Music In My Life

In the modern and developing world that we live in today, music has become a larger as well as a more important part of everyday life. To me, music has played a large role in my life ever since I was a child. The way in which music can affect people in a variety of ways has always fascinated me, which led me to question how exactly music affects and has an impact on our memory, concentration and emotions. Every year we are introduced to new songwriters who create music portraying special, different messages and evoking different emotions that can be felt through melodic rhythms and ideas. Although music has always been an entertaining part of our lives and an art that we turn to when we need the comfort that others feel the same way we do at

There have been countless cases where women who are pregnant and play the same musical piece on an instrument repeatedly over the course of 9 months claim that their children later on in life remember the song, but are unsure of how they are so familiar with it. No research has been done in these specific cases, so no conclusions have yet been made. At this point in time it is hard to conduct experiments in order to determine why music is already stored differently in our memories even before birth, and before being able to make music a significant part of one’s every day life. It has long been known that music can trigger tremendously powerful recollections, but how can one have such a powerful connection to music when still in the womb? “What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head. It calls back memories of a particular person or place, and you might all of a sudden see that person’s face in your mind’s eye.” says Peter Janata. (J. Hsu, livescience) Although it is unclear how melodies and rhythms can be stored in an unborn child’s brain to become such a powerful memory later on in their lives, this statement suggests that melodies can recall certain eras, events, moments and phases in one’s life. When you listen to a song repeatedly during a certain time period, season, emotional event or anything else

Very little serious research has gone into investigating music’s ability to truly physically influence the brain until recent years, and even to this day there is quite little we actually know about the neurological effects of music, since emotions are rather hard to investigate and experiment with. Music goes a lot deeper than just being sweet sound to ours ears. Music is a phenomenon, which has managed to cross all borders of culture, nationality and race. For stirring emotions and feelings, music is far more powerful and real than language has ever been. As interest in how exactly the human brain tends to process musical emotion increased, it has been described as a certain language of emotion across different cultures. Whether it is music one hears at live concerts, on a home stereo, on the television or an orchestra, music can be so evocative and yet at the same time so overpowering that the only way it can truly be described is by the feeling of “standing halfway between thought and phenomenon”, described perfectly by Malini Mohana. (M. Mohana, Psychcentral) Musical pieces always have a way of making it clear which emotion it is they are portraying, as there is evidence from psychological research that listeners very often tend to be able to agree on what type of emotion is expressed in a music piece. It is also believed that music has the ability to at times