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(Photo: Khashayar Kouchpeydeh)

Short for vibration, vibe poetically describes music’s most intangible yet palpable quality: its feeling. Vibe is how music feels over time, how its vibrations sustain a mood, conjure an aura, and keep an affect aloft like smoke billowing on a windless day. Describing a music’s vibe is difficult and requires assigning a borrowed vocabulary to sounds which are immensely varied and elude description. As Charles Seeger noted in his 1976 essay The Musicological Juncture, “Gaps found in our speech thinking about music may be suspected of being areas of music thinking.” Because of this, musicians’ music thinking is often strategically reduced to vibe generalities when their talk is about music: That band has a great vibe, we say. The song’s vibe is dark, or The beat has an intense vibe. The futility of describing vibe’s multivalence with words–great vibe, dark vibe, intense vibe–points to its musical importance. Pay attention to vibe in music and ask yourself, What is this vibe and what is it saying? Vibe, like sound itself, is invisible yet physical, the current that keeps everything moving.