A chapter-by-chapter series of images illustrating key ideas in my book Wired for Music. Click here to view the series from the start.
Chapter 6: More Than Meets the Ear [excerpts]
On a snowy day in January, when I was around ten, a couple of kids came to school after the holidays wearing a blue-and-silver metallic gadget.
Best friends got to try the foam-covered headphones. The rest of us stood and stared as they mouthed riffs from Billy Joel and Air Supply. Riffs no one else could hear.
The original Sony Walkman: Launched in 1979, this Japanese invention had an asteroid-like impact on how we listen to music.
This TPS-L2 model was the first portable music player without an external speaker. Before the Walkman, hardly anyone wore headphones (other than extreme audio geeks). Photo Binarysequence, Creative Commons.
“Everyone knows what headphones sound like today,” wrote the late Sony designer Yasuo Kuroki, “but at the time, you couldn’t even imagine it, and then suddenly Beethoven’s Fifth is hammering between your ears.”
Sony took this unique acoustic experience and made it mobile.
Downtown Vancouver in 1981 — the cityscape author William Gibson explored with a post-punk soundtrack playing on his first Walkman. Photo CVA 779-E11.33, City of Vancouver Archives.
The novelist William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, bought his first Walkman in the summer of 1981.
As he roamed downtown Vancouver listening to Joy Division, he imagined a future where machines delivered data with the same “under-theskin intimacy” of the new music player.
A year later, Gibson named this virtual world “cyberspace.”
William Gibson’s award-winning novel Neuromancer (1984) follows a washed-up hacker who ventures into a futuristic world called “cyberspace,” which Gibson envisioned while wandering around Vancouver with his Walkman.
Years later, in a 1993 interview, Gibson declared: “The Sony Walkman has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget.”
Up until the Walkman, noted the writer Matt Alt in The New Yorker, “music was primarily a shared experience.”
Then all of a sudden, the Walkman gave us permission to tune out.
“It’s like a drug,” said Susan Blond, a vice president at CBS Records, in a 1981 interview with the Washington Post. “You put the Walkman on and you blot out the rest of the world.”
Has listening on the fly given us a more intimate relationship to music — or simply a more distracted one?
Riders "tuning out": New York subway on March 22, 1981, two years after the Walkman was released. Photo by Dick Lewis/NY Daily News Archive. Use on this website licensed via Getty Images. (Warning: Do not copy or post without contacting Getty Images re: file #97293754.)
Before the headphone era, no one could jog to Rihanna, let alone listen to a “pump song” just before a job interview.
One morning on Twitter, I spotted this thread: “What’s your favorite hype song?” Most of the comments mentioned high-energy tracks like Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam.”
But other picks showed a vulnerable side, such as “I Have Confidence” from The Sound of Music.
"I Have Confidence" from the 1965 film The Sound of Music. ©Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization.
In a study from Northwestern University, college students who listened to an upbeat playlist opted to go first in a debate nearly twice as often as those assigned low-power tunes.
Hype songs had similar effects on other confident behaviors, the study found.
Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, never hit the pool for a race without listening to music “until the last possible moment,” he told The Guardian.
Michael Phelps in June 2011, just before competing in the 100-meter butterfly. The swimmer's pre-race playlist glided from Lil Wayne to Nero to vintage Eminem. Photo JD Lasica, Creative Commons.
And in his memoir, A Promised Land, Barack Obama mentions drawing strength from music during his first presidential campaign.
“It was rap that got my head in the right place,” he wrote, especially Jay-Z’s “My 1st Song” and Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.”
For my own hype music, I might choose the Mahotella Queens, a South African trio whose a cappella harmonies and booty-shaking moves exude the message “nothing’s going to keep me down.”
The Mahotella Queens: President Jacob Zuma greets members of the singing group at the 16th Cape Town International Jazz festival. Photo via GovernmentZA, Creative Commons.
Given the choice, though, I prefer my music live.
As Yo-Yo Ma pointed out in a USA Today interview, our largest organ is our skin:
When music moves molecules through the air, the cellist said, “You feel actually touched. It’s that tactile, it’s that personal — that intimate.”
Yo-Yo Ma in 1987 performing for U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan, and guests. Photo in U.S. public domain, Creative Commons.
But in recent years, I’ve been talking myself into a headphone habit.
Portable music, it turns out, can take exercise to the next level.
Working out to music makes exercise seem easier and more enjoyable, studies have shown. Photo Nenad Stojkovic, Creative Commons.
A 2020 review of 139 studies yielded key findings about music in exercise and sport:
Music makes exercise seem easier — reducing our perceived exertion by about 10 percent — and more enjoyable, distracting us from the voice inside screaming, “Make it stop!”
In lab experiments, sports psychologist Costas Karageorghis has shown that running in time to music helps regulate our stride patterns, reducing the micro-adjustments needed to maintain a steady pace.
Running in time to music gives athletes an edge — so much so that races including the Boston Marathon have either restricted or “strongly discouraged” the use of portable music players. Pictured: Marathon Rotterdam. Photo Peter van der Sluijs, Wikimedia Commons.
When we run or cycle in synchrony with music, he explained, our bodies use 6 to 7 percent less oxygen than they need to perform the same feat without moving in sync to a soundtrack.
Who could forget Olivia Newton-John singing “Let’s get physical”?
Workouts have come a long way since ’80s aerobics and Jazzercise, but there’s still no such thing as a silent spin class, let alone Zumba. GIF via Tenor.com.
After a race or workout, said Karageorghis, music should start at around ninety beats per minute and gradually bring you to a resting state with a tempo of sixty to seventy beats per minute.
In general, he added, “you have to think very carefully about the exact function that music is serving and select it accordingly so that it serves you well.”
Do the same rules apply to mental exertion?
