Tuning In: The Surprising Way Music Affects Our Daily Lives

If you’re taking a break from work right now because you’re struggling to focus, might we recommend some assistance? You could down some caffeine, of course, but you might prefer to choose Debussy’s Clair de Lune or Satie’s Gymnopedie No.1. If you’re working on a mathematical problem, research suggests you should take in some Bach. If it’s a visual or dimensional problem, try Mozart. On the flip-side, if you’re preparing to go into battle, try a marching band.

Most people have an intuitive sense of how music seems to mould their emotions – to calm or to energise, for example. That’s the point of music, after all. Business certainly appreciates this. That music can drive behaviour is the thinking behind what was once called ‘muzak’ – actually a brand name dating back 90 years. Indeed, a tool most typically associated with supermarket shopping in the mid 20th century – and often dismissed as being just as outmoded – is, thanks to a spate of recent studies, entering a new era of sophistication.

Far from being bland and defunct, muzak – once found as far away as the command module of Apollo 11, now in malls and airports, in restaurants and factories – reaches 150 million people daily.

‘The way music triggers certain emotions and behaviours [like shopping] is still not well understood, but we can only expect neuro-science to advance such that we can grasp specific correlations,’ says Nigel Nicholson, professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School. ‘[The business world is] becoming more advanced in the use of music. We think we make most choices freely but we’re pushed and pulled by many factors, music, we’re now understanding, being one of the most powerful. We’re easily manipulated by it.’

Certainly studies have linked aggressive music with increased, if short-lived, aggression; they’ve found ways in which people use music to define themselves – typically by what they’re not rather than by what they are; music has been shown to be both stimulus and distraction, to make us work harder or spend more.

Sad music, for example, encourages the release of the hormone prolactin, a chemical associated with crying and one which helps to curb grief. It also encourages us to splash the cash. In one experiment playing stereotypically French or Germanic music was correlated to increased sales of French or German wine, shoppers being entirely unaware of the effect. 

‘People tend not to think about the effect music is having on them, in the way they probably don’t think the colour of the walls [around them] has an impact. After all, although the idea that music has an impact subliminally is shaky, hearing is one sense you can’t turn off, such that your brain actively processes music even when you’re asleep – so it does have an impact,’ explains Professor Adrian North, of Curtin University, western Australia.

But music is not just used to these sometimes slightly nefarious ends. Music’s very building blocks have even been shown – by experiments at the Universities of Salzburg and Munich – to change the way you think: resonant, unfamiliar tonalities cause people to think in more abstract terms, for example, while consonant, familiar chords encourage a more concrete mindset. 

Music as medicine

There are, after all, therapeutic uses of music too, such that, as Nicolson puts it, ‘we might expect a time when a doctor prescribes a playlist.’ While the discipline of ‘music therapy’ is a relatively new one, music is increasingly being explored as a clinical intervention to help children and adults with learning difficulties, in the management of autism and depression, even in palliative care. 

Although music has been part of every human culture for as long as we can remember – human fetuses can even respond to music as early as 15 weeks into pregnancy – and we can recognise thousands of tunes, sometimes even from just a single note – we’re only just beginning to explore the potential for music to heal or shape mood, and not primarily as a form of entertainment. Even Premier League football teams like Tottenham Hotspur FC now use specially curated playlists in their training complex to help with player well-being.

It’s an idea we’re grasping in our own lives more deliberately too it seems. Professor Daniel Mullensiefen, a psychologist specialising in music and the mind at Goldsmiths, University of London, recently led a study on behalf of audio company Sonos suggesting just how aware we’re becoming of how music defines our behaviours: 52 per cent of respondents said they wouldn’t be successful at work if they didn’t listen to some kind of background music, with 76 per cent saying that music helped them produce their best work.

At home: 56 per cent said that music made their sex life more adventurous, with 20 per cent – remarkably – even having a dedicated playlist for the bedroom. Music can cool things down too. Another Sonos survey found that 69 per cent of respondents said music was important for easing tensions at home.

Shaping Mood

But using music more deliberately – with what’s called active listening – also has its effect, albeit not in the obvious way we might assume, with up tempo to lift a mood, down tempo to bring calm. A study by psychologists at Western Sydney University five years ago found that people tend to strategise in their use of music for mood regulation in two key ways: they either listened to music that differed from their negative mood, in an attempt to smooth it out, or they listened to music that mirrored or even enhanced their bad mood, as a way to embrace it in some sense, and play it out. 

The study concluded that music used this way might not change the mood, exactly, but helped the listener cope better with it. That instinct is right: listening to music has been shown to reduce stress hormones and, listened to before and after an operation, even the pain we experience. Awareness is another important factor here: it’s important to be conscious of the fact that prolonged listening to the ‘wrong’ type of music – endless downbeat EMO, for example – can also make you feel worse. Be careful what you play…

But any music is having some effect on the way we feel, says Mullensiefen, in part precisely because it’s music and not speech. ‘We don’t tend to build a cognitive defence to music because it’s not an argument or a specific proposition,’ he says. Music washes over and through and around us. It works in subtle ways that aren’t so blunt as reaching for ‘The Greatest Pop Songs Ever! (Vol.3)’ after a hard day at work.

To return to your lack of concentration, for example, it might seem that this would only be disrupted by music. And yet, for many if not all people, concentration is improved – at least by music that is heard without it being too obtrusive. Why? The theory has it because such music provides a patterned, ordered, predictable sequence of sounds, it reassures the brain that the environment is unchanging and so safe; silence fails to provide evidence of this, and so increases stress levels. This is why more people are discovering ambient soundtracks on the likes of Spotify and YouTube – gentle humming, nature sounds or background babble. 

Likewise, peak hours for listening to music are between 5 and 6pm – just home from work, preparing meals, dealing with kids – and 10 and 11pm – moving towards bed; which is to say when there is a need to relax. But this doesn’t necessarily mean the same slow, chilled out, unobtrusive music. Much more important is music that the listener likes – it could be thrash metal. In which case, please wear earphones. 

Indeed, earphones are a central part of the story of how we’re learning to use music as a form of mood enhancement for our individual selves. Increasingly music is not listened to in some kind of social setting – as it has been for millennia – but through earphones, privately. Thanks to streaming services, music is much more ubiquitous – note how disconcerting it can be to walk into a hotel or shop that isn’t playing music these days – but also more solitary.

We’re entering what Nicolson calls the era of ‘music as self-medication’: its use to provide companionship, underscore individuality and manipulate how we feel. 

‘Wherever we go, whether working or relaxing, we plug in our earphones and turn to a suitable playlist. In a way we all create our own muzak now,’ he adds. ‘People [and particularly those who have only ever known a digital world] use those playlists much more deliberately to manipulate their own emotional states. Look at the number of people who wear headphones when they’re working or shopping, almost constantly. They’ve shut themselves off to outside influence. It’s them and the music.’