Compelling music vs. wise friends

Every so often friends ask something of you, give unsolicited advice to you or tell you what they really think about your new special friend. And sometimes, every so often, they’re absolutely right.

When told to listen to San Fermin, a Brooklyn-based baroque pop band, I assumed I was being advised for no other reason than to validate my friend’s musical tastes. I was wrong. It was a therapeutic suggestion made from personal and emotional considerations, as if good music weren’t enticing enough.

In lieu of the smiling, nodding and promptly forgetting that I’ve come to realize is the default self-defense, I decided to take such a thoughtful suggestion to heart. Also, I needed something to write about in my column, and this seemed like a better idea than trying to attend belly dancing dressed in sparkles and embarrassment.

San Fermin is a weeklong festival in Spain that includes the encierro (the running of the bulls) and other folkloric events. The band released its self-titled debut in 2013 and bears surprisingly little resemblance to crazed, adrenaline-high Spaniards and tourists running from imminent death. The album, in fact, is a little somber. It follows two angsty lovers through the course of a “hopeless case.”

To really overdo my friend’s suggestion, I opted to listen to San Fermin and nothing else for an entire week. On my way to class: San Fermin; being lazy in my bed: San Fermin; supposedly studying in Tisch: San Fermin. In short, I would be binge listening, or guzzling an individual song at least three times per hour, according to the prophetic wisdom of Urban Dictionary.

Some of the album was tough to enjoy at first, as I zombie-walked to my morning classes on Monday. The songs are intricate compositions, sometimes just too Schoenberg-esque for my own conventional tastes. The more I listened, however, the more I could enjoy, appreciate and relate: a trifecta of addiction. The more I listened, the more I wanted to listen again. It became a compulsion comparable to what I can only assume sniffing cocaine feels like. It is pop, after all.

The neurobiological effects of music are fascinating and largely undetermined, and I wondered if they could delineate some of my own experiences, namely, that thing called wanting to listen during most, if not all, of my opportunities to do so.

We know from archaeology and ancient flutes carved out of bone that music has been popular since the Paleolithic age. We know from brain imaging that emotional music triggers subcortical nuclei integral to reward, emotion and motivation systems. If pleasurable music stimulates reward pathways, my observations don’t seem so far-fetched.

Could my uber-saturation of emotion-laden San Fermin have accentuated the already potent psychological effects of music? Another theory suggests that the pleasure of music, specifically music one plays for oneself through headphones, derives from the locus of control. We don’t always have power to shape our environments, but we can tune them out, taking refuge in a soundscape we create for ourselves. This sounds a lot like the lure of second life video games, as geeky (and creepy) as that sounds.

A third hypothesis claims that solitarily listening to music is a form of social bonding. If that makes no sense, you’re not wrong. But the conjecture goes that even while listening alone, the listener bonds and identifies with the composers, the performers and their emotions. Social bonding, even in this relatively isolating and pathetic shape, occurs in the imagination and feels good nonetheless.

So what can I glean from a week devoted to the evocative San Fermin? Well, listening to exorbitant quantities of music, especially emotional music of good quality, is dangerous. It feels good, but isolating, refreshing, but cyclical. Without variation and moderation, songs become self-confining anthems. Friends are good remedies, even if they do still offer unsolicited advice.