Episode 01: You Are What You Listen To

Welcome to the first episode of "You Are What You Listen To!" In this episode, we'll explore the fascinating topic of musical preferences. Why do we like the music we like? What does it say about us and our life experiences? We'll delve into some theories surrounding our musical preferences and influences, and discuss how music can mirror our selves in many ways. Join us as we explore the deep connections between music, personality, and identity in this exciting debut episode.

Episode Resources:

• Song - “Everything is Sound” by Jason Mraz

• Book - “The Dynamics of Music Psychotherapy” by Kenneth Bruscia

• Song - “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” by The Andrews Sisters

• Song - “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye

• Song - “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan

• Song - “Gracias a la vida” by Violeta Parra

Episode Transcript:

Marisa: We are all connected through music. It’s something that we all share and experience in our lives, both individually and collectively. 

One of the reasons I decided to create this podcast was also to share different perspectives of why we love music so much and how it impacts us in so many ways and, you know, I’m constantly amazed by the impact that music has on our lives. It’s such a tool- it has the ability to speak for us sometimes. It has the ability to share our experiences and express our feelings. It can take us in and out of time in some ways. It can give us purpose and meaning. 

Whether you're a music therapist or a music instructor, or someone who just loves everything about music - we have this connection to this thing - this musical thing.

I read somewhere once that music is one of the only things that’s not biologically necessary for survival, but somehow managed to survive throughout the entire course of human history. From bone flutes to, you know, full on drums and percussion, to the Beatles to modern pop and contemporary music that we have now…music has always been with us. And I think it’s here to stay. 

So, the name of this episode is “You are what you listen to”...

And there’s so many ways to approach this. I think it’s such a multilayered topic - you are what you listen to. Music is just so many things. That’s kinda what I want to unpack today in this episode. What is music? And why do we connect to it so much?

So, the first thing I want to talk about is music kinda more scientifically. Music as vibration…from this perspective of being totally encapsulated by music all the time. And if we think about it, all matter we’ve learned now, all matter is fundamentally energy. When we break anything down to the molecular or subatomic level, we see that everything fundamentally is vibration. And what is sound? Vibration. So, it kinda reminds me of that Jason Mraz song, everything is sound. That means that everything we say, everything we see and everything that we hear ultimately comes down to vibrations.

I found this on the Dartmouth website. It says, “Sounds are governed by principles of physics, from the vibration of strings on a violin to the measurements and dimensions that go into the acoustics of a concert hall or stadium. At the heart of the physics of music is the wave, an energy-carrying disturbance that travels through particles in a given medium.” 

So music is physics, music is vibration. Music is everywhere. That’s what that means to me. It’s that music is everywhere. Music is everything. It’s our heartbeat. It’s the clock on the walls. It’s our radios and favorite songs. It’s our respiratory rate. It’s the tempo of our gait, how we walk. Music is about moving through time and space in a way that expresses life, that expresses purpose, and meaning. 

It’s also our way of processing life experiences. If we were to - and this is something we do in music therapy sometimes - if we were to write out a list of every song that’s ever been meaningful to us, we could probably write like a full on story for each song and explain what we were doing and why it was meaningful and who it reminds us of or what stage of our life we were in or maybe memories from the time, feelings that we had or the words of something that happened to you around that time. 

And that’s because we’re not really separate from those things either. And our taste in music isn’t separated from our life either. You are what you listen to, right? So, the music we like is the music that means something to us. And that’s really interesting because that makes music personal but it also means that we are all experiencing it in some way. So it’s kind of like a collective thing and a personal thing all at once. 

When we listen to music, it’s almost like we are re-experiencing all of the associations we have. In music therapy, we call them extramusical associations. And this goes back to Freud and Carl Jung with what they described first as “melodic automations”.

