Music is all about the experience. Think back to your all-time favorite songs of the past and you’ll probably find you relate them with a place and time in your life. Music brings back memories and makes new memories too.
Good music is universal in that it engulfs and embraces us, igniting our senses. It feels so real, you can almost reach out and touch it, taste it, smell it, and visualize it.
The best music embraces us on an emotional level too. No doubt you have a playlist that can bring you to tears and another that sets your day on fire with motivation.
The Experience of Music
Music affects emotional experience. It can bring joy, sadness, or practically any other feeling a musician wishes to evoke. The study of the psychology of music has been on record since the seventeenth century.
Over the years, we’ve learned that music:
- Is the language of emotions
- Inspires aesthetic emotions that require no response
- Has the ability to mimic emotions
- Provides a safe space to face negative emotions
- May be a learned emotion
- Affects different people different ways
- Speaks what words sometimes can’t
- Has the power to produce biological responses
- Has the capability to heal emotions
- Activates pleasure points in the brain
- Promotes attachment emotions like love, empathy, and compassion
- Helps channel negative emotions
- Entertains the brain
- Has the ability to motivate and inspire listeners
- Possesses the power to change emotions
- Can aid productivity and increase flow
Music can also improve cognitive performance, reduce stress, and help improve memory. People listen to music for multiple reasons. To achieve self-awareness, to cure boredom, to regulate moods, and to express social relatedness are among the most common. Sometimes music catches us, and freeze frames a memory into our minds, permanently attaching that recollection to the tune. Other times, lyrics or a melody stir up a more temporary emotion.
To touch your listener on an emotional level or to spur a reminder of someone or something is a powerful reminder of what being a musician is all about. Playing music is nice but creating an authentic experience for another human being through connecting through your music is an amazing opportunity you don’t want to pass up.
Tips for Creating a Memorable Music Experience
Music is more than a feeling, it’s an experience. If you’re a musician, you know that your music is successful when it moves people. While it may be well played, it’s not always easy to make sure your music provides an emotional experience, however. Buy when you do make that connection, your tunes not just be listened to. They’ll be heard.
These ten pointers can help you take your music appeal on an emotionally connected level with your audience:
- Set the scene. When building a soundtrack or any production with multiple songs, transport your listeners to another time and place by setting the pace such as going from slow, sentimental music to upbeat rhythms. This is especially effective in slide shows and videos. Even a single can have effective scene setting. If your song is about rain, show the rain in your video. Have rain sound effects in your music. Wear a raincoat. Make your listeners see what you are seeing and feel what you are feeling. Be a good storyteller though your songs.
- Don’t be shy with special effects. Listeners love to engage in music and music videos that have added extras like electronic sounds, catchy beats, and the sounds of nature. Creatively adding in something unexpected is great for the experience too like a phone call, birds chirping in the distance, or anything else you can conjure up that goes along with your song.
- Start with the chorus. Studies show that people live things that are familiar because the can relate to them which is soothing to the soul. Consider starting your song with the catchy chorus first as well as in its traditional spot.
- Use your time in the studio wisely. Less is more. Making your tune dynamic is far more effective than it is to just make it long. Employ the professional equipment and gear you’re renting to make the moments matter and leave a lasting impression in the mind of your listeners. Mic feedback, room tone, drummer count-ins and tons of other possibilities are at your fingertips while in the studio.
- Go unfiltered. If you have access to crisp, fresh recordings through professional equipment, performing a tune or two unfiltered engages the audience because they feel like they are there with you in person.
- Instrumentally hook your audience. Vocal hooking is very effective but sometimes instrumentally hooking is even more so because it’s an unexpected way to draw your listeners in.
- On your mark, get set…oh, wait a minute! There’s something about creating a false start that intrigues listeners when played off right. This scenario seems to spark up something within the brain that causes people to think they missed out on something and to listen in closer.
- Step up the passion. Listeners are very cued in on the amount of passion you are pouring into your music…or not. Every note, every eye contact, and every movement adds to communicating with your audience so make sure you genuinely connect with them on every level through embracing the passion behind the story of each song.
- Influence the masses. As a music artist, you can and do make a difference. Think of the message you would most like to spread if you thought your listeners would receive it. Guess what? They will. Music is magic like that so use it to influence your audience with your own convictions and emotions.
- Be authentic. Listeners love musicians they can relate to. Building an experience depends on your creating one between yourself, your music, and those you wish to reach.
The truth of the matter is that through your music, you create an experience for your audience every time you play. Whether it’s a positive one that keep them engaged.