If a creative work deeply resonates with people, it’s often seen as an affirmation that the art is good and meaningful.  But what if it resonates because it’s reinforcing the waywardness of humanity?  Resonance alone can’t determine what is good because it’s reactionary; it largely depends on the disposition of the individual, who may or may not be in line with what is true.  To highlight the problem here, let’s look at resonance from a scientific standpoint.

Acoustic resonance is “a phenomenon in which an acoustic system amplifies sound waves whose frequency matches one of its own natural frequencies of vibration.”  (Thanks, Wikipedia.)  To put it simply, when a sound wave encounters something in the environment similar to itself, the waves align and the sound becomes louder.  Metaphorically speaking, the world contains two major natural frequencies.  The first is “good”, a beautiful and powerful frequency sustained by God.  The human heart and created world were designed to be in harmony with this.  The second is “evil”, a bold, harsh, but less powerful frequency sustained by Satan.  Its shape is a direct inversion of “good”.

This waveform of evil seeks to cancel out the good through “destructive interference”.  For this to occur, the weaker opposing wave must match the amplitude of the wave it seeks to cancel out… in other words, it must become louder.  To increase the volume using resonance, more hearts have to line up with that same frequency.  Since humans naturally gravitate towards what they perceive to be good, their perception of what’s good and what’s evil needs to be flipped to more closely resemble the waveform of evil.  For people in this state, true goodness will sound cacophonous, and they’ll try to cancel out the sound by singing out the inverted frequencies that better resonate with their hearts.  But since true goodness comes from an infinite God and can never be cancelled out, the end result of this exercise is just more noise.

Because of how much influence art can have on society – for good or for evil – it’s important that it resonates with people for the right reasons.  There’s an increased responsibility for artists to be well-formed in what is true, good, and beautiful.  Now more than ever, in an age where content is being created and consumed in enormous amounts, it’s time for us all to get on the right wavelength.