Music doesn’t have to mean anything. Music has the versatility to be a vacant and semantically empty echo or a terrifying reflection of your most sweltering emotions. Music doesn’t have to mean anything but so many people use it to accompany them during their most vulnerable moments. It can summon incomparable pathos, or it may suppress emotion entirely.
Music almost acts as a sentient companion to our most visceral feelings. Break-ups? You can dig your key into his four-wheel drive or lament to George Michael (who’s always going through something). Grief and music intertwine to form religious hymns that offer a nightlight of community and age-old support whilst in the throes of feeling and memory. Even anger has its place within the musical ecosystem, with the harsh guitar and screeching vocals of heavy metal and grunge music. Music can mimic and hold a mirror to a listener’s rich inside narrative that otherwise feels impossible to vocalise or even access. When you feel your most psychologically inscrutable or hopelessly complex in a way that feels too revealing or vulnerable to discuss with loved ones, or even yourself, Phoebe Bridgers or Elliot Smith hold a unique brand of misery to coax yourself into like a frog in a boiling pot. It can feel kind of exciting when you indulge in your negative emotions, or drown them out, but music can easily become a crutch to stop yourself from actually feeling.
When we are surrounded in a modern world of constant overstimulation it can be important to spend time bored, or alone. If your instrumental spiral is the only way you can even internalise outside stimuli, then the issue arises of music becoming an emotional reflex rather than a tool. Recently I’ve found it important to be able to sit with myself and spend some time allowing myself to feel the emotion out to its fullest, lest I deprive myself of the three dimensional world around me. When all that you hear on a daily basis is bleak or furious, slipping into negativity becomes a practised pattern, and formulating your own ideas can become harder and harder.
From what I understand, most people use music as either a way to intensify and wallow within all-consuming emotions or to dull them. Do you open the floodgates and feel everything at one hundred percent, or do you attempt to smother any burgeoning source of discontent in some very loud music? Like with most things in life, perhaps the answer is a happy medium between the two. If you hide yourself away within your music, now might be the time to peel back that cocoon and sit with what you’re feeling. As music gradually becomes more of an escape mechanism, it becomes harder to picture a life where you floated through without it.
However, while noting that processing through music comes with its own risks, there are countless positives too. There are benefits to listening to music when emotions are high in everyday life, but also in more specialised areas too. Music has actually had a long-term role as an established form of therapy. Saarikallio et al suggests music therapeutic emotional processing is a ‘consititution of three factors: expression, awareness and pain’, and that the unique synthesis of raw emotion and reflection within songs can help patients achieve an understanding of their own emotional wellbeing, thus music acts as a starting point to delve deeper into the spiritual landscape; music ‘serve[s] as a trigger and a symbolic nonverbal expression of emotionally charged experiences’. These spurred experiences are consequentially more easily conveyed with therapists for ‘conscious meaning-making’ i.e. patients can internalise and understand the cause and effect of their psychological triggers.
The conclusion of this study suggests that music catalyses and provokes bursts of emotional clarity. Art as a whole has a unique place within therapy and practice. Patients may be encouraged to write their own lyrics or improvise songs, write poems, paint artworks, sculpt or make short movies to reflect and better understand their own state of mind. This may be because art in itself is a very introspective process that relies fundamentally upon the human state of mind. Meaningful art is often rooted in an artist’s lived experience, which is what makes music so potent as a trigger for emotional overflow. Grasping that some other figure in this broad and isolating world is in the same boat as you, is feeling the same fear or sadness or anger that you feel, is more than enough to provide comfort. Music, while often a cognitive experience, can be so easily transformed into a physical one.
If you’re looking to connect with your music on a more meaningful scale, take moment to reflect on why the music makes you feel the way you do, or what particular lines resonate with you the most.