Connectivity Through Sonics
Trying to help provide a soundtrack (versus mere background ornaments) for a person’s life is a massive responsibility. Historically, in preliterate cultures, songs often were a primary means of preserving and passing down vital information in lieu of writing. And, music has throughout time been used to synchronize people’s movements, labor, and feelings.
A brain’s power is not measured by its size, but by its level of connectivity (e.g., someone with a big skull is not necessarily the brightest, and women routinely have more balance between the brain’s two halves via more developed corpus callosums). Part of music’s specialness is that it stimulates the mind on multiple levels and simultaneously in diverse regions.
One of the most robust aspects of memory is our ability to concoct meta-memories, memories about memories. (Further, many people’s childhood recollections emanate from photos of their childhood, not the actual moment that the photos were taken.) Classic songs often serve the function of organizing time and emotion, with each listen creating and stimulating multiple layers of experience.
People will rarely reread even a favorite novel once or watch most films more than a time or two, but there are many songs that most of us have heard literally thousands of times in a lifetime—often against our will.
Hooks for some songs act as centers—instant orienting devices—that then generate an almost immediate nostalgia by way of their repetition (“Hey, I remember that . . . I just heard it thirty seconds ago.”), and then take root in their host. We tend to be attracted to consistent, recurring patterns since they indicate life in much the same way that a baby bird’s chirp does or wind and waves. And these things with easily definable structure are easier to process. Silence, contrastingly, indicates danger or lifelessness.
Though any single piece of recorded material itself remains consistent, the changing contexts it shares accumulate as it runs like a thread through people’s lives, acting as a guardian to their existence—sometimes being summoned on command, and at others, popping up unexpectedly. And, what that song then triggers is a multisensory experience (smells, locations, etc.) that can span decades, or even back to infancy. When an auditorium full of fans pump their fists in the air to a band’s signature song, a transparent circuit of connectivity is lit up invisibly, more elaborate than any laser light show.
Some songs have accompanied people their entire life, outlasting almost every other relationship, and often being the last remaining thread to a portion of their past, with even the senile sometimes still remembering snippets of songs (with music now having been scientifically proven to help counteract the ravages of Alzheimers far better than any chemical combo yet in existence).