How much is the music you're listening to affecting you?

By Maria-Athena Zachariou, Third Year, English

Everyone has a different playlist for a different mood. There’s the pres playlist, the gym playlist, the dinner playlist, and inevitably, the sad playlist. But how much is the music we’re listening to actually affecting us? Can music change our mood, or are we actively choosing to listen to songs that mirror how we already feel?

Maybe the difference between walking to campus with a spring in your step vs a miserable trek is nothing more than what you’ve decided to put in your headphones.

08:00

You wake up. You have a lecture in an hour and zero desire to attend it. You lie in bed for a few minutes, tossing and turning, considering whether you should actually go. Here comes your first decision of the day: what are you going to listen to? You could a) open your morning with ‘How to Disappear Completely’ by Radiohead - something slow and melancholic, allowing you to quietly emerge from your groggy state - or b) wake up and immediately whack on ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’, something happy, cheesy, and upbeat?

Or perhaps it isn’t quite that simple.

The relationship between music and emotion works in two ways. Some researchers believe that people tend to select music that is ‘emotionally congruent’, while others suggest that poignant music stimulates areas of the brain associated with not only emotion but also the nervous system. This affects things such as heart rate and arousal (enter the sex playlist). Maybe ‘How to Disappear Completely’ isn’t making me miserable. Perhaps I was (rather morbidly) already miserable, and Radiohead simply seemed appropriate. However, this relationship between music and emotion works both ways.

So, when a song makes your heart race, your stomach drop, or suddenly transports you back in time, there is more happening than simply having good taste.

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08:30

You leave the house. The sun is out. The birds are chirping. For once, you haven’t forgotten anything. You put on The Beach Boys or Paolo Nutini’s ‘New Shoes’, and the walk up Park Street seems slightly more bearable for once. You have a spring in your step. Maybe university, or rather 09:00 lectures, aren’t so bad after all.

Or, you leave the house and it’s raining. You’ve forgotten your umbrella. Your shoes are already wet and your socks are soggy. You settle for Jeff Buckley’s ‘Lover You Should’ve Come Over’. Did you choose it because it fits the existential crisis storyline? Have you accidentally amplified the dramatic effect of getting soaked on the way to your lecture?

Perhaps listening to The Beach Boys in the rain would turn the walk into an uplifting moment: Come on, let’s make it up Park Street and get to the 09:00 lecture!

Music can make an entirely ordinary situation feel like something much bigger. A walk to university becomes a montage. Rain isn’t just rain anymore, it’s now symbolic.

14:00

Gym. The playlist changes again. You shuffle through a mix of Bring Me the Horizon and some heavy house music, perhaps eventually arriving at the true Bristol staple: drum and bass. Everything is faster, louder and more energetic. The reason for this is physiological, as ‘music with a strong, consistent rhythm can encourage the body to synchronise its movements with the beat’, improving efficiency during exercise. But are you doing that, or are you just stretching in the corner…

In my opinion, the more interesting question is why we intuitively match music to our current activity. We don’t usually put on a devastating breakup ballad before attempting a personal best on the step machine. We don’t generally choose drum and bass when we are trying to fall asleep. We have somehow created an unwritten rulebook about what music belongs to which mood.

And to add to that, there is the regrettable crying playlist.

There is something slightly unsettling about voluntarily making yourself feel worse. You finish a long day, step into the shower, put on the most heart-wrenching song you can find and allow yourself half an hour of wallowing. Sadness evoked by music isn’t necessarily an unpleasant experience. People can enjoy sad music because it can produce feelings of being moved, nostalgia, empathy and emotional connection, a distraction from the day just passed.

So perhaps we don’t listen to sad music because we want to be miserable. Sometimes we listen because we want to feel something, whether that be sadness or not.

18:00

Dinner. Cooking with the girls usually involves Olivia Dean on the communal speaker, something warm, easy and happy enough to make chopping vegetables feel considerably more enjoyable than it probably deserves to feel.

At some point during the evening, though, I will hear the distress signal coming from my housemate’s room: Cigarettes After Sex’s ‘Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby’. This is how I know I need to enter the room of death and despair. I lie horizontally in the dark beside her while the music makes everything feel approximately ten times more tragic than it actually is. Eventually, I attempt to introduce High School Musical (2006) karaoke into the cave.

This might be my most convincing evidence that music can regulate your mood, when I’m actively using it to hype up my friend. Sometimes you don’t need to analyse how you’re feeling. You just need to skip the song. But this is also where the question becomes slightly more complicated. If we repeatedly choose music that matches how we feel, could we also end up keeping ourselves there? Maybe the problem isn’t the sad song itself. Maybe it is when we stop using music to regulate a mood and start using it to cement it.

Music isn’t a magic button for happiness, productivity or emotional stability. It is more like a volume knob. Sometimes we crank it up because we want to feel more. Sometimes we turn it down because we want to feel less. Sometimes we choose the saddest song imaginable because being in a despair pit for four minutes feels oddly comforting. Sometimes we need ‘New Shoes’ because the walk from Clifton Down to campus feels significantly more manageable with Paolo Nutini playing in our ears.

So, is waking up to Radiohead setting yourself up for disaster? Probably not. But if your entire day consists of Jeff Buckley, Cigarettes After Sex, rain and staring meaningfully out of a window, perhaps consider giving ‘New Shoes’ a chance.

Your degree may not improve. But you might at least go to a lecture with a spring in your step, and a day that’s not been set up for disaster.

Featured image: Epigram / Maria-Athena Zachariou