FEATURE:
How Music Shapes Our Lives…
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Physical and Streamed Music, and How It Impacts and Shapes Memories
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HAVING read…
an interesting recent article from The Guardian from journalist and author Jude Rogers, it got me to thinking about the way music shapes our lives and how it affects memories. It relates to her excellent book, The Sound of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives. I have always assumed that the physicality of older music leaves a bigger impression in the mind. Memories are deeper and more vivid because of the lack of instant accessibility to everything. The fact that, by saving up and buying albums and singles, they are more precious and that tangibility is more evocative and longer lasting. Rogers explored her memories and theories:
“I’ve always been fascinated by how music affects us and I delved into neuroscience in my book to discover how our brains and bodies are hardwired to respond so powerfully. According to a 2013 University of Helsinki study, humans are capable of memory-building from the womb (a group of babies were tested just before birth, then at four months, to see if they recognised a specific version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star played to them in utero – and they did). Music can help give us security in our changing identity when we are hormonal adolescents, our bodies telling us to define ourselves separately from our family to help us mate beyond our genes. Wonderfully, I discovered through research that favourite songs can give us the same dopamine rush as an orgasm.
PHOTO CREDIT: Gareth Iwan Jones/The Observer
Music also helps us when we hurt and when we grieve, giving us a familiar place to help us explore and express our feelings – and our brains still respond to music right through to later life, including in people experiencing dementia. I’ve realised I want music to support my son in his life as well as it has supported me, and this feeling is intensifying as he gets older. He was only seven when I wrote my book, getting into his first pop songs that weren’t just for children. We have now travelled from his first love, the Spice Girls, a band he loved dancing to with his female cousins, to a playlist that he shuffles through skittishly. It’s more than 150 tracks long.
My worries about my son’s engagement with music, I realise, are partly about it existing in a digital space, where he can get lost in mood music, or give up self-control. But a chat with Professor David Hesmondhalgh, Professor of Music, Media and Culture at the University of Leeds, gave me pause. He referred me to his 2021 journal article, Streaming’s Effects on Music Culture, which underlined how music has always been tied to functions, from social rituals like weddings and funerals to intimate rituals like singing babies lullabies to send them to sleep. “The recent concerns about the use of music to accompany other activities can seem rather odd when seen in this historical context,” he added.
Upstairs, I can hear my son’s feet dancing through the ceiling…
Hesmondhalgh’s article also cited a sample of 5,000 streaming-service users by Norwegian researcher Anja Nylund Hagen in 2015, which involved people keeping strict music diaries, showing many of them “exercising skill and creativity in searching and browsing, and engaging in substantial curation”. Another study by Dutch marketing professor Hannes Datta showed that new users of a streaming service significantly increased their consumption of artists, tracks and genres that they had not previously encountered.
My son’s playlist is a mishmash of genres that also collapses the distance between decades. Alongside contemporary tracks by Nova Twins, George Ezra and Olivia Rodrigo are Roxette by Dr Feelgood, Copacabana by Barry Manilow and Song For My Father by Horace Andy. He also changes his top 10 all the time: his current favourite is Bonkers by Dizzee Rascal which, unbelievably, is now 14 years old.
The closest I got to this was making mixtapes in my mid-teens: a laborious process involving a double tape deck and much more planning involving controlling the order of songs. When I was in my mid-20s, my mother found a box of cassettes that included a similar tape made by my father. The clunk of record and play buttons being pressed together between songs by Kim Wilde and Roxy Music still hit my heart like a hammer.
‘My life has been shaped by songs.’ The Nova Twins. Photograph: Samir Hussein/WireImage
My “reminiscence bumps” – otherwise known as the vivid recollections of favourite music for people over 40 – are something neuropsychologist Professor Catherine Loveday, of the University of Westminster, is an expert on. So does waiting for music or saving up for it increase the intensity of connection to songs? “Hearing people say, ‘This was the first record I bought’ or ‘I saved for ages to get this’ is common in my work, yes – but it’s important to remember I have interviewed people from their 40s to their 80s,” she says. The older people’s experiences of accessing music were very different, but the way their reminiscence bumps work was very similar.
When Loveday’s older interviewees were teenagers, pop music was not on mainstream radio or TV and music was much harder to buy. Even though young people’s access is almost immediate if they have the right technology, Loveday thinks younger people will experience similar reminiscence bumps when they’re old enough to be studied – and may have an even deeper connection to songs”.