At this time, they were talking about, maybe you’ve experienced this, but humming melodies of songs. And then they stopped and , as they do, analyzed, psychoanalyzed what was going on. Why am I singing this song right now? Is there something in the lyrics, something in music that is mirroring my experience right now? And it was something they believed it was similar to dream analysis. They were also doing that around that time. They believed that music served as a projection or provided insight into our subconscious minds. 

This further advanced into advanced music therapy techniques. If you’re a music therapist listening right now, the Dynamics of Music Therapy book that Bruscia has talks about this in the Induced Song Recall chapter. 

Honestly, since reading more about that in classes and on my own time, it’s been really interesting to see how that kinda plays out in my life. I’ve noticed, now that I’m more aware of that, I’ve been a lot more in tune with some of these correlations between the things I’m going through and the songs that get stuck in my head. It might not be very obvious at first, but once you start to look a little deeper, there’s usually something more there. And it might just be like, “Oh that song is just stuck in my head. I don’t know. It’s just in my head, I don’t know.” And then I’ll pull up the lyrics and I’m like “Oh…oh nevermind. It might’ve been a subconscious thing”.

But that’s what makes our connection to music so complex- it is never just like one thing. It’s a combination of everything that we experience. It’s our feelings, our memories, our thoughts, our  experiences, our environment all living together, simultaneously, in this like one musical moment.

And maybe that’s something you all can relate to. Are there any songs that you hear and then you’re like “oh that reminds me of what person” or “that reminds me of this time in my life” especially if it’s one you hadn’t heard in a while and one that randomly comes on out of nowhere. It’s almost like a time capsule of all of these experiences. 

And actually as music therapists, that’s something that we take into consideration when working with older adults with dementia or with Alzheimer’s. That’s something that we do. We’ll always use songs from what we call the client’s young adult years, which is usually about like 16-25 or so. For some reason, that time period in our lives is deeply impactful and, even when clients don’t recognize themselves or recognize the faces or voices of their loved ones, they know these songs. They remember all the lyrics and they remember melodies and they’re able to sing along after a while. Somehow, these songs just have the ability to bring them back to who they were, even if it’s just for a moment. Like, I’ve worked with clients where their children or maybe their spouse will tell me that they hadn't been recognized by  them in months or years. And as soon as we start playing these songs from their favorite times from those younger years …everything kind of changes. Their eyes will widen and they’ll start to look around the room. 

In some cases, they’ll remember their family members again and they’ll start to tell us memories,  “Oh yeah, my dad used to sing that song. He played the piano” or “We used to sing that song every Christmas” or some memory with that song. And even if it only lasts a few moments, it’s just such a powerful experience and just a powerful healing moment for them and for their family just to be able to see them and talk to them and connect with them in that way again. 

I’d like to think somehow it’s because those songs are us. They are who we are in a given moment. And there’s something so incredible and special about that. 

So if we are what we listen to….I guess that brings me to my next layer of this. If we are what we listen to then why do we like the music that we like? 

Understanding music preferences is really such a complex thing because it’s a combination of  so many factors. It could be influences of people that are around us by either accepting or totally rejecting their musical preferences. But it’s also other factors like demographics. It could be cultural factors, regional factors, even sensory, emotional, familial, geographic, maybe spiritual elements. So many things that influence our musical preferences.

There’s a study by Greenburg et al. in 2017. When I was thinking about this topic, I started looking at the literature and seeing what was out there recently. This is one study that came to me. It was really interesting because they were actually looking to see if there was a correlation between personality and musical preferences. And they looked at the relationship between personality types and musical preferences that these individuals were reporting. And this is what they had to say. These are very general assumptions but I think it’s worth sharing. 

They found that people who are open to new experiences tended to prefer music like the blues, jazz, classical music, folk genres. And they found that people who are extraverted and agreeable - these are their words not mine- tended to prefer music like pop music, soundtracks, religious, soul, funk, electronic, and dance genres. 

Let’s unpack that a little. Why do you think that is? Maybe there’s something in the way that these genres are structured that tend to lend themselves to different personality types. 

