You Are the Music: How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human (8 page)

Suvi Saarikallio’s research suggests that I am not alone in my experience. She found that adolescents use music to promote self-exploration, to gain self-knowledge and to strengthen and reinforce their growing conception of themselves as people.

In their book
Musical Identities
,
³²
Raymond MacDonald, David Hargreaves and Dorothy Miell discuss the many selfidentities that can reflect and develop through music, including national identity and gender identity. There are also self-identities that develop through musical education, such as the performer’s persona. Important concepts for young musicians include their self-assessed level of competency, natural ability (or perception of talent) and degree of independence in their musical development.
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All this evidence leads to the inevitable conclusion that music is a useful and powerful vehicle for the development of our idea of ‘self’.
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In the next section we will see how we go on to use that musical identity in our social environment, like a badge or cover, to quickly indicate to other people who we are and what we are all about. Music can be a much more effective communicator of this kind of information during adolescence than taste in clothing, films, books or other hobbies.
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Group identity

Our private identity may be something we only ever reveal to a select few people in our lives; our social identity, on the other hand, is out there for all to see. Everyday life requires us to interact with others and we develop a persona that is, to a degree, a reflection of our self-identity but can also partly be purely for social purposes. Our adolescent years are most strongly identified with the development of our social selves as we strive to be part of an in-group.

Achieving a sense of belonging and support through membership of a social in-group can not only boost our own sense of self-identity but it can facilitate an unconscious mental process by which we learn to engage in social comparisons with other people. We define ourselves partly in response to how we see ourselves against other people and music becomes a powerful definer for many people in adolescence.
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We have all heard of social in-group labels that are defined by musical genres. We have emos (emotional hardcore rock/punk), goths (gothic rock), new romantics, mods (ska, soul and R&B), rockers, beatniks, and so on. Within these social groups people like to assimilate the characteristics of those who share similar musical tastes.
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Adolescents draw on common social musical identity to create a sense of group cohesion (peer bonding) where they
view their own in-group more positively compared to other groups. This in turn promotes a level of optimal distinctiveness
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in the social world. This is an important concept in adolescent socialisation: we seek out a position where we are not too isolated but at the same time retain a sense of selfidentity. Achieving optimal distinctiveness becomes a crucial source of positive self-esteem.
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This process is all part of learning how to interact with wider society, something that children are often shielded from in small families and schools but a valuable skill that they must learn before heading out into the wide world. Dolf Zillmann and Su-lin Gan
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suggest that music listening and fan culture in adolescence is all part of the natural transition from socialisation with parents to socialisation with peers. They agree that small peer groups can gain significant gratification from belonging to a ‘musical elite’.

Our musical social identity not only impacts on the way we behave in the world but it can have an effect on the way people view us. For example, if I tell you that a new acquaintance of mine shares your musical tastes then you are significantly more likely to appraise them positively and to want to become their friend than if they don’t share your musical tastes.
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Music can also have a positive impact on appraisals of social ‘out-groups’; in other words, it can have a pro-social effect. In one study, Spanish participants were asked to listen to either flamenco or classical music. This was followed by a subconscious test of their attitudes towards Gypsy groups. Those who heard the flamenco music before the test showed less prejudiced attitudes towards Gypsies compared to those who heard classical music.
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Exploring musical identity in adolescence from both inside and outside social groups gives an important insight into the nature of the more subtle appraisals that are made
in social situations and which are a feature of adult life in all cultures.

In adolescence our musical taste narrows to perhaps the smallest range it will ever be in our lifetime. During this period we focus on the music that speaks to us, reflects who we want to be, and through association with that music we learn about our self-identity and how our social world works. One consequence of this focus is that we listen to the same sorts of music over and over again. Because it becomes such an integral part of our development, this music invariably becomes ‘the best music ever made’ – in our humble opinion.

The best music of my life

In our adolescent years we create matches between music and our forming identities (both self and social) with the result that the music we hear at this time eventually becomes part of us and our reflection. This process has been termed the cohesion or crystallisation of musical tastes
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– the idea that the music we hear in our teens and early twenties becomes a large part of the music that we will enjoy for the rest of our lives.

But why does the music of our adolescence so often become our favourite? We don’t seem to have such consistent, strong associations with the food we tasted in young adulthood, the clothes we wore or the places where we lived.

Frozen in time

The first reason is that while all those other things can change (quality of ingredients, fabrics, and buildings) music stays exactly the same, frozen in time. Otis Redding, Amy Winehouse, Johnny Cash, Luciano Pavarotti, and Ella Fitzgerald may all have left this earth but at the flick of the switch I can hear their voices as if they were recorded yesterday. Music is so effectively frozen in time that it makes a perfect stimulant for mental time travel.

