The Soundtrack to Our Lives
“Zippin’ up my boots, goin’ back to my roots” (Odyssey)
Have you ever felt the chills or goosebumps when you hear certain songs? Fifty percent of people experience frisson: an emotionally driven, euphoric, and stimulating connection with music (Westmaas). This feeling stems from a physical feature in our brains; those who experience frisson boast a denser volume of brain fibers that connect our auditory cortex to parts of our brain that deal with emotion.
If so many people possess this trait, sharing this ability does not set me apart, let alone mean I have some kind of superpower. I’m rather here to argue that my — our — inner, spiritual ties with music transcend a mere corporeal trait regarding connective neural fibers.
As a toddler, my parents’ predilection for Indian classical music — one of the many values they carried with them from their home country of India — defined my world of music. From fiddling with my father’s endless collection of cassettes to hearing stories from my grandparents of times when they heard Indian musical maestros like Bhimsen Joshi or Lata Mangeshkar perform live when they were younger, the legacy and complexity of such a tried and true tradition in Indian culture enamored the young me. I grew lost in the world of rа̄gas, an assortment of melodic frameworks, each one expressing a specific mood and painting a different scene in my head.
“When someone sings this rа̄ga,” my father told me one day, “the sky fills with heavy clouds and a fierce rainstorm begins.” I listened to music from that rа̄ga all week long, staring outside, waiting restlessly for the storm to come down.
Then I closed my eyes.
I saw the brilliant Indian monsoons piercing the parched earth; I could almost smell the fresh, musky scent of the first rain. That inner experience marked the first time I understood the powerful effect of music.
The second my older brother could sit up front and mash the dials on our family minivan’s radio, 2000s pop and hip-hop infiltrated my bubble of music. Pop icons like Ke$ha, Jay Z, Katy Perry, and Rihanna would join my brother and me on our short trips to school or long car rides to sports practices and games, filling — or, as my mother often objected, polluting — the car with earworms. At an age where I (thankfully) could not comprehend the real meaning behind most of the songs on the radio, I still held on to the tunes by constantly reciting their catchy, repetitive lyrics. And when I learned how to whistle in the second grade, savoring music started becoming an integral part of my everyday life. Thus, my connection with music ironically flourished with repetitive and catchy pop songs, songs that lacked any deeper meaning yet allowed me to figure out how I could listen to music without literally listening to music.
You know those cars whose thumping bass you can hear reverberating from miles away? When my brother could start driving me to school, we drove that car. Initially, I could not appreciate my brother’s peculiar taste in music; those ear-splitting rap songs that he enjoyed, nodding his head and tapping his finger vigorously on the steering wheel, seemed rather callous to me. But my disinclination for this genre stemmed from the fact that I had been listening to the songs incorrectly, or in the same light as I had with other music that I had previously enjoyed. I soon grew to appreciate the masterfully-lyricized, emotionally-invigorating, and heart-rate-stimulating rap songs and Hip-Hop beats by musical pioneers like Kendrick Lamar, Lil Wayne, and Eminem — those songs that made me want to go run three miles for no apparent reason. Musical classicists and ‘purists’ often doubt and repudiate the rap genre, but I realized from my brother that establishing a genuine connection with various types of music entailed a certain relatability and an appreciation of the music’s merits. Ultimately, my early exposure to new forms and styles of music broadened — and more importantly, deepened — my relationship with music.
My musical world and my emotional associations with music have evolved not through some brain fibers but rather in conjunction with the experiences and stories I lived through with music and the familial underpinnings of my musical taste and values.
This soundtrack to our lives is one that we create — not something predetermined by genetics.
“I’m your pusherman” (Mayfield)
Although memories are inherently manifestations of my deeper ties with music, I find that music’s most immediate and real-time emotional ramifications reveal my most genuine reactions to songs. The emotions to which music pertains transcend mere feelings of sadness, happiness, anger, etc. Music is the charming younger sibling of drugs — a stimulant, a depressant, a tonic yet a sedative, a device that elicits in me curious and conflicting emotions.
