Personal Narrative: How Music Controls Our Emotions

Imagine when you hear noise, you logical mind does signals you how awful or good is that, but you only pick it up if it strikes your heart! And picking it up is even not that you need. Contrasting to it, when you hear any good music, that soothes you, and you feel an internal energy flowing into your body, mesmerizing its essence everywhere- you not only enjoy it, but you live it, you feel like your heart and brain have just synchronized with each other and that every word of song makes logic and while listening to it, you even use your imagination powers to connect it with some of your past experience or memory?

Music and the sounds that surround us have a way of affecting us before we even enter this world. David Burrows, a music teacher at New York University explains this concept by saying “An unborn child may startle in the womb at the sound of a door slamming shut. The rich, warm cacophony of the womb has been recorded: the mother’s heartbeat and breathing are among the earliest indicators babies have the existence of a world beyond their own skin.” (Storr). This is something a person never outgrows. Whether we intend on it happening or not, the sounds by which we are surrounded affect our mental patterns. Nevertheless, music has the ability to help us heal emotionally and combat our current mental state.

The article provides a general overview of how music can evoke specific memories. Hearing music activates the limbic system, which takes part in controlling the memory and emotions, and automatically, brings up autobiographical and episodic memories. One of the strong emotions that music evokes is nostalgia. In general, this article provides useful background information on that music evokes emotions, but does not necessarily define feelings. Since some sad songs can be associated with happy memories, and happy on opposite --with the

To sum up, overall music enhances my mental health in terms of emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It is rewarding and enjoyable at the same time. Furthermore, music helps me in community development and emphasises empowering ways of working in school’s assignment. The playlist that I created has successfully enhanced my mood. I figured out that the elements in music can result in so many ways. One of the result is that it reduces anxiety and helps maintaining calmness. Another result is that it helps me to relax and stay motivated in life especially during bad days. Additionally, it can boost one self esteem and achieved desired state of mood. Thus, this playlist can be recommended to other people as it bring benefits in terms

As the combination of different sounds travel through out ears, we tend to connect music with certain emotions or memories. For example, to feel that adrenaline rush we select a more upbeat tone in music. If you want a relaxed mood, you listen to something nice and calm with a relaxing melody. According to an article by Mental Health Center, students at Penn State did a study on music and emotions; they showed that people’s emotions have a more positive attitude after they listened to music. Music has a great

As a lacrosse player, I always have to practice. I either shoot at my goal or throw the ball against the wall to work on my stick skills. As I walk out the door, my dad stops me in my tracks.

Music has always been emotionally evocative to me since I was young. I am always able to recall just how extreme the atmosphere and mood can be enhanced by music. Whether at a bitter-sweet moment in a TV show or at a heroic moment in a video game music is always there to multiply the emotions of the scene tenfold. Even today I find myself recalling emotions and feeling them all over again whenever I listen to a particular piece of music, especially so for ones that went along with a highly memorable scene in a show or game. I wind up pumping my fist in the air all over again if inspiring, or fighting back tears if morose. I never knew why music affected me so or how, and so after learning of this assignment I decided it was time I looked into it. Why this story matters is simple. It is simply the reason I ever asked this question. I wanted to know why music could affect emotions to such an extent, and why it could leave such lasting impacts.

Because music bypasses rationality, it goes straight to people’s emotions, Blair pointed out. It involves several brain areas that induce emotions and involve reflexes, conditioning, visual imagery, expectancy, memory, and emotional contagion.

The impact of music on positive psychology and emotion is a well known fact. Music has an extraordinary ability to change people’s emotions. In humans, music has the ability to invoke emotions of sadness, happiness and even fear (Goycoolea, Levy & Ramirez, 2013). The ability of music to alter human mood makes it one of the greatest subjects of positive psychology. Seligman (2011) argued that even though a lot of effort has been spent on psychotherapy and pharmacology, such interventions are not

Thesis: Music is a unique form of sound powerful enough to manipulate mood, feelings, and cognition.

have always had an unexplainable affect on my life. Music seems to have the ability to

If music reveals emotions, it is not a normal emotion like any other (Stecker 273). The expression in music can be considered a traditionalized phenomenon (Stecker 273). There are common questions about

Have you ever sat in the car with someone, and listen to their music and think to yourself “What in the world are they listening to, and why do they like this type of music”. Well, everyone has their own taste in music, and just because you don't admire the music that they listen to doesn't mean they have “bad” taste in music. My father loved to listen to “The Bee Gees”, “The Carpenters”, “Simon & Garfunkel”, and “The Beatles”, growing up listening to my father’s taste of music, my elder sister developed a passion for the same taste of music as my father.

Music elicits an emotional and cognitive response in all who listen to it. It is powerful at the individual level because “it can induce multiple responses – physiological, movement, mood, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral” (Francis, 2008,

Media takes all forms of shapes, from video games to music it influences people daily because we are always surrounded by it. Music especially impacts individuals because in a lot of ways it can say what we want to say in times when we as individuals cannot say it. In those times we lean on music to help us understand the hardship we are going through, or as a mechanism to face our feelings or to block them out. Interpersonal violence which is defined as an individual using power over another in the form of violence whether that be emotional, physical, or sexual. With the many forms of interpersonal violence it’s apparent that it has been expressed in the form of music for quite a while, and sometimes not always in a preventative way. By