Pop. Classical. Hip Hop. Punk. Country. Alternative. Jazz. Metal. Bluegrass. Rap.
No matter what you prefer to listen to in your spare time ,your taste in music shouldn’t matter in popular circles. No, not even if you listen to Miley Cyrus’ new single 40 times in a row each day. It just shouldn’t matter.
But why? One: It’s more important that you’re listening to music. Two: Music you find pleasing isn’t really in your control. Three: Musical prejudice is just another superficial way for us to create boundaries and groups between us.
Listening to music isn’t just fun, it’s proven to make your healthier and even to help get you better grades in class.
Music has been proven to help with back pain by a study from Austria’s General Hospital in Salzberg. They found that when slow rhythms are played our blood pressure and heartbeat slow down, which helps slow our breathing, reducing muscle tension in the neck, shoulders and back. Not only that, but pleasing music can settle psychological tension.
Another study conducted at the Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia found that listening to music while you work out can give you up to 11 percent more productivity. Listening to some music releases endorphins, which then contributes to lifting our moods and making our motivation to exercise last longer.
Now, how about those grades? A study from Norway’s Sogn Og Fjordane College found that patients with severe memory loss could remember significantly more when they looked over the material while they were listening to music. So, just turn on something low and get an A on that exam.
Listening to music obviously helps in a variety of ways, but what’s even more important is that what genre you want to listen to isn’t entirely in your hands. Like your taste buds tell you what foods you like to eat, your biology also works to inform you which music is pleasing. Now, how does that work?
Your music preferences are, oddly enough, sealing in adolescence. At around age 10, you start to throw out the music that doesn’t fit with what you consider “good.” At age 12, studies have proven to use those musical preferences to help you find a niche in the world; at around 14 years old, your musical preferences are set, they’re not going to change much. Even though music has evolved over the years, do the rhythms, beats, and lyrics of the music you listen to now really differ greatly from what you listened to when you were middle school?
But how does you decide what’s pleasing? Just like you can easily distinguish between “sad” and “happy” music, your brain is wired to in a specific way to tell you what is pleasing. You can easily differentiate between what music might be played at a funeral and what might be played at a birthday party, right? The same neural processes help you decide what music you’re fond of. Sometimes it even has to do with your ear and what it can handle.
It doesn’t matter what music you like to listen to. Taking music taste and drawing lines between the genres and their fans is just another way society is working to create groups within the population. We already have too many factors pushing us into different cliques, why not just be happy that our friends like music at all instead of sneering at them for what it is they listen to?
How about we all stop looking at the superficial aspects of each other and look at the actual person behind the headphones?
Photo courtesy of Anna Mathias