Music’s emotionally stimulating effect is the most applicable in jazzing up today’s repetitive daily life. An unsettling number of people in our world rely on drugs and other deadly forms of intoxication to face life’s inevitable hardships. Music bears no such side effects, yet listening to music ironically serves a purpose (presumably) akin to that of drugs: both can invoke a sense of ethereality, providing a necessary escape from temporal life. As I grapple with the perpetual monotony of virtual learning and crave those essential getaways, I often turn to music as a source of not only joy but also motivation. Listening to inspiring songs like “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” or “When the Going Gets Tough,” my heart rate accelerates, and my sense of boredom shifts to one of pure excitement. A withdrawal from this uplifting music would resemble withdrawal from a stimulant drug — I descend into an eternal state of lethargy; my straining eyelids soon surrender to the glaring laptop screen. My heart rate falls back to the boring rhythm of the day.
Musical anticipation, or the times where songs either fulfill or violate our expectations, serves as yet another emotionally inciting element of music that parallels the effects of a drug (Heshmat). I experience this unique sense of satisfaction from listening not only to modern songs — those tunes that incorporate mind-blowing bass-drops and jarring synth sequences that, like my heartbeat, accelerate from a series of steady beats to a rapid, almost continuous zip of tones — but also classics, like the 1:30-minute-long buildup to the sweet, rewarding melody in ABBA’s “Fernando,” or even the mere 12-second-long rising anticipation to the fierce adrenaline rush of a ripping sax riff and a bouncing, arpeggiating 80s synth bass in “The Heat is On” by Glenn Frey. The point is that I know what’s coming next, and this very aspect of a song acts as a melodic, rhythmic fulfillment — a rush of satisfaction that intensifies my emotional connection with music and makes me feel plain delighted.
But almost unparalleled for me in the realm of musical anticipation is a song’s element of surprise — an unexpected, dazzling shift in a song’s key or tempo can deliver an even more invigorating feeling. The striking key change halfway through Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror,” the quintessential inspirational song, sends me to tears without fail.
The shift emphasizes the song’s passion, and its unexpectedness enlivens me and ultimately creates for me an imperishable bond with the song. And it wasn’t until last year that I encountered a back-to-back key change; listening to the already complex chord progressions, genius bass patterns, and fervent chorus in Randy Crawford and The Crusaders’ 1979 soul hit “Street Life,” I felt elated to hear a doubly-unexpected couple of key changes. I couldn’t stop listening to the song for weeks.
But just like most drugs, many forms of music serve more like an anesthetic — a catharsis, if you will, that numbs and cleanses my mind. Just as I listen to music for its energizing effect, I often also tune in to the sweet chords of The Beatles or the soothing timbre of Al Green for their healing effects. Without the musical geniuses’ warm tunes and preachings to “Let it Be” or remember “Love and Happiness”, nothing prevents the day’s stress from accumulating into a heavy cloud of despair that hovers eerily over my head by bedtime. Without Coldplay’s “Don’t Panic” or MFSB’s “Love is the Message”, I toss and turn, searching for pleasant thoughts, only to remain sleepless. Truly, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” But at the end of a tiresome school day, music can, like a depressant, provide me with a numbing feeling; as I get lost in relaxing tunes by artists like Todd Rundgren and Billy Joel, my pain from the day slowly oozes away. Rundgren’s songs “Hello It’s Me” and “I Saw the Light” serve as friends — they talk and empathize with me, and the soothing effect of Joel’s album Glass Houses ultimately takes me over and allows me to forget the trivial hardships of the day.
Many forms of music root back to songs and musical prayers that served as offerings to the divine. Music’s spiritual quality also contributes immensely to my inner connection with many songs. In the Indian culture in which I grew up as part of an immigrant family, many classical vocal songs have devotional and religious roots. As a practicing Hindu, I find that this musical association with the divine makes music surpass merely being the younger sibling of drugs; it makes music a tool that connects me with my deepest fears and my deepest comforts — a tool so important that no matter if songs are Hindu or non-Hindu, religious or non-religious, I can often still feel the spiritual backing to the song. Sometimes, this appears more explicitly in songs like George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” in which Harrison incorporates b0th Christianity and Hinduism with his background vocals: Hallelujah, Hare Krishna, and even a recitation of a Hindu shloka.
