not understand a single word. I did not know what the song was about. But something in my chest opened, and tears came without permission.
The driver looked at me in the mirror. He did not speak. Perhaps he understood. Perhaps he had cried to music he did not understand too.
I have thought about that moment for years. About why sounds arranged in certain patterns can bypass everything we know and reach directly into something we feel. About why music does not need translation.
My mother used to listen to Hindi film songs. She did not speak Hindi well. She could not follow the lyrics precisely. But she knew when a song was sad. She knew when it was joyful. She would hum along, getting the words wrong, getting the emotion exactly right.
I asked her once how she understood songs in a language she did not know. She looked at me as if I had asked something foolish. “The music tells you,” she said. “The words are just decoration.”
I think she was right. The words are decoration. The music is the thing itself.
Scientists say that language and music are processed differently in the brain. Words go to specific areas—Broca’s, Wernicke’s—where meaning is decoded, grammar is analyzed, sense is made. Music goes somewhere older. It goes to the limbic system, the ancient part of the brain that handles emotion and memory. Language is learned. Music is felt.
This explains why a song can move you before you understand it. The emotional content arrives first, carried on melody and rhythm. The meaning, if it comes at all, comes later. And sometimes it never needs to come. The feeling is complete without it.
I have a friend who collects music from places he has never been. Japanese enka. Portuguese fado. Arabic maqam. He does not speak these languages. He cannot read about the cultural contexts. But he listens for hours, and he says he understands.
At first I thought he was pretending. How can you understand what you cannot comprehend? But then I listened with him. We sat in his room as a fado singer’s voice filled the space—a woman singing in Portuguese about something I would never know. And I understood too. Not the words. The weight. The particular quality of longing that the Portuguese call saudade. It came through the music directly, without translation, without explanation.
Perhaps this is because certain emotions sound the same everywhere.
Grief has a characteristic sound. The voice trembles. The pitch wavers. The phrases break before they finish. I have heard this in Bengali funeral songs and in Irish keening and in blues from Mississippi. Different languages, different cultures, same trembling voice. Same broken phrases. Same sound of a heart that cannot hold itself together.
Joy has a sound too. The voice lifts. The rhythm quickens. The melody rises and stays high. I have heard this in wedding songs from every country I have visited. The words change. The instruments change. The feeling remains identical.
We recognize these sounds because we are human. We have all grieved. We have all rejoiced. We know what these emotions feel like in our own throats. When we hear them in another throat, our bodies respond automatically. Mirror neurons fire. We feel what the singer feels, regardless of what the singer says.
Evolutionary scientists believe music came before language. Our ancestors communicated through pitch and rhythm long before they developed words. Mothers hummed to infants. Groups coordinated through chanting. Emotional states were expressed through sound patterns that everyone understood.
Language came later—more precise, more complex, more divisive. Words created meaning but also created barriers. My words and your words might not match. Translation is always imperfect. Something is always lost.
But music retained the old connection. The pre-linguistic bond. When I hear Pavarotti, I am not hearing Italian. I am hearing something older than Italian. Something older than any language. I am hearing a human voice doing what human voices have always done—expressing what words cannot contain.
I took my daughter to a concert once. Indian classical music. The singer performed a raga I had never heard. It went on for nearly an hour, building slowly, the same phrases returning and transforming. My daughter, who was twelve and impatient, whispered after twenty minutes: “What is he saying?”
I told her I did not know. The words were in a language I did not speak.
“Then how do you know what to feel?” she asked.
I told her to close her eyes and stop trying to know. Just listen. Let the sound arrive without interpretation.
She closed her eyes. Twenty minutes later, she was crying. I asked her why.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It just felt like something I lost.”
She had never lost anything significant. She was twelve. But the music had found something in her anyway. Some universal experience of loss that exists in all of us, waiting to be touched by the right combination of notes.
This is what music does. It finds us. Not our educated selves, not our cultural selves, not the selves that need to understand before they feel. It finds the deeper self. The one that existed before we learned language. The one that will remain after language fails us.
When my father was dying, he stopped speaking. The disease had taken his words. He lay in bed, eyes open, silent. We did not know if he understood us. We spoke to him anyway, hoping something got through.
One day my mother played an old song. A Bengali song from their wedding. She had not played it in years. As it filled the room, my father’s hand moved. Just slightly. His fingers tapped against the bedsheet in rhythm.
He could not speak. He could not tell us he heard. But the music reached him where words could not. It found the part of him that was still there, still feeling, still connected to us through sound.
He died two days later. But I know—I absolutely know—that he was not alone in those final days. The music was with him. And through the music, we were with him too.
This is why I believe music is humanity’s deepest language. Not because it says more than words, but because it says what words cannot. It speaks to the part of us that existed before we had names for things. The part that feels before it thinks. The part that knows before it understands.
We are divided by so much. Language, culture, history, politics. But when the right melody plays, we all feel the same thing. We all become, for a moment, the same creature—listening, feeling, remembering something we cannot name but absolutely recognize.
This is the language before language.
This is how we have always spoken to each other.
This is how we always will.