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Listening to music is important because of the nostalgia, identity and aesthetic pleasure it gives us.
As a second-year international student, music has been a critical part of getting used to being away from home. Living far from home isn’t easy for anyone. You have to learn how to navigate the world on your own. Sometimes, silence can become suffocating, as thoughts and memories from home come rushing in.
Nostalgia hits, and missing home is inevitable. Talking about your feelings is a good way to process them, but sometimes we don’t want to because sadness is complicated to express if you can’t quite put your finger on the source. Sometimes we just want to experience those feelings without the silence around us.
Music helps us fill that silence.
Music is part of my identity. It helps me understand and express how I feel. During my first semester of college, sometimes I would feel homesick, and I knew that if I called my mom, I would cry harder because I missed having her voice close to me. So instead, I listened to music.
Noah Kahan was one of the artists that helped me understand those feelings. His songs reflect on home, growing up and leaving something familiar behind. I listened to his lyrics while I was in my dorm, adjusting to Bloomington’s summer heat. In “Northern Attitude,” he says, “You’re gettin’ lost, You’re gettin’ high. All alone, late in life. Scared to live, scared to die.” This helped me understand that I didn’t need to stop missing home just because I’m living new experiences, and that it’s OK to experience both. Music has been helping me that way throughout college. It didn’t stop homesickness, stress or uncertainty, but it gave me a place to put those feelings.
In other moments, I wanted music that matched the excitement of living a dream. I had a beautiful campus surrounding me as I met new people and went to a plethora of events offering new experiences. I wanted a playlist that captured those emotions, and the artist P1Harmony gave me that sense of enjoyment. The group’s lively beats and playful energy matched my excitement. Their music gave rhythm to my feelings and made bright new opportunities more important to me by helping me to enjoy them.
Listening to music can influence how we feel. According to research from Harvard Medical School, music activates brain areas involved with emotion and memory, including the hippocampus, the amygdala and the limbic system. Music’s emotional qualities can affect our nervous system, helping regulate involuntarily processes like heart rate and breathing. P1Harmony’s energetic sound connected with my excitement after the experiences, when I was walking back to my dorm. Music didn’t create those experiences, but it did become part of them.
Some researchers suggest music can help reduce stress, improve your mood and increase motivation. According to the professional health journalist and editor Crystal Raypole, music can activate the brain’s reward centers, which may provide motivation while working or increase your learning outcomes.
In other moments, music is more than a relatable rhythm or lyrics we like — it becomes part of the memory. Years from now, we might listen to a song and remember our college years, like the moment where you met your current friends or when you got a good grade because of all the studying you did or when you arrived on campus for the first time.
Some of us already make playlists for different experiences. I have one for studying, for when I want to feel like a movie character and, of course, for when I miss home. Each playlist has its own purpose, and choosing the right songs for those specific moments helps with processing your feelings, rather than having music randomly playing in the background. The songs we choose become attached to the stage of life we are living in while we listen to them.
Of course, music doesn’t have to be everything you listen to. Maybe podcasts relax you, or shows make you laugh. But something will always fill the silence. Whatever you are listening to is not trying to make you ignore your feelings, but it’s wanting to help you to understand and process them.
Tomorrow’s song might eventually become the song that reminds you of this semester. We don’t know which moments will stay with us or which songs will become attached to them. But somewhere between our walks to class, our late nights of study sessions or the afternoons with friends, we’