Imagine this: you are driving away from work, winding down the roads that take you closer and closer to home. You start thinking, worrying about a current project and your plans for the weekend, when your favorite song comes on the radio. You feel yourself move with every beat, glide with every rhythm. You go up-and-down, side-to-side, shifting wherever the artist takes you. You are transformed by the music, changed. After the song ends, you feel a little silly for shouting the lyrics in your empty Ford Fusion, and you may start to wonder why one piece of music has such an effect on you. But there is no need to fret; scientists and philosophers have been working for ages to understand the various abilities of music.
One example of this research was presented in a 2012 Scientific American article by Cheryl Murphy. According to Murphy, an experiment relating music to perception revealed the human tendency to pair specific types of melodies with outside stimuli. In this experiment, subjects were presented with varying happy or sad faces posted across a grey background. Each participant completed their test with either upbeat or melancholy music playing. The scientists found that the subjects had the most success when pairing facial expressions with similar music genres; for example, people were more likely to correctly indicate a happy person when listening to happy music. But Murphy explained that this predisposition has even wider implications than these simple associations.
“Even more intriguing was the fact that people gave a lot of false positive responses correlating to the mood of the music of which they were listening. When a stimulus face was not presented, only visual noise, people thought they saw sad faces while listening to sad music and happy faces while listening to happy music when really there was nothing there,” Murphy said. “This suggests that visual perception is influenced not just by our experience and expectations alone but also by our current state of emotions or mood and it may be altered by our music.”
Music can not only shift our mental perception; it can also change us physiologically. Music therapy, a time-tested and inventive form of treatment, has been used to help patients recover from disease and stressors.
“Evidence increasingly suggests it helps people better manage disease symptoms and treatment side effects by curbing stress, soothing pain, promoting sleep, and boosting focus,” Maureen Salamon, executive director of Harvard Women’s Health Watch, said.
Along with the ability to influence our emotional perception and physical state, music can also chip away at our implicit values and prejudices. Like most forms of media, music, through consistent messaging and intentional rhetoric, can affect our individual worldviews.
For example, a 2018 article by Harvard Crimson writer Uzochi P. Nwoko argued that mainstream rap’s propensity for sexist language has created a young culture rooted in misogyny. Nwoko explained that every belittling expletive or sexual remark made in one of these songs builds onto the idea of female inferiority in the minds of listeners.
“While the core message of most songs do not line up with such belittling rhetoric, these words saturate the songs with misogynistic undertones, and their presence in so many top songs indicates how pervasive said undertones are,” Nwoko said.
In 2022, University of Manchester Senior Lecturer Dr. Nicola Puckey submitted a written testimony to the United Kingdom’s parliamentary hearing on misogyny within the music industry. She argued that this subtext rationalizes sexism and spreads the idea to broad audiences. Puckey said that this frame of thinking can lead to harmful consequences.
“This prevalence of misogyny in songs performed by male and female artists leads to the normalization of misogyny and toxic masculinity in wider society, which can then lead to the normalization of violence against women and girls in some groups. This occurs as a result of women and girls being presented in misogynistic lyrics as sexual objects with limited, if any, agency of their own,” Puckey said. “Additionally, where female artists also use misogynistic stereotypes and behaviors, they demonstrate complicity with these and can reinforce perceptions that women and girls want and desire to be treated in these ways.”
This music-based world building can affect many different avenues of thought, creating spiderwebs of inculcated ideologies. From our perception, to our physiology, to our convictions, the media we consume has the power to change us. So the next time you find yourself getting lost in your favorite tune, try to remain cognizant and think critically about what the artist is suggesting and what effect it is having on you.
