Music variety not only fun, but beneficial
You may have seen me walking around campus with my blue headphones on. You see me take my phone out of my pocket and change the song, but you have no idea what songs I’m listening to.
Music is a part of my life, and it always has been. As a baby, I would cry until my parents played certain songs I liked as they would calm me down. As a teenager, I would always bring a CD or two with me when we drove to Grandma’s house.
In college, my music is still a big part of my life: ask anyone in Thayer Hall and they’ll agree.
But what catches my friends, family and resident hall pals off guard is the type of music I listen to.
When I woke up this morning I was listening to Willie Maxwell, known by his stage name Fetty Wap, but put on alternative band The Fray when I went to lunch.
Though the different types of music I listen to are seen as unusual to others, to me they’re who I am.
For the days that I wake up and go for a run before classes, I need someone like Macklemore to rap quickly to up-tempo beats to keep me going fast. But for the nights I need to slow down while I do homework, having a playlist of Coldplay playing quietly keeps me focused on my schoolwork. Driving in the car on the way to a friend’s house, I’ll put on some Skrillex because his beats always get me hyped up and ready for a fun time.
I believe that there is a reason that I listen to several different types of music. Because not only one genre of music describes me, I listen to different ones based on the different sides of my personality. By this I do not mean I am fake or hide parts of my personality, but instead when my friend is driving and hands me the aux cord, I can’t disappoint. I’m not going to play Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors” – don’t get me wrong, it’s a great song, but not for certain situations – but I could very well throw on “To Ü (Feat. AlunaGeorge)” by Skrillex and Diplo or Silento’s “Watch Me.”
While I’m probably the only person you know who still listens to Kanye West’s “Heartless” that was a hit when it came out in 2008, I still keep up with current songs too. There are times when it helps to have soft, calming – to me, at least – music on my phone. Depending on my current mood will determine the songs I put on. Sometimes the songs I listen to improve my mood – making a happy mood happier or making a sad mood happy – while other times I’ve had a long, frustrating day and I need to put on something that will get me hyped and ready for football practice.
Some people say that they only listen to one type of music. I simply cannot.
But can my different genres of music benefit me in ways more than just satisfying my music tastes?
According to an article on American Scientific’s site, Allie Wilkinson wrote that during a study, “volunteers had their brains scanned by functional MRI as they listened to two musical medleys containing songs from different genres” and “the scans identified brain regions that became active during listening” because not all parts of the brain are active when listening to certain types of music.
This study concluded that while different genres activate different parts of the brain, this is because some songs are instrumentals compared to other songs with vocals.
Wilkinson also wrote, “While both hemispheres of the brain deal with musical features, the presence of lyrics shifts the processing of musical features to the left auditory cortex,” which demonstrates how different music genres can affect us.
Medical Daily had an article written in March 2014 that said, “The brain’s ability to absorb and make sense of music… is highly complex and far more effective than even a computer’s capacity to identify and process it,” which means that there is more to music than simply hearing it as it passes through our headphones to our ears. This article continued to say that the auditory cortex – what the Scientific American reported on – deals with more than just the sound of music, but also our emotions, movement and memory.
This explains why I will hear a song from years ago and instantly remember my best friend from middle school, because we used to listen to it from the second it came out until we got sick of it.
The article continues to say that our minds are fans of repetition – for example, muscle memory is something everyone has probably heard before – and prediction.
Therefore, when listening to a song, we catch on to the beat, usually by tapping our feet, and then predict what will happen throughout the rest of the song because songs have repeated parts, or “patterns.”
Our emotions, movement and memory that come from music are more important than we think, and music itself means more to us than just instruments and/or words. Because of music’s influence on my life, I will listen to music until the day I can’t hear it anymore.
I’ll be listening to Phil Collins when my grandkids are around, and the second they leave, I’ll be playing my A$AP Rocky album so loud that all of the neighbors will have to take out their hearing aids.