But perhaps most central to my emotional connection with music is creating music. Though mediocre in actually practicing and performing the art on my tenor saxophone, I have found that greatness is not a prerequisite for simply getting closer to the music I create. At a basic level, whether I honk a few notes or play a full song, I still feel a certain level of satisfaction in the sole fact that my fingertips and my lips can make some kind of sound: each note I play reverberates through my body, and whether those notes I play come together into one, fluid piece or clash each other in some cacophonous frenzy (which happens often, trust me), I still know that I can genuinely feel the music and react to the music in ways far more visceral than my response to just listening to music.
“It’s more than a feeling” (Boston)
Life without music would seem incomplete, like a week without weekends, or a language without vowels. Life without music would force me into a perpetual cycle of a monotonous, almost robotic, daily rhythm.
Music makes me human. I can establish with music an intense emotional connection that holds profound implications in other aspects of my life, allowing me to appreciate the world around me. The environment I live in — physical and metaphysical — enhances substantially while I listen to music because songs have the unique ability to elevate me, letting me break free from the shackles of boredom and toil. Music gives me the ability to maybe not enjoy, but at least tolerate, the daily drudgery of schoolwork, menial chores, and studying. I see the world around me in the same light as the song I am listening to — currently, as I see the snow-covered earth outside while I listen to “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” I take in the snow the same way I consume the song: I appreciate its beauty while simultaneously reflecting upon the snow’s unsightly slush and its restrictive quality in our lives. But if I were tuning into Chuck Berry’s “Run Run Rudolph,” there’s no doubt I’d look outside and see a white wonderland, a playground that evokes memories of snow-forts, snowball fights, and sledding adventures during my childhood winter holidays. Thus not only do I develop strong emotional ties with music, but music itself also influences my emotional interactions with what I see around me.
And when I say what I see around me, that includes people; I have built friendships based on both shared and conflicting music tastes. No matter what genre, even if the music emits seemingly harsh vibes, all music has an innate uniting quality — as much yelling and blistering guitar as “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses contains, the song, which also includes the not-so-subtle lyric “I’m gonna watch you bleed,” never failed to draw a bustling crowd to my previous school’s football games (Guns N’ Roses). Songs serve as the most complex yet most basic form of human communication — complex in that music incorporates so many elements that undoubtedly surpass the thought that goes into daily conversation and communication, but basic in that music is universal: regardless of a song’s genre, its lyrics’ language, or its tempo, anyone from anywhere in the world can connect with the song. Play “Dancing Queen” by ABBA, “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson, or Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” and the whole world can listen in with equal appreciation, equal understanding, and equal enjoyment.
Music has no barriers. It’s more than a feeling, more than an art, more than just a drug. Music is a science that defies scientific reason. Music provides us with an escape, redefining what we see, feel, and the connections we create in our lives. It’s mine, yours, and everyone’s.
Works Cited
Boston. “More Than a Feeling.” Boston, Apple Music file, Epic Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment, 1976.
Guns N’ Roses. “Welcome to the Jungle.” Appetite for Destruction, Apple Music file, Geffen Records, 1987.
Heshmat, Shahram. “Music, Emotion, and Well-Being.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 25 Aug. 2019, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-choice/201908/music-emotion-and-well-being#:~:text=Music%20has%20the%20ability%20to,alter%20mood%20or%20relieve%20stress.
Mayfield, Curtis. “Pusherman.” Superfly (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture), Apple Music file, Curtom Records. Marketed by Rhino Entertainment Company, a Warner Music Group Company, 1972.
Odyssey. “Going Back to My Roots.” I Got the Melody, Apple Music file, RCA Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment, 1981.
Westmaas, Reuben. “What Getting Chills from Music Says About Your Brain.” Discovery, 1 Aug. 2019, www.discovery.com/science/Getting-Chills-from-Music.