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The question she posed in the article is whether streaming sites will affect our musical memories. The younger generations are having a different connection and relationship with music compared to someone my age (late-30s). Maybe there is something idealised and romanticised when it comes to past decades. It is true that we had to save up for albums and often record stuff off the radio. We didn’t have access to a wide selection of genres and music as we do not. Mixtapes were quite hard to put together. Now, we can assemble playlists that span the years and genres. It provides these new memories. People can connect with the past, but they can also have these new layers of memories, as Rogers wrote in her article. It is an interesting debate. I do feel that physical music should be preserved and kept alive. Rather than cassettes and C.D.s being seen as relics or something quite kitsch and past their time, you do get a different experience and sensation hearing albums on these formats rather than digital. I am not sure whether I would have such a primal, tangible and long-lasting fascination with music if it were not for the way I connected with it physically. I do feel that streaming and digital music is very valuable. There are definite advantages and disadvantages to how we can access music now. Whilst digital services can provide wide access and richness that we did not have when I was growing up, maybe the accessible, inexpensive, and almost ubiquitous nature means that there is not the same value. I think a lot of the memories I have are because of the way I saved up to buy something, shared it with friends, and kept playing. If you are scrolling playlists and do not have that sense of pride from saving up and owning something, do the memories last as long and mean as much?
IMAGE CREDIT: Freepik
I am fascinated by the whole subject. I was struck by the article, so I wanted to source some of it here. But I also realised a couple of things. I don’t think that everything was better in the past regarding the way music was digested and handed down Whilst I always maintain that it means more if albums in physical form are passed down and shared, that is not to say that tradition has been abandoned. Parents now have kept hold of albums on vinyl, cassette ands C.D., but playlists and streaming means that younger listeners can bolster that education and palette. The reason I have attachment to particular tracks and albums is because of the setting and people around me. Whether it is falling for Steely Dan because of car trips with my aunt, or the music I was listening to at high school during a formative time or playing a cassette on my go cart whilst whizzing it around the block with friends hanging off the back. Or remembering hearing Betty Boo’s Where Are You Baby? during a warm day as a child and being hooked by its infectiousness. Sure, the physical sensation of putting an album into a device and playing it and sharing it meant that it has stayed in my mind. I feel it is less to do with the physicality or music and more to do with the lack of distractions and the individuality of music. I love the fact that anyone can hear anything now. You do not have to save up for a single album and, therefore, are not able to buy too many albums. It means your tastes are less chart-driven and singular. Streaming services can lead you to artists you might not have thought of. And you can still have that social aspect. You can share songs and playlists with friends. It does not have the same physical and connective aspect. I love the fact that I still have in my family home albums I bought growing up. They each hold fingerprints and memories. I am not sure whether playlists will ever do that.
The point of this was to raise a couple of points. First, things are not as clear-cut as they sound. Jude Rogers’ experiences with her son and the memories he is getting from a combination of streaming playlists and her collections is powerful. It is more than I had growing up, so that sort of education and mixture of physical and digital could mean longer-lasting memories. He gets an attachment and knowledge of his parents, but there is also this new chapter and instant access to old and new music without having to wait or save. The other thing I wanted to raise is how important the physical aspect is. Even if albums and singles were quite sparse in terms of affordability, we keep hold off them and each play and time we revisit stirs up older memories. I do feel playlists and digital music is so vast and accessible, we take it for granted and it is harder to form specific memories and experiences around albums and songs. Maybe a more solitary and less focused listening experience, will children now look back twenty or thirty years from now and remember times they shared music with friends or had precious family moments with particular songs? In all of my prized memories where music plays a big part, I was focused and undistracted.
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If it was listening to music in the car and particular songs heard on the way back from the airport after a family holiday or a song I heard played in a classroom when I was in primary school, I was always attuned to the sound and let them in. I do worry people in general are more distracted and skimming through music rather than dedicating their full attention and time to it. That may be a generalisation, but it is clear there are blessings and curses with digital music and the relative lack of physical music. The way generations now will remember music and how their memories will differ is really intriguing. I hope physical music is retained and protected as much as possible, as there is no substitute for it. I also would much rather keep the childhood I had, rather than be young now and have the experiences with music young people do now. That said, I never had libraries of music at my fingertips when I was growing up. I can only imagine how that would have impacted my life and what effect that would have had. It is an interesting debate and generational conversation that should be kept alive and relevant. Thanks to Jude Rogers’ article, it has made me think more deeply about music and memories. I think we can all agree about the importance of music. How they keep memories alive, and how they score important times like nothing else. Its power is clear. Music bonds us and creates a very raw and wonderful connection. It keeps alive friends that have left us, and it also gives us inspiration and clarity when it comes to the future. I think we can all agree on that…
PHOTO CREDIT: Brett Sayles
REGARDLESS of age.