Thinking about - let’s start with that first one again - people who are open to new experiences, one of the ones there that was listed is jazz. That makes a little bit of sense to me in the sense that jazz is often so unpredictable. It’s a genre that tends to be very spontaneous. Every time you play a standard, it’s never really played in the same way. They might embellish a little bit differently or they might play it a little differently with a little bit of a different chord variation or something. So it’s very unpredictable. To me, that makes sense with the new experiences aspect of the personality. 

Thinking about the extraverted personalities, it’s really interesting to me that they mention electronic, pop, and dance because those tend to be genres that are more interactive - music that you’re dancing with, music if you’re going out if you’re going to festivals/shows. It’s one that lends itself to more social interactions so I can see that as far as extraverted personalities.  

Again, these are super generalized ideas but it’s really interesting to think about the fact that how we are affects the music that we like and vice versa, the music that we like affects who we are. 

There have been studies on many aspects of music preferences and some studies have looked at the relationship between musical preferences and things like early childhood experiences,  technology available at the time. They’ve looked at the relationship between us and different cognitive styles and music preferences, and honestly I even found one that was architecture taste and musical preferences. But like most things, we don’t really have a specific answer. We don’t know why it is that this is what we like…and that’s okay. That’s okay. It’s so complex like I said earlier. It’s a combination of so many things. 

Other theories around music preference talk about how important age is and our social context. Others emphasize interpersonal relationships surrounding the music. Maybe family growing up or friends you had growing up. 

When I took psychology of music, we talked about our music preference on a continuum. On one end of the spectrum there is stimulation (so how stimulating the music is to you) and on the other end of the spectrum is expectation or familiarity (how much the music meets our expectations either harmonically, the chord structure) and where we fall on that continuum is kind of like our musical home. This is where our preference and taste for music lies. We’re all on different ends of this continuum just depending on maybe our personality, our environmental factors, whatever it is that we’ve been through. All these things that make us us. 

And we all fall in different ways, thinking about some of my friends or just some people in my life that like heavy metal music. For me, that’s too stimulating most of the time. Sometimes I like it, but for the most part, it’s too stimulating for me and it’s not as familiar so I tend not to listen to it as much. But then, I think about my parents and they are very much like hippie, Janis Joplin, The Beatles, Carol King, you know, that era of music. To me, that music is so familiar. Chord wise, it’s kind of what I expect harmonically, and so for me, that tends to be the music that I listen to a lot because it’s music that’s familiar to me. 

So, think about that. What music do you like right now or at different points in your life? What music have you liked? And is that related to people in your life or things that you’ve experienced? Is it music that you liked during the 80s or the 90s or the 2000s? And why? It’s really interesting to think about music in this way. How did we get here with the music that we like? 

So there’s a lot of different theories as you can tell, a lot of info out there.

But what we do know is that music is often linked to our identity. We pick songs we like because they mirror our experiences or they express something that we couldn’t quite put into words. Music gives us an outlet to share parts of ourselves in a very tangible way. Music can be our scribe. It can be our vehicle, and it can be our experience all at the same time. 

As a music therapist, sometimes the most effective thing I can do in a session is just ask somebody, “Can you pick a song to express how you’re feeling right now?”. And yeah, maybe I could’ve just asked for words or maybe I could’ve just had a conversation but I feel like the music just has so much more context and so many more elements to work with whether it’s the tempo or the chords or the instruments. All of these things give me information about what’s going on in their mindspace. And then you add the lyrics onto it and there’s even more. It’s really interesting to me to think about it like that. How are you feeling right now? What’s going on right now? What song do you think would match what you’re going through right now?  

I feel like I can always think of a song for that.

Music gives us so much and maybe that's why it has survived for as long as it has. it's an expression of what we've been through individually but it’s also an expression of what we've been through collectively as a society.

