The chart topping songs from the past couple months. Will these songs be a part of your reminiscence bump?
After writing my last few blog posts, I started to think about the impact of the music we prefer in our youth and young adulthood. One of the things I remember learning in college is that when you are going to a nursing home and working in memory care, use the music that would have been popular when these clients were teens to their late twenties. It made me wonder if we are attached to music from our adolescence and young adulthood. I know a lot of adults who still listen to the music from the 80’s because they say it was the best music to be made. I also know that musical memory is one of the last things to go, so we use that quite often in our practice. Those two ideas led me to my assumption: we are attached to and prefer music from our adolescence because it’s tied to our identity and memories. I decided to try and find some research literature on this idea.
My reasoning
It is during this time in our lives that we start to form our identities. I think of Junior high, High school, and early adulthood as the time that we figure out who we are, what our values are, our likes and dislikes, our beliefs, how we see the world and others, and our role in relationships and the workforce. So it makes sense that the music that we listen to at that time would be tied to that identity of ourselves that we build. Identity is also influenced by the people we are around, such as our friends and family, as well as our environment.
My other reason for why we may be attached to and prefer music from that time is because of memories. There are so many milestones we go through during that time in our lives, which means there are so many memories of big events and music then tied to those events. A song that played during your first kiss, graduation, or your wedding.
Research on music preferences
I read a research article by Bonneville-Roussy, Rentfrow, Xu, & Potter (2013) that collected data on musical engagement and preferences. For the purpose of this blog, I am going to focus on the preferences data.
Method
In the study 254,825 participants between the ages of 12 and 65 filled out an online questionnaire. Each age had at least 164 participants. Music preferences were assessed by using a test called the STOMP-R or Short Test of Music Preferences. Participants used a 7-point Likert scale to express how much they liked each genre. Another test used was the ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) was used to assess the Big Five domains of personality: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Music genres were assessed and categorized by MUSIC, the groupings being mellow, unpretentious, sophisticated, intense, and contemporary.
Results
The scores of how much they liked the music genres were then compared to their ages and their results in the Big Five personality domains. Preferences for music categorized as mellow, unpretentious, and sophisticated increased as age increased, while preference for music categorized as intense and contemporary decreased as age increased. There was also a relation between the five domains and the scores. Participants who showed higher levels of openness rated mellow, sophisticated, and intense music genres higher. Those with higher levels of agreeableness rated unpretentious music genres higher. High extraversion led to higher ratings of unpretentious and contemporary music. Lastly, higher conscientiousness led to higher ratings of unpretentious music genres but lower ratings of intense music genres.
What does this mean
The results indicate that our music preferences seem to correlate with our personality, an integral part of our identity. It is also worth noting that categories like mellow and contemporary are most popular during young adulthood, a time of forming close relationships, and unpretentious and sophisticated music is most popular in adulthood when family and career are the focus. This means that our preferences may also be in relation to our stage in life. Our big five domains grow and change as we grow and change. Neuroticism is higher during adolescence, and agreeableness and conscientiousness are low but they don’t necessarily stay that way.
So why do we use music from their youth and young adulthood with memory care patients? The answer is a phenomenon called the reminiscence bump.
Research on music and the reminiscence bump
The reminiscence bump is the “disproportionate recall of memories from between the ages of 10 to 30 years in comparison with other lifetime periods”. We know that music is tied to memory and that music memory is one of the last forms of memory to go. The article by Jakubowski, Eerola, Tillmann, Perrin, & Heine (2020) studied reminiscence bumps in music-related memories.
Methods
There were 470 participants between the ages of 18 to 82. These participants were shown the titles and artists of 111 popular songs that spanned from 1950 to 2015. Popular songs were decided by picking songs that topped the charts during these years. Participants then rated how familiar they were with the song, how much they liked it, and the “degree to which they had autobiographical memories associated with each song”.
Results
The respondents were split into four groups based on their age, with a similar number of participants in each group. All four of the groups showed a reminiscence bump for songs that appeared in the charts when the participants were between the ages of 5 and 14. For 42 to 55-year-olds, that age extended to 19. For participants 56 and up the age extended to 24. When looking at the data, the highest point of the reminiscence bump was between 15 to 19 for the two older groups and 10 to 14 for the younger two groups. The songs rated highest in familiarity were from when the participants were 10 to 19. While most respondents showed higher scores of liking the music from their reminiscence bump, the youngest group showed higher ratings for music of their parents’ reminiscence bump.