When I say mental time travel I don’t necessarily mean to say that we journey to a specific point in time. Hearing a favourite piece of music from our youth
can
transport you to a certain time and place but it can also simply take you back to a time period. This is often the case with our favourite songs, when we have heard them so often that they are not really attached to a specific event. Rather these pieces represent a symbolic concatenation of the youth experience – ‘this song reminds me of what it was like to be 21’.

Our minds are capable of specific time travel as well, thanks to a special form of memory known as episodic auto-biographical memory (the ‘self-memory’ system), which is your memory for your life episodes (more on this in Chapter 7). Very often our memories can become foggy and need a jump-start to trigger the recollection of a particular event. Music is a great cue as it is reliable over time and personal to us. This means we end up using it more as a mental time-travel device than other things in life, such as food or locations, and because of this regular use, music is more likely to end up tied to our best and worst times from growing up and by association becomes part of our favourite music.

Emotional jolt

The second reason why we become so attached to the music of our youth is the emotional ingredient, which again is hard to recreate with a good sandwich or a pretty park. Our adolescent experiments with music, mood and emotion stand us in good stead for the emotional journeys we will go on as adults but they also lay down deep markers that stay within us.

Most of the really strong emotional experiences that we have with music occur in our adolescence.
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The music that is most effective in touching us emotionally in this way is very often the music that will touch us for the rest of our days
because it becomes so psychologically and physically significant in our life story.
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Unique brain signature

Both the strong link to memory and the special ingredient of emotion mean that our brain reacts differently when it hears our favourite life music compared to when it hears music that is not in our personal hit parade. We talked at the start of this chapter (
see page 58)
about how music that gives us a physical sensation of chills can stimulate deep areas in the brain associated with emotion and reward. But this is not the only brain area to react to our top memory tunes.
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Petr Janata studies the brain signatures of music-evoked life memories. He believes that this type of memory is unique and may hold promise as a way to stimulate memory in medical conditions such as dementia (see Chapter 8).

In 2007 Janata and his colleagues tested the musical memories of 329 students in their early twenties at the University of California, Davis.
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His team downloaded 1,515 different songs from the Top 100 pop and R&B lists and trimmed them to 30-second samples. Each participant heard a selection of songs that were in the charts when they were aged between seven and nineteen years old. The students were asked if they had any personal memory recollection in response to each song clip.

Janata found that a life memory was associated with at least one of the music clips in 96 per cent of cases. Most of the songs triggered memories from the last five years for the students, putting those memories in early adolescence as opposed to childhood. The most common memories were of friends (47 per cent of songs) and partners (28 per cent of songs), and in around 50 per cent of cases the participants provided detailed descriptions of the memory, proving just how vivid they were.

Importantly, the emotional rating given to the musicevoked memories were significantly higher than neutral and the most common emotion words selected were ‘happy’, ‘youthful’ and ‘nostalgic’. This preliminary study confirms just how intricately music gets knitted into emotional memories of our adolescent life.

In a follow-up, Janata used this kind of music to trigger life memories of thirteen adolescents (average age of twenty) in an fMRI scanner, which measures brain activity by analysing the way that the brain uses oxygen in the blood.
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In response to musically related life memories he found unique activations in a distributed network of brain areas including the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). This part of the brain is located in the middle of the head, just behind the frontal cortex (the bit of the brain encased by the forehead – see diagram on
page 83
). These MPFC activations were stronger in response to the most salient and favourite adolescent life memories.

Janata concluded that this brain network is involved in music life memories because so many different memory systems (emotion, knowledge, recollection, etc.) are triggered by hearing the music and all fire together in order to make a stronger and more vivid memory for the person. That brain activation signature is unlikely to be unique to adolescence but the research we have seen in this chapter suggests that the types of music that trigger this brain response are more than likely going to be those that we heard during that period.

All this evidence suggests that we enjoy the music of our adolescence in a special way, in a way that no other music we will ever hear in our lives will inspire. During these years our mind and body face a unique set of stressors (hormones, personal and social challenges, rapid physical growth) that mean the way we take in music, weave it around our memories and sense of self, and the frequency with which we recall it for the
rest of our days, will always give that music a special place in our hearts … and in our brain.

Ask yourself, what are my top five favourite songs or pieces of music? I would bet good money that most of what you come up with will be the music that you were listening to in your adolescence. Out of my top five, four songs are from that period
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and I know that all six of my dad’s (yes, I asked him for a top five and he gave me six)
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are from that time. Two of mine are connected to specific people or events from that time period while the rest, and all of my dad’s, are simply the soundtracks of our youth.

This chapter has thrown some scientific light on why this brief but unique period of life can be so very important to the growth of our musical ideals and tastes, and how through emotional support, memory prompts, self assurance and social facilitation the music of this period becomes an integral part of our lives. This is no doubt why we choose to take it with us as we journey on to the next life period – adulthood.

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Brainstem reflexes, conditioning, emotional contagion, expectancy, memory and visual imagery.