Music soundtracks in our lives

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?