Most liked music decade
18-29- 1976-1985
30-41- 1981-1985
42-55- 1976-1985
55+- 1961-1965
What this means
We recall memories from our reminiscence bump better than memories from other points in our lives. This carries over to music too. The music we listen to during those ages is important in recalling memories of that time. Our preferences for music do not always match the popular music of that time.
Take away
I was correct about memory and identity being tied to music, but I was off about our preferences.
We don’t reach the age of thirty and just stop listening to new music. Like everything else in our lives, our preferences continue to grow and change. Just because you listened to scene music when you were a teen does not mean that is the music you listen to for the rest of your life, for better or worse. This isn’t to say that you won’t still enjoy it, but that your brain is not locked into only liking music from when you were fourteen.
Something that surprised me
As for those adults that I know who are still obsessed with 80’s music from their teens, the study showed that people of all ages ranked music from the 70’s and 80’s higher in their liking.
GraceAnne
My sources
Bonneville-Roussy, A., Rentfrow, P. J., Xu, M. K., & Potter, J. (2013). Music through the ages: Trends in musical engagement and preferences from adolescence through middle adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(4), 703–717. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033770
Jakubowski, K., Eerola, T., Tillmann, B., Perrin, F., & Heine, L. (2020). A Cross-Sectional Study of Reminiscence Bumps for Music-Related Memories in Adulthood. Music & Science, 3. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059204320965058 (Original work published 2020)
Lullaby in Ragtime from the 1959 movie The Five Pennies that my grandparents sang to me as a child that holds a lot of meaning to me.
A big part of music therapy is the use of preferred music. As people, our taste in music has a tendency to change across our lives, so I thought as a way for you to get to know me better I would share a playlist, a timeline of sorts, of the music that I have listened to and loved throughout my life up to this point. As you will see my taste in music has been all over the place and I am now a conglomerate of all those genres and music phases I went through.
After making my list I realized that it was far too long to include in one blog post so this week will be part one.
EARLY CHILDHOOD
My earliest memories of music are nursery rhymes and lullabies. My mom used to sing the first two to me and my siblings, especially the second one when we would be driving at night and the mood would be out. The third song is one that is still very special to me. My grandparents would sing this song to my sister and I whenever we were staying over and it was bedtime. There are three parts to this song that all layer over each other. One day I’ll learn the final part.
Rock a bye baby
I see the moon
Lullaby in Ragtime
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
A lot of the music I consumed as a child was from whatever was on the radio. The radio station most played in the car was WIBI, a Christian radio station. All the singing that I did in front of people happened at church as part of the children’s choir and sometimes as solos. All three of these songs are ones that I either sang in a group or by myself.
I Can Only Imagine – MercyMe
Amazing Grace (My Chains are Gone) – Chris Tomlin
Praise You In This Storm – Casting Crowns
MIDDLE SCHOOL
Disney/Pop
Any music I listened to that wasn’t heard while in the car was from CD’s played on a Boombox. My first CD and prized possession was Hannah Montana. I eventually leveled up to a knock off MP3 player that was bright pink loaded up with random songs my dad pirated off the internet. I sang songs three and five in talent shows.
If We Were A Movie – Hannah Montana
Fly With Me – The Jonas Brothers
Do You Believe in Magic – Aly and AJ
E.T. – Katy Perry
Mean – Taylor Swift
Demi Lovato
This was still at the same time as the previous grouping, but Demi gets their own category because I listened to the Here We Go Album religiously on my MP3 player. I could probably still sing all the words to every song on that album.
Every Time You Lie
World of Chances
U Got Nothing On Me
JUNIOR HIGH
My “country” phase
I struggle to even call it country because I only listened to Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert. Mostly I was trying to relate to all the other kids at my school going through their country phase but I also wanted to branch out to music outside of Disney and what my dad downloaded for me.
Before He Cheats – Carrie Underwood
Blown Away – Carrie Underwood
Mama’s Broken Heart – Miranda Lambert
Alt- pop
(At this point we’re getting to music I still listen to)
After my short lived country phase was my “emo” one. It continued on to high school and still has a big chunk of my heart. I didn’t listen to a lot of artists though. I didn’t venture very far past Fall Out Boy. It was also the music that my friends were listening to.
