Sometimes it’s hard to explain human feelings. It’s hard to explain the invisible connection we feel with some people due to these emotions. For me, music forces me down lanes that I believed I had closed forever, to remind me those feelings and connections. Some of my all-time favorite songs became my favorites due to some stories behind it. Many of them got lost over the years but when I suddenly stumble upon them on the radio or in the mall, all those memories come flooding back. Luckily for me, almost all these memories make me look back fondly to the times when they made me feel good about myself.
The oldest of these isn’t even a real song! It’s a distant memory. It’s a “bed time song” that my father would sing to me when I was a kid, when he would come to tuck me into bed. It was almost a one liner that he would just say in a sing song tone that has stuck with me till date. Another old one is an old Bengali song that isn’t even my memory. It’s a song that my mother was attached to and she had just mentioned it to me and I’m attached to it because of that. There are songs that I absolutely adore just because my mother loved them. And then there are songs that automatically got attached to people around me which bring back some really happy memories.
This brings me to my purpose for this article – the strong connection that humans have with music. Extensive research has been conducted on this subject and many books have been published on how music affects the human brain! Music has the power to control our brain and make it feel according to the mood of the music. One study said that after hearing a short piece of music, participants were more likely to interpret a neutral expression as happy or sad, to match the tone of the music they heard. This also happened with other facial expressions, but was most notable for those that were close to neutral. Similarly, ambient music can actually increase productivity. Surprising as it may be, but I can completely vouch for this because I have completed countless MBA assignments sitting for long hours at a stretch just because I had some playlist or the other running in the background. If I didn’t have the music on, my attention span would be miserably low! It’s a proven fact that formal music training can significantly improve motor and reasoning skills.
Another study claims that your choice of music predicts your personality! This is where I differ. Music can be categorized into various genres and each genre has its own fan following. This research classifies the genres and personality types as follows:
- Blues fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle and at ease
- Jazz fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing and at ease
- Classical music fans have high self-esteem, are creative, introvert and at ease
- Rap fans have high self-esteem and are outgoing
- Opera fans have high self-esteem, are creative and gentle
- Country and western fans are hardworking and outgoing
- Reggae fans have high self-esteem, are creative, not hardworking, outgoing, gentle and at ease
- Dance fans are creative and outgoing but not gentle
- Indie fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard working, and not gentle
- Bollywood fans are creative and outgoing
- Rock/heavy metal fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard-working, not outgoing, gentle, and at ease
- Chart pop fans have high self-esteem, are hardworking, outgoing and gentle, but are not creative and not at ease
- Soul fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle, and at ease
The study does admit that it’s hard to generalize the results based on these classifications since there are clear overlaps. I, myself, am a classic example. I have a favorite song in almost all these genres. What does that make my personality type? For me, when something significantly happy or sad is happening in my life, and a song is playing somewhere in the background, it gets “stuck” to me with the incident and thus automatically becomes archived in my memory. Later on, either the incident reminds me of the song or it’s the other way around. So, not only does music affect the way you feel at present, but it also has the power to remind you what you felt at a particular point in time.
On perhaps a bad note, music is said to hamper concentration during driving. Drivers “tested” for this made more mistakes and drove more aggressively when listening to music. However, what you would find really astonishing about this study is that this performance was tested for three scenarios. The first, where music was harmful, was with music of the driver’s preference. The second scenario was, of course, no music at all. But a surprising third scenario was music of the tester’s choice. The drivers performed better in the third scenario than the second. This means, music is not that harmful. Unfamiliar genres or styles can prove to be good for safe driving.
With different genres affecting different personalities in different ways, one might think each brain would comprehend each genre differently but another line of research states otherwise. Essentially the brain reacts similarly to a new genre. This line of thought is the result of a study conducted where a group of people were subjected to Western music of early eras that would have been unfamiliar to the test group. The researchers found a similar synchronization between different areas of the brain. This indicated that not only did the test group perceive the music in a similar manner, but their inherent differences didn’t affect their choice and brought them together in an unexplained manner. This is probably why studies say that music brings people closer.
The connection between music memory is so powerful that this is being considered as a treatment for patients with dementia and also those suffering from depression. There are tons of research papers that give detailed description of how this works. But for me, music is just a way to forget the present for a while and go back to some memories when I was really happy and sometimes when I was sad, sometimes to remember the people who were so close to me at one point but are no longer a part of my life, a way to just get by on a day that just doesn’t seem to be passing along (specially the long Mondays at work!) or simply to enjoy some great voices of our time! Today music also inspired me to do what I most love, write!
Sources:
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140417-why-does-music-evoke-memories
Musings of a confused nut! 