Jonas Doerr-
Many people think headphones or earbuds are as essential to a good workout as having the right shoes for running or having $100s in your pocket when going to a yacht club. Not that I’ve been to a yacht club, but I would guess they check your pockets for wads of cash beforehand. But the Lund desk employees will not check your ears for AirPods before you go to work out, so I strolled in with my ears uncovered.
This was not the first time I had done such a devious act. In fact, I regularly worked out without music, aside from the gym speakers blasting something. But this time, my freedom to not listen was questioned.
My friend came up to me and asked how I could work out without music. “You psychopath,” he said. I, of course, took this personally. Why should we have music on to distract us from working out? What’s the point of background music in general?
And since I was questioning the value of background music in general, why should I have to listen to Taylor Swift welcome me to New York thirty times while I work out? Last time I checked, Gustavus is in Saint Peter. I tried to shake it off, but I couldn’t.
On the other hand, maybe I was wrong, and the abundance of music around us was actually a good thing. After all, I had strange ideas all the time, like sleeping on the floor. I needed another opinion; was I really a psychopath for not wanting music on all the time?
I decided to turn to an expert, Dr. Dave Stamps, Associate Professor in music, the director of several jazz groups on campus, and the co-founder of the International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers. If anyone could answer this question, he could: do we have too much music?
Dr. Stamps was gracious enough to entertain my questions, and when I asked him what effects the broad accessibility of music had, he said, “I think choice can be paralyzing – especially without context. In my opinion, our society tends to gravitate towards what is being provided rather than seeking out something new. It is very easy to turn on a streaming service’s radio’ function and just listen to what it’s giving us. And I think that the programming is selected by algorithms to make us not want to change the station rather than to really be excited by it.”
Aha! So the abundance of choice is turning us into helpless goats, consuming whatever morsels Spotify feeds to us. I wanted to confirm that this was accurate about the Gustavus student population, so I headed to the Writing Center. After all, why not kill two birds with one stone? They could help me write this piece.
They didn’t, but the Writing Assistants agreed that it was too hard to choose songs. Junior Writing Assistant Elizabeth Orton said, “I don’t like making decisions. I feel like using other people’s playlists, you never know what you’re going to get, so it’s a surprise, and I can blame it on someone else’s playlist if I don’t like one of the songs.” And Senior Writing Assistant Aiya Jorde said, “I’m too lazy to make playlists.”
It was confirmed. Gustavus students, or at least some of them, couldn’t be bothered to choose music with how many options there were. Alas!
My theory that background music in the weight room was dragging people back seemed to be confirmed so far. It encouraged people to be passive about their music choices and led them away from choosing new music that could excite them and broaden their horizons.
But I still had more questions for Dr. Stamps. Other than this type of passiveness, I asked, what are healthy and unhealthy roles for music in one’s life? He replied, “I don’t know if I agree with music ever being unhealthy (unless you turn it up too loud!). Music provides many types of things for many types of people. I think it is healthier when we engage with music and really listen deeply as opposed to using it as background music.”
Well, that put a damper on my theory. Music is still good, even when on in the background. However, he still made it clear that it is better to be intentional about the music we are listening to. Weight room background music usually is not included in that.
This still hadn’t covered one part of why people might listen to music in the weight room, though. Music can be equivalent to a movie soundtrack for our ordinary lives; it inspires us to feel the right emotions for each moment and can be motivational. Personally, I’m no hobbit. I think I can achieve things without the greatest soundtrack in movie history playing behind me, unlike Frodo.
I asked Dr. Stamps his opinion on this concept, and he said, “If we listen to rage music while working out, we’ll start to associate that type of music with our memories in the gym. If we listen to an album on repeat while on a road trip, we tend to associate those places with that album decades into the future. Which is why I wish that the algorithms weren’t choosing those playlists for us so much of the time. I feel that we’ve lost a lot of nuance in our uniqueness because so many of us are listening to the exact same things.”
It’s a good point. All in all, my theory that we shouldn’t have music was wrong. Instead, I should have said that music should be used in the right way, which is a rather vague statement that definitely needs explanation.
As Dr. Stamps said, allowing algorithms to choose music for us takes away an important part of enjoying music. By selecting what songs we want to hear, we can step out of our comfort zones and find ways to engage with the complexity of what the artists encoded into their music.
Maybe it’s difficult to think about music when you have to focus on adding five pounds to your bench press, but even for those not in this situation, it is worth being more intentional about music. Try choosing some songs in an unfamiliar style of music. Try looking into some artists’ backgrounds to support some you align with. And overall, try taking some time to consider how the music you listen to shapes the way you remember your life.