Fall Out Boy
Sugar, We’re Going Down Swinging
My Songs Know What You Did in The Dark
Alone Together
Takeaways
This is just 13 years of music tastes. It is important to realize how as an adolescent our tastes were always changing and growing as we changed, grew, and learned. It’s the same for adolescents now. Variety is always good when bringing music selections to sessions, especially in classrooms. This reminded me to be open and not so stuck in the music that I listen to now most days.
My room set up for lessons that I used to be terrified about teaching
Part of my homework as an intern at MTC is to write a daily journal about how the day went and my thoughts and reflections. Yesterday, I wrote about the fear of the unknown and struggling when something is new and you feel like you don’t know where to start or have no control. While writing that journal entry, I knew it was something that I wanted to expand upon. We all have to deal with new things or doing things that give us anxiety whether we are a music therapy intern or not.
As I move further into my internship, I’m having more added to what I am doing and I know that will continue. One of those things is leading. This week I led for the first time. Just one song here and there during different sessions that I had learned for my repertoire check last week. It was exciting and scary and somehow felt both big and small at the same time. On one hand it was big because it was my first time leading since finishing my course work a while ago as well as my first time doing any leading at MTC but on the other hand it felt small because it was just a song, something I have done for a long time. It’s always relative. When I felt like the song didn’t go well it became such a big thing in my head but when it went well a couple hours later it was just something small I had achieved. As humans I think we have the tendency to make our mistakes or losses so much bigger than our wins. While I am currently leading one song, in the near future I will be leading whole sessions and it will be on me to plan and facilitate them. Starting in October I will be taking over two different sessions: a contract at a school and our Listen and Learn class. This was the week I started to really plan out the Listen and Learn class and figure out the music. So currently I don’t feel too nervous about it but I have found myself freaking out about going and leading sessions at the school.
To be honest I have always struggled with anxiety and OCD and in turn may have become somewhat of a “control freak”. For me, feeling like I have control over some part of the situation helps alleviate my anxiety. In new situations I don’t always know everything, like where to even start on a plan for October. In this case I don’t know what music to prepare or how that changes amongst the ages of students so I start to feel anxious and out of control. So I decided to share my process with you in the hopes that if you ever feel anxious and out of control when something new pops up maybe you won’t feel alone or will have some place to start so that you can get through. When you break it down sometimes it doesn’t feel so big.
Why am I feeling anxious?
I can’t do anything unless I know why. In this case I am anxious because I don’t have much experience with schools and though I have three weeks until I would even lead I feel like I am jumping feet first. At the point of writing this I haven’t even observed yet so my brain can make the situation as big and scary as possible
What do I have control over?
In my case there is more that I can control than I thought. I can go to the music therapist that worked with them before and talk about what worries me. I can ask to meet and talk through ideas for sessions and learn about what music they like. I can listen to the radio to learn what songs are popular right now and make and listen to a playlist of music they have used in the past. I can control how I think about it and not allow myself to go into the worst case scenario. I can also change how I talk to myself. I have education and I wouldn’t be here if my supervisors didn’t think I could do it.
What is it that I am afraid of happening?
In this case, I realized that I was worried about crashing and burning when it comes time to lead. I know I will write a plan and facilitate it. I am worried that it won’t work and then I will have to use the plan that doesn’t work two more times. In figuring this out I can then focus on what would be the outcome if it didn’t work. I would just have to try something different the next time. As my mom always told me growing up: “The world won’t end. The sun will still rise in the morning and the Earth will keep on turning”. Even if it doesn’t go well. Making a mistake is not a personal failure or reflect on me and somehow make me unworthy of being a music therapist.
Making a gameplan
Next week I go to observe. I am sure that will clear up a lot of anxiety for me once I actually see the group and see what is done in the group. Until then I am going to work on listening to music outside of my Spotify playlist and listen to what is on the radio. I am also going to be patient with myself and allow myself to feel whatever it is I feel even if it is nervous.
Last thoughts
In Music Therapy we can’t control and micromanage how the session goes. That is just not how it works. We don’t know for sure how a client will respond and you have to be able to adapt as necessary. I know I can’t control every aspect of life and that my worry of doing badly comes from a place of wanting to be the best I can be for my clients. We all learn as we go and I am still learning to let go of some things. I know I will accomplish so much over the course of my internship and that starts with doing new and scary things. I have done scary things before like teaching lessons since I started at MTC and learned that I love doing it so much. No one likes doing things that scare them, but it is in these moments that we can learn the most. If we never leave our box of what makes us comfortable, how can we ever grow?
