I'm Dr Ruth Herbert, I'm lecturer in performance and music psychology
for the Centre of Music and Audio Technology at the University of Kent.
I'm interested in human minds and music and particularly in the ways we use and experience music
in daily life. Music is present in all societies cross-culturally and the use
of music to transform experience to affect a fundamental shift in an
individual's consciousness is universal. So why do we value music so much?
What's it doing for us? How does it affect us?
My research stems from my practical involvement as a performer, wondering how the audiences hearing
the music I was playing were experiencing it. It also stems from being a listener to music
whether that's at a live gig or in the car or at home.
Do other people experience music in the same way as me?
Two things in particular made me curious to know more about other people's experiences of music.
One was an assumption I'd come across through my own musical education,
and also in some academic writing, that there was a proper way to listen
and this proper way to listen involved a concentrated focus on music itself.
Anything else would be dismissed as superficial or background or every day.
The second thing was the notion that musical experiences are primarily about emotion.
And that accords with an established tradition traceable back to the ancient Greek notion of catharsis.
Well neither of these things matched my own experience so typically
my experience of music changes from maybe a proper focus, in quotes,
on musical features, maybe I'm analysing aspects of music, to a realisation that the
sound I'm hearing is blending with my thoughts or imagination and perhaps aspects of the surroundings.
Much as you might be experiencing right now, or in the course of this talk,
I'm going to talk today about a research project I ran which explored what it's like to experience music
as a teen or tween and whether age, gender and personality can shape our experiences in some way.
So the young people you can see on the screen and more like them from
across the UK were asked what would a world be like without music.
Here's some of their responses.
"Music is my best friend It's always there and never criticises me.
Without it life would be empty and I'd be lonely." [Ella, 12]
"I wouldn't like die without it or anything but the world would be quite straightforward
and black and white... culture would sort of go away really." [Callum, 14]
"It would be quite dark and sad and I would just be miserable
having music there brightens me up and makes me braver." [Lola, 11]
Engaging with music is a prime way in which children and teenagers negotiate everyday life.
And that's both ways of being in the world such as the music to add pace to the day
or frame a routine, and ways of experiencing the world such as the use
of music to mediate perception and change the way we see the world.
My study focused on the 10 to 18 age range.
This is a time of enormous neurobiological development for young people
and it's marked by emotional volatility and experimentation with identity.
Music really has an enormous role in scaffolding young people's music development
and general development at this time.
But how do you tap experiences inside other people's heads in any detail?
What's it like to be someone else experiencing music?
Well in recent years a scientific study of music has enabled us to get much more of an idea
about the neural correlates of various aspects of music experience.
Say, for instance, increases in blood flow to certain parts of the brain that are
associated with emotional response to music can be mapped by an fMRI scan.
But knowledge about the physical brain doesn't capture the contents of our
thoughts, our emotions, our imaginings, and this is what
the Australian philosopher David Chalmers called the hard problem of consciousness.
How to derive mind from mentation, from material substance.
So being a dog experiencing music is likely to be a little bit different from being a human
What about being a bat? this was an example that Thomas Nagel, an American philosopher,
famously explored and it was quite a clever example in that bats are similar to us,
in that they're mammals but obviously quite different in other ways.
They hang upside down, they're nocturnal and they rely on sonar
emitting high-pitched squeaks to negotiate their environments.
Of course, one solution to finding out about what's going on in other people's heads is
simply to ask them, and although this is likely to give a partial picture of experience
it's still really insightful as I'll show.
So Young People & Music Project involved 625 10-18 year olds across the UK,
and they were from a variety of educational backgrounds and school settings.
So we had primary state schools, secondary state schools, also private schools, a Cathedral School and
then specialist music institutions, for instance, the Purcell School, national east jazz orchestra etc.
And the aims were to explore the subjective feel of young people's music experiences,
that's to say the phenomenology,
and also to see whether age and gender and personality shaped experience
This was a mixed method study so that meant that we used interviews, we used written reports,
we used an online listening questionnaire and also an
online listening lab study which I ran in collaboration with Professor Nicola Dibben
from University of Sheffield.
As part of the projects, exchange of knowledge was really important,
so that included an online listening blog,
really a library of listening experiences compiled by the young people and also a
series of public talks with music educators and discussions with music educators.
So what types or qualities of experience did young people in the study find important?
10 to 18 year olds describe the use of music to create a
sense of momentum; give energy and excitement of the day; to escape, detach, dissociate.
They used music for a feeling of absorption, that sense of effortless
involvement in an activity, they use music to daydream and to construct imaginative fantasies
Music was used to feel connected whether that was feeling connected to people or things
that sense of not feeling isolated, alone in the world,
is tremendously important for this age range they use music to articulate
mood and emotion and to vicariously explore unfamiliar emotions or elements
of identity, sort of trying on aspects of experience for size and seeing how that fitted.
For performers, they use music to copy attributes of role model musicians.
And finally, young people use music to create very immersive multimedia,
multimodal experiences that blended together sights and sounds.
So I'm going to focus just on two aspects of experience today,
that is age-related musical daydreaming and the use of music to detach.
And both these centre around the use of music as a form of escape.
I'm going to illustrate these themes with particular examples.
We use verbal examples alongside the music that featured in the experience.
First I'm going to start with the idea of musical daydreaming
and this whole theme of musical daydreaming
has really taken off in research, not least because enables us to explore a central question in the
study of music, which is, how do we make sense of music? What are the meanings
that we apply to music? How is what we imagine when we listen to music actually
reflected in the structural properties of music?
