Music and Feeling

Esperanza Silva

Expos 101

Professor Finn

15 October 2012

It’s easy to get lost in your own world. You stare straight ahead and look around; you can see people’s mouths moving but nothing coming out. Look to your right and see a bunch of kids laughing at something but you hear no laughter. All you can hear is the music that is overpowering your ability to hear anything else. It’s easy to get lost in your own world. You look down at your iPod and scroll through the miscellaneous songs in your library. You ask yourself, what should I listen to next? It is that specific library that drives and excites your musical world. It is exactly those songs that develop your moods, memories, and personality. Your music library is specific to you. One could even say that the music you listen to and the playlists you form describes who you are.

Walking down the residence halls one could hear the famous rapper Tupac blasting and vibrating the walls in someone’s dorm and then as you walk through another door the mood quickly changes when you hear country singer Taylor Swift singing about her new heartbreak.

How could Taylor Swift and Tupac describe who you are? Different songs, genres, and artists can develop and elicit different moods in someone. Your mood is a big part of who you are. When you’re sad sometimes all you want to do is listen to sad music. When you’re love sick you try to avoid songs that sing of love and romance because you know that it’ll only hurt your feelings even more. Listening to a sappy love song could only elicit memories of your significant other.

One song, playlist, lyric or one album could conjure so many memories. Your memories make up who you are and who you have become over the years of your life. Music and memories can be linked together to form a chain and bond together your past experiences. A study done by Stephanie M. Stalinski and E. Glenn Schellenberg showed that in general, affectively valenced stimuli are remembered better than...