My name is GraceAnne Prince and I am the new intern at Music Therapy Connections.
A little about me
I was born and raised in Rochester Illinois, so I am no stranger to Springfield. I have two brothers and a sister and between all of us there are too many cats to count. Currently, I have two cats Pomegranate (Pom) and Kiwi but I am an avid believer in the cat distribution system so I will probably end up with more.
I graduated from Rochester High School where I had a wonderful music education and was involved in Madrigals, vocal jazz, and the musicals. After high school, I went on to study Music Therapy at Western Illinois University. While there, I was a part of many ensembles including University Singers, Chamber Singers, Vocal Jazz, and Jazz Combo and was a part of the WIU Music Therapy Association. After being in Macomb for the five years I was in school, I am finally back in my home town.
Outside of internship I love to nap, sing, play guitar, snuggle with my cats, and spend time with my family, friends, and my partner. I also really love theater and have been involved in shows at the Muni and the Hoogland. I have been singing and performing since I was two years old!
My journey to Music Therapy and MTC
I decided I wanted to be a Music Therapist almost ten years ago. When I was fifteen I did some research on what resources were available to siblings of children with Autism. My brother was diagnosed with Autism when he was sixteen and I was eight so it was a topic close to heart. In my search I came across a research paper about a music therapy group for the siblings of Autistic children. This paper led me to the website of the American Music Therapy Association where I read as much as I could about music therapy. At that moment I decided that music therapy is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Lucky for me MTC was close to the town I grew up in and I knew of it before going off to college. When asked in school where I thought I would go for an internship, I always said I thought I would end up here. It took a while and plans changed but things came together. I moved back home and quickly found out that MTC was open to taking an intern and now I am here.
My first week
This week, although short because of Labor Day, was my first week. I got to observe multiple therapists in a multitude of settings in both group and individual sessions. In one week I saw as many sessions as I would see in one semester at college. At Western I never really got the chance to observe because COVID hit and we were all sent home the semester I was supposed to observe. Getting to observe has been a really cool opportunity. It has given me the chance to slow down and rely on what I learned at WIU. When I observe I write down everything I see and then I get to discuss with the music therapist after the session and compare notes. I know I am going to grow and learn so much over the course of my internship here.
My takeaways from this week
FLEXIBILITY Plans change, sometimes you can’t plan at all, and sometimes new things are thrown at you. You have to be flexible. It is something I have been working on and continue to work on. In this field of work you always have to be ready to change plans and go with what is being given to you. I loved seeing the music therapists I observed having to be flexible and how they did so with such grace.
SELF COMPASSION During a meeting I had this week I talked about how I struggle to not listen to my inner critic on every matter. When you are starting something new, in my case internship rather than school, it is easy to be critical and doubt every decision I make. My focus as I continue is self compassion. If I wouldn’t say it to a friend or a client why would I say it to myself.
I AM A MUSIC THERAPIST In the same vein as self compassion was this declaration. It has been hard for me to see past the fact that I am still technically a student. This has led to me questioning everything I do. In a meeting with my supervisor she told me this. This has become somewhat of a mantra over the last couple of days when I start to doubt myself. While not certified yet, with every day of internship I am on my way.
I want to thank you for embarking on this journey with me. I know this is just the beginning but I have a feeling it’s going to be a good one.
A sweet drawing that a well-wisher drew on the chalkboard wall in our lobby at Music Therapy Connections.
Recently, my coworker Laura shared a great new Jason Mraz song, “Look For The Good”, with our team. It’s a beautiful song about looking for the good amidst troubling times in your life. I immediately realized that it might be beneficial for some of the people I work with, especially in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic.
I was able to collaborate with my supervisor Katey on a music therapy activity to go along with it. As all of our sessions now take place via Zoom or pre-recorded video, this activity was designed to be done by the participant on his/her own, instead of during a live, in person session. However, it can be modified to fit the needs of the people you work with.
Music Therapy Connections provides so many unique opportunities for their students: the chance to learn more than one instrument during their lesson, 2 studio-wide recital days each year, and mini-recitals throughout the year. One of my favorite events, the Adult Recital, occurred last week!
MTC welcomes people of all ages through our doors for lessons and music therapy services. Yes, this includes adults! I applaud all of our adult students who choose to learn a new instrument or refine their pre-existing skills. It’s definitely not easy!
