I remember the
very first time that I used a portable cassette tape player to add a music
soundtrack to an otherwise music-free zone. I was cross country skiing, and as
I glided along the trail, I listened over and over to a recording of Respighi’s Pines of
Rome. I remember
clearly the wonder of this idea that we could listen to music anywhere, and I
also remember how the countryside seemed to have greater clarity; the smells
seemed stronger, the colours more vivid, the air crisper. Fast forward to 2017,
where we inhabit a world where music is readily available and background music
is ubiquitous. The idea that we may perceive the world differently through the prism of music
is intriguing.
A body of
research has been preoccupied with questions around how music can influence
human behaviour and how we use music to regulate our own emotional responses to
the world. Recently, a group of researchers used experimental methods to investigate the influence of music
listening on perceptions of real-life environments. Teruo Yamasaki, Keiko Yamada and Petri
Laukka measured their
participants’ impressions of four different urban contexts: a residential area,
a park, a busy crossroads, and a commuter train. These impressions were
gathered with five different ‘soundtrack’ conditions – no music, and four
different tracks that varied with regards to arousal and pleasantness
(activation and valence). Their results showed that the music soundtracks did
influence impressions of the environment, in the direction of the
characteristic of the music. For example, highly positive music fostered more
positive impressions of the environment, and inactive music seemed to diminish
the impression of activity in the environments that had been perceived as being
highly active without any music - i.e. the busy crossroads and the commuter
train (the latter being of particular interest to me, as someone who spent many
years commuting on packed commuter trains in the Southeast
of England, and always
experimenting with how I could use music to endure the journey)..
The effects of
soundtracks in our perceptions of the world extend beyond our perceptions of
the environment, though. Consumer research has demonstrated that music can influence consumer behaviours and perceptions. Film music soundtracks have also been
shown to have a powerful influence on our responses and to influence our perceptions of
emotions.
Some
researchers have wondered whether entrainment – being in sync with one another
- might play a role in the effects of music soundtracks of our lives. Essentially,
entrainment refers to the process that happens when our internal biological
rhythm interacts with and becomes synchronised with an external rhythm. Entrainment has been studied in the context of communal music-making, where it has
been linked with the
unifying sense of fellowship and trust that is often reported by participants
in music groups. Sarah Knight,
Neta Spiro, and Ian Cross
were curious about whether entrainment could have a similar effect in
situations where we are passive listeners or observers. In their study, participants watched videos with
soundtracks that were entrained (a drumbeat in time with the footsteps of the
actor) or disentrained (the drumbeat was out of time with the footsteps). After
watching the videos, the participants in the study rated the trustworthiness of
the actor in the video. The researchers found that perceptions of
trustworthiness were higher when the drum beat was in time (entrained) than
when it was disentrained (out of time). It is not clear whether entrainment heightened
the perceptions of trustworthiness or, alternatively, disentrainment diminished
perceptions of trustworthiness. Nevertheless, this study, which raises many
questions, is a reminder that the soundtracks in our lives may have more
far-reaching influence than we may have thought.
These studies
raise important questions about the music that frames our experiences of the
world, and our personal responses to that music. Thinking about this topic also
made me wonder about contexts where the music stops – where access to music, be
it listening or participating, is not easy or even possible. In a world where
we have grown accustomed to soundtracks, what happens in our individual
perceptions and social interactions, when the music stops?