So even thinking about cultural music. That’s an expression of that cultural identity. It’s a representation of the sounds, voices within that given culture. So even the instruments that are used can be an auditory representation of what resources that culture had at the time and what types of instruments they were able to produce from their environment. Even the notes and scales they have within a culture also vary because we all have different musical scales and notes and musical expectations. So thinking about that continuum, we have different expectations for what the music is going to sound like. 

Music also records our history as a collective society. There are genres of music during certain points in time in our history that have come about specifically in response to a particular movement or situation or something that was going on at the time. 

Thinking about the Andrew Sisters “Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree”. That’s one of the first songs that comes to mind, I think because I spent a lot of time working with older adults, but “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” if you’re familiar with that song. That comes directly from the world wars and those soldiers going out to war. They’re saying, “Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me”. And now looking back, that's so iconic because there’s so many songs that represent what was happening at the time. Songs like “What’s Going On”, “Blowing in the Wind”, “Gracias a la Vida”. All of these songs represent worldviews of each time and they’re closely tied to what was happening politically, what was happening socially. And it’s this collective representation of thoughts, experiences, events from this time. 

I said something earlier about music as a time capsule. And this is what I mean. You have all of these iconic or classic songs that speak volumes about what we were all going through as a society in that time and it's just really moving and it's really cool to think that we can capture those moments, capture those emotions, and put them into a song, into something tangible. And something to preserve memories. It’s just a really powerful, powerful thing.  

So, one of the things I do a lot in music therapy is to help clients express something in their life and we can do that through listening - like I said earlier - or we can even do that through songwriting, and even just finding songs to match different points in their lives. Let me give you an example. 

One of the first things that I did for my music therapy undergrad that I remember is having to create what we call a musical audio biography. Basically you take different time periods like birth, childhood, adolescence, young adult, adult. You would go as far as you were able to depending on how old you were. And you would find a song or create a song that would match up with that time in your life. 

It was really interesting to see my life organized in this way. I felt like I was re-experiencing significant parts of my life in one CD (we made a CD at the time). It’s amazing to think our brain can use songs to catalog everything we’ve ever been through, like a floppy disk of these random moments in time, or just the soundtrack of our lives, if you will. 

You know, at the end of the day, it was really cool to just see my life that way and as I was listening to this collection of songs, I felt like I was re-experiencing my entire life all over again because you would listen to it in order. And, I don’t know, it just felt like..it was just a really interesting experience and a lot to process, but something that was really meaningful and really powerful and something that, I think, just shows that all of those songs really did mirror those points in my life. 

I think I picked like, you know I was really into the Sound of Music when I was younger so I picked that song. It’s almost like taking me back to that point and you could see as the music changed..it’s like you could feel everything that you went through and how you changed in response to a lot of those situations and I could see my own growth just musically and personally as I continued to listen. And so, it was really just an interesting experience and just another way of saying “you are what you listen to”. I was those songs at that time. 

So maybe that’s something ya’ll can try to. Make a playlist, if you want, if you use Spotify or Apple music, or YouTube, however you listen to music. Make a playlist of maybe the top ten songs of your life. I’m really interested to see what you would choose. 

And we’d love to hear from you too. So if you are interested in sharing a little bit about your experience or a little bit of your thoughts of anything we’ve talked about today, you can leave us a message. You can leave us a voice message. You can respond to us here or Spotify or on Anchor, and we’ll get back to you and hopefully we’ll have a response to that. 

Before we go today, I just want to say. First of all, thank you for listening to this episode. To these thoughts. This is my mindspace on a daily basis, so you’ve entered my mindspace. 

But music is such an incredible phenomenon. I’m just excited to share more thoughts about music and more musical topics in the next episodes. We have some really interesting topics coming up soon and some special guests we’ll get to hear from. If you have any questions about music or any thoughts about music, feel free to send us a message. You can reach out to us on our social media (@rgvmusictherapy) or visit our website (rgvmusictherapy.com/podcast). And any of the things we talked about today (references, resources), they’ll all be up there. 

So, thank you for listening to our very first episode! Thanks for being here in our mindspace and I hope we see you soon!