Here is the first example:
So the words people use can give various clues about the quality of their experience
and it's interesting to see whether this could be reflected in
individual differences like age and gender. So as I read out this experience
I'd like you to see if you can work out what age, what gender and what style of
music is being used here - so all these different unknowns about this participant.
I have a big habit of having daydreams and when I'm listening to music
I just seem to - all the daydreams seem to come out... When I was
listening to X in the car there was this rather creepy track
and I imagined there was someone being murdered - a small child actually - and
there was an evil killer who we don't know of - no one's ever seen their face as
it's hidden under a black hood. And they're the one killing all these children.
And it leaves. And it sees a little poor baby. It's had some trouble
with being a child in its previous life and it thinks that all children are
horrible due to what's happened to it in its childhood. It looks at the child it
starts to feel sorry for the child. Then it forgets, throws it into the river
starts murdering a whole load of other kids... that's one of the stories
I can't really remember all of the stories I dream about. It's usually quite dramatic.
Lily is 11 and she's listening to a piece by Astor Piazzolla.
Clearly there's a relationship between visual imagery and structural properties
of the music. So by the age of 11 Lily's familiar with a series of
associative musical codes which is picked up via the process of
enculturation which just means the way we absorb influences from our environment.
And it's not the individual music attributes that make the whole experience
but it's all these attributes heard together
so what tempo a piece of music is, what emotion it is, whether it's a minor or major mode etc.
Soundtracks featured on a range of digital media,
so thinking about computer games and films and TV,
use these sort of associative musical codes all the time.
And the tendency to hear filmically is particularly common for children and teenagers.
We recognise how Lily's description relates to the music she's listening to,
so thinking of the creepiness she describes ,
we might relate that to features of music such as the thump of the drum or that slide upwards
in the strings. And if we've had a certain type of formal education we might
mention things like bitonality, which is the use of two keys at once, or a
minorish feel feel to the mode.
Taken together young people's music experiences
suggested that there really might be an age-related component to musical daydreaming.
For 10 to 12 year olds, they seem particularly likely to
construct quite elaborate narrative fantasies to music, something which I've termed storying.
Let's compare with the next example, and this time I want to start by playing the music.
Again, the musical characteristics, so the tempo the way the bass was quite to the
forefront in the mix might give us some idea of how we would see this filmically.
Let's actually see the experience that goes with the music.
In one piece - something by bass hunter... I just see myself in some random road... floating in the air
moving stuff with my mind... [or]... I would be randomly in the middle of the
playing fields just sort of controlling the weather, that sort of thing... And as
the music progresses it's a bit like a sci-fi movie. The actions and the drama
get more intense as the music gets to its climax. Basshunter's very techomodern,
sort of bass dominated so you can get very strong feelings from it and... if the
volume's at a certain pitch I find it a lot easier to access that path. I can't
do it with classical music. Just really big sounds. I can get really into my
imagination. I've got a bit of an overactive imagination.
Interviewer question: This is regular this accessing?
Response: Yes. Daily. Sort of alternate world sort of thing... because I don't really like my world a lot.
Question: Is access only through music?
Response: Only through music.
So once again we can see how the visual imagery and the structural characteristics of the music go together.
Although, maybe might not have been expecting quite that sort of visualisation.
This is John and he's 17, and he describes a repeating autobiographical fantasy.
So this occurs at various times during the day and over a period of weeks and months
and is slightly changed but it's a recurrent fantasy.
And it was interesting that for older adolescents the imagining to music tended to be more autobiographical
and more tended to be a series of dreamlike succession of images rather than a clear narrative or story.
When the qualitative data, so that's the interviews and diaries, were compared with the quantitative online
questionnaires, another interesting finding emerged. And that was that from
the age of 15 or so young people were far more likely to use music to dissociate with.
So that means they were using music to cut off from stressful
situations, or aspects of self, or even states of mind - particularly boredom.
Now, music could help to articulate animation but what was really interesting about these experiences
is quite a lot of them really were about escaping from emotion, escaping from self,
and just a relief from not having to be - what we might call zoning out.
This is termed "normative dissociation" and it's interesting that
dissociation, this detaching, is often being described as a quite unhealthy or
pathological even practice in psychological literature. And yet here we
can see that - and elsewhere - that this sort of listening, this dissociative listening,
can be quite a protective self-regulatory defence mechanism.
This is summed up by my final example which is Jake who's 15.
On the bus listening to metal I start looking out and I do know I'm looking out and then
eventually there's just a fade where I'm just unaware that I'm unaware... kind of
inside the music, disappearing... it's not positive or negative, just about an
alternative space, somewhere else to go... I'm not aware of myself, I'm just aware
of the track, like the track is my thoughts.
What might be the takeaway points from this exploration of the musical minds of teens and tweens?
Well, thanks to digital portable technologies we're surrounded, perhaps as never before,
by an incredible range of musics.
Music is clearly a powerful resource with which to customise subjective experience
and it seems that it's particularly powerful for young people in scaffolding aspects
of their general development, such as emotional maturity and experimentation with identity.
And understanding the ways in which young people make sense of music
and the ways that they use music can help us as listeners and as
musicians to really reflect on the beneficial and detrimental aspects of music,
and the powerful potential of music - self-chosen music - as a therapeutic and educational resource.
Thanks for listening.