With music, you often don’t have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don’t know why.

Byrne points to music’s capacity to communicate beneath (or prior to) language. Unlike verbal art, which often requires translation, cultural decoding, or conscious interpretation, music can produce immediate bodily and emotional responses—tension, release, joy, melancholy—without the listener being able to articulate a cause. The remark also reflects Byrne’s long-standing interest in how sound, rhythm, and performance context shape meaning: music can “say” something even when its message is not propositional. The quote underscores a modern view of art’s power as partly non-rational, operating through sensation, pattern, and affect rather than explanation.