During a recent session of the Artist Entrepreneurship course at UCLA Extension, instructor Hisham Dahud led a discussion that produced a concise definition: “Music is a vicarious experience.”
Dahud noted that the term vicarious typically describes living through others, as with novels or films. Music, he argued, does not merely convey someone else’s story but allows a listener to inhabit another person’s emotional world.
“I’ve never stood on a battlefield. I’ve never lost a spouse. I’ve never watched my child leave home,” Dahud said. “And yet music has allowed me to imagine those emotional landscapes in ways that feel deeply real.”
As a composer of instrumental music, Dahud explained that without lyrics there is no protagonist or explicit narrative. The listener completes the work: one person hears hope, another grief, another a childhood memory. “The composer builds the world. The listener lives inside it,” he said.
That may explain why the same recording can carry entirely different meanings at age sixteen than at age thirty-eight, he added. The recording itself has not changed.
Dahud connected this idea to the business of music. Artists, he argued, are not selling songs, albums, or concert tickets. They are selling emotional experiences that allow another person to feel something they could not reach on their own.
“You’re no longer trying to sell songs,” Dahud said. “You’re creating opportunities for people to experience more life than they could on their own.”
Hisham Dahud is a Los Angeles-based composer, producer, live electronic artist, and educator. He performs under the name RIŽIK and teaches Artist Entrepreneurship at UCLA Extension.
