The Psychology of Music
Music can make us feel almost anything. Music can inspire us, move us to tears, strengthen our resolve, depress us, motivate us, and make us feel understood. Every culture on earth possesses some sort of musical tradition. Most religions incorporate music into their forms of worship. Films and TV shows constantly use music to make us feel what they want us to feel. The philosopher Simon Critchley writes in Mysticism (2024) that, when listening to the music one loves, it is impossible to be an atheist.
I know the feeling. I have never been a musical person, nor much of a music lover, but listening to Peter Gabriel’s “It Is Accomplished” always makes me feel like the Christian I have long since ceased to be. Likewise, I am not much of a patriot, but patriotic music can make me feel like one, however momentarily. Popular music has a way of making one feel part of the culture, of the generation, of the society in which it is popular.
Because music has such a capacity to shape our emotions, music itself has enormous power. We are emotional creatures. That which can influence our emotions can influence our behavior. It is no coincidence that music plays a central role in countless manifestations of propaganda. To give just one example, consider how Donald Trump has used his pop music playlist to reinforce his populist image among his adoring fans.
Music, according to neuroscience, “lights up” almost the entire brain. It particularly affects the parts of the brain associated with emotional regulation. There are innumerable benefits to this form of neural activity, which have been covered exhaustively elsewhere. What concerns me here, rather, is why we so rarely address the potential misuses of music, given the influence it can wield over us as individual and social beings.
Take, for example, the difference in various attitudes toward the visual arts and toward music. The Ten Commandments forbid graven images of the divine, and the Abrahamic religions – even Catholicism, to an extent – have always had a difficult relationship with sacred imagery as a result. Some of these traditions, or denominations within them, have also proscribed music, or certain forms of it, but wholesale opposition to it, of the sort that has frequently been leveled against representational art, has been comparatively rare.
Somehow music does not attract the same kind of distrust from moral guardians, which is quite strange, considering that music is at least as influential as visual art, and probably more so. I once intended to major in art history, and as a result, I quickly got used to hearing the stock phrase “I don’t get art.” I’ve never heard anyone say the same of music. Sure, someone might not “get” certain types of music – the more experimental manifestations of it, for instance – but music in general seems to reach directly to an intuitive level where explanation is not required.
This, of course, is what makes music so useful to religions, governments, filmmakers, advertisers, and any other source of propaganda. I do not wish to make any of these sources sound too nefarious, but it’s worth noting that all of them have an incentive to encourage emotional rather than rational decision-making. Music, as a particularly intuitive, emotionally manipulative artform, has a unique capacity to subordinate reason to emotion.
If Critchley is right and it’s impossible for an atheist to be an atheist when listening to the music they love, imagine how difficult it must be to think straight if the music one loves is featured in a commercial. People make impulsive purchases all the time on the basis of much less positive associations. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you buy almost anything. This applies to the buying of ideas as much as to the buying of commodities.
When we listen to a particular piece of music, we are listening to everything we associate with that music. Religious experiences are often associated with music, at least in the Christian tradition. Listening to such music can allow the believer to relive their conversion at will. Yet any song or tune can transport us, temporarily, to an altered state. In this sense, when listening to music, we are all like Catholics, who, as the priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley said in The Catholic Imagination (2000), “live in an enchanted world.” Other denominations tend to rely more on music to influence their followers because they are more averse to the iconography and other visual paraphernalia that give Catholicism its distinctive appearance and unique enchantment.
As such, music serves to reinforce any narrative we associate with it. Countries do not tend to have a national painting (France and the Mona Lisa being a possible exception) but every country has a national anthem. Soldiers have marched in step to the rhythms of musical instruments and chants for millennia. When everyone knows the same songs, it fosters a sense of group identity, one which can, at least temporarily, supersede other differences. Music is therefore invaluable in the establishment and maintenance of in-groups, massaging individuals into masses. When intoned by a crowd, it can give each member of that crowd the enchanted feeling of literally being a part of a larger body and purpose.
This places it in stark contrast to a motionless image, with which one can only commune as an individual. A painting, statue, or photograph can move us deeply. Such images affect us on the basis of certain relatively universal laws of human psychology. Nevertheless, they do not tell us how to feel anywhere near as deeply as music because they do not light up as much of the brain and do not stir our emotions so forcefully. To study an image is a more aesthetic, intellectual experience, one which lends itself more to deep thought and less to deep emotion than listening to music.
I suspect that this is why so many religious traditions are so wary of graven images. Religious imagery encourages the individual to commune with the divine on a one-to-one basis while religious music encourages one to submerge oneself in the crowd. The study of images teaches us to think for ourselves. Some might perceive a contradiction between this claim and the popularity of religious imagery in Catholicism. Surely the Catholic Church, of all institutions, cannot be said to teach people to think for themselves? However, as Greeley notes, practicing Catholics are actually much less likely to obsess about the specific teachings of their church than, say, the supposedly “free” Southern Baptists. The relative importance of visual art to the former and music to the latter is only part of the reason for this, but an illuminating part.
Hierarchies, of course, prefer us to accept what they tell us uncritically. They have their own reasons to be wary of music, but it is too useful a tool to pass up. This is why, when music is censored or opposed, it is almost always on the basis of its specific content. Rock-and-roll has always been controversial for its chaotic, rebellious character. The 1967 song “Je t’aime…moi non-plus” by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, notorious for its sexually explicit lyrics, was banned in several countries and condemned by the Vatican. The forces that try to stop us listening to certain music generally do so with a distinct notion of what we should be listening to instead.
In short, music often enters our ears with an agenda. It enters not only to make us feel a certain way but to make us feel that way for a reason. It can serve to maintain the status quo, to disrupt it, or to create a new one. My point here is not to argue against music or its appreciation. If anything, it is the opposite. We can only gain a deeper appreciation for music by reflecting on its agenda. At the risk of sounding humorless, however, I do consider this a legitimate reason to be a bit warier of music generally. The sheer ubiquity of music, its inescapability, means that we often fail to notice it and how it is influencing us. This is always a worrisome condition.
To summarize, music generally functions to make us feel, rather than to make us think. It brings us together, for better and for worse. It both transcends differences and deepens them, even creates them. When concert crowds cheer their pop stars, they represent the worldly equivalent of cheering Catholics greeting the pope, who, in Greeley’s words, “confirms for them that the enchantment is real, that grace is everywhere, that the stories they’ve heard are true.” Music, like religion, fulfills a real need for most people. Like anything so important, however, it should for that very reason be handled with caution. Above all, if we feel music motivating us to do anything important that we would not otherwise do, that would probably be a good time to pause and reflect.