Many people insist music primes them for peak performance in the cognitive realm. But is it true? Image Darekm135, Creative Commons.
In his book The Organized Mind, the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin breaks the bad news: Listening to tunes while we’re doing other things scatters our attention, making our brains work in a highly inefficient way.
And yet, Stephanie Land wrote her best-selling memoir Maid to a playlist that began with “The Mighty Rio Grande” by the American band This Will Destroy You.
Stephen King penned his horror blockbuster Misery to blasts of Anthrax and Metallica. And Jean-Michel Basquiat painted to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
Could all these writers and artists be wrong?
My mother, Susan Feindel, working on her large-scale mosaic entitled “Quarry” for a public art installation in Ottawa.
©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.
After watching my mother painting in her studio to Franz Schubert and Erik Satie, I have a hunch that in creative fields, too much focus might interfere with the stream-of-consciousness thinking that inspires artists to do their best work.
Of course, this nebulous phenomenon would be tricky for scientists to study, and as far as I know, none has tried.
But there’s no doubt that listening to music alters core physiological systems in our bodies, not just our minds.
Listening to music can dampen the histamine response in people with food allergies after they’ve swallowed an allergen such as peanuts. But (warning!) this effect is unlikely to be strong enough to prevent a life-threatening reaction. Photo by PiccoloNamek, Creative Commons.
Concealed in our eyes, ears, mouth, and nose is a crucial antibody, Immunoglobulin A, our first line of defense against viruses and bacteria.
A meticulous review of sixty-three studies describes fluctuations of this antibody as “particularly responsive to music,” especially when people enjoy the sounds.
The immune boost may be mild and fleeting.
But even the most orthodox of medical professionals acknowledge that our mental and emotional states can influence how sick we become and how well we bounce back.
Music relieves pain by evoking a pleasure-reward response in the brain, which sends signals through the spinal cord instructing the body’s endogenous opioid system to suppress pain.
Image InjuryMap, Creative Commons.
Music can help relieve pain after surgery.
According to a Queen’s University study, music works as a painkiller by evoking a pleasure-reward response that activates the body’s descending analgesia system.
Music can take the edge off insomnia as well.
Music is a mild analgesic compared to opioid painkillers — but it is cheap and free of side effects. Kashirin Nickolai, Creative Commons.
In a rigorous Cochrane review, listening to slow-tempo classical, new age, or jazz improved restlessness, nighttime waking, and problems falling asleep.
In a recent survey, classical music, especially Bach, was the top choice for drifting into dreamland. ©Susan Feindel. Reproduction in any form prohibited without written permission.
However, insomniacs may need several weeks of nightly music before its sleep-inducing properties kick in, for reasons not fully understood.
If adding tunes to a bedtime routine was just a matter of conditioning — training our bodies that it’s time to sleep — then audiobooks at bedtime should offer similar results. But they don’t.
There might remain, noted Australian researchers, “mysterious effects of music that science has yet to address.”
Take the phenomenon known as “binaural beats.”
Often marketed as “soundwave therapy,” binaural beats deliver two steady tones at slightly different frequencies, one in each ear.
You’ll start to hear a low beat that sounds like it’s coming from inside your head. But this third sound is just an auditory illusion, the result of “wavelength interference.” Image by Adjwilley, Creative Commons.
On their own, binaural beats are about as tasty as cardboard, which might explain why they are typically sweetened with nature sounds and new-age music.
While more research is needed, in the few studies showing benefits from binaural beats, the music itself might be the special sauce.
But despite all my cello training, it was not until my late thirties that I fully grasped just how potent music could be.
Anyone who has cared for a newborn around the clock knows how exhausting it can be. Photo Fortepan #101602, Creative Commons.
My baby was born with a dimple in one cheek and a set of lungs that would soon produce blood-curdling screams.
He screamed in his stroller. He screamed on his play mat. He screamed in his car seat, baby swing, crib.
I tried every infant-soothing technique in the book — even even “cry it out.” Nothing worked. I became bone-achingly, brain-numbingly sleep-deprived.
Nine months in, on yet another bleary trudge through the city with my baby, a flyer on a lamppost caught my eye: African Movement Workshop. Something about the beaming drummer in the picture made me sign up on the spot.
Video: Click the "play" arrow and wait for mesmerizing marimba by Kurai Blessing Mubaiwa, the Zimbabwean musician I heard in a Vancouver workshop during my postpartum depression.
Partway through the workshop, the warm tones of a marimba rippled through the air. The gentle currents bobbed around me, mellow and cheery, and I had an almost physical sensation of being lifted by the exuberant melody.
After months of shouldering my baby, it was as if something was carrying me.
That day marked the turning point in my rough transition to motherhood. How could this be?
It got easier: Holding my 10-month-old son about five weeks after the music workshop that lifted my spirits during postpartum depression. ©Adriana Barton. Reproduction in any form prohibited.
As a journalist, I was trained to question all things woo-woo, but I didn’t need a before-and-after brain scan to know something had shifted in me.
From that moment on, I vowed to stop underestimating what music could do.
Follow here to view future chapters of Wired for Music: The Visual Companion. Or sign up to receive an email alert for each post.
To order the book Wired for Music, see links on this page.
Sources for all information in this post can be found in the endnotes of the hardcover and paperback editions.
Copyright note: The author is the copyright holder of all text but not all images included in this post. Every effort has been made to identify and indicate the copyright status of each image pictured. In some cases, copyrighted material has been included for the purposes of teaching and scholarship in accordance with “fair use” regulations in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law.
Please contact me with any questions, permissions requests, or concerns about copyright.
Disclaimer: Discussions about health topics provided in this post, or in any linked materials, are not intended and should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. The author accepts no responsibility or liability for any health consequences relating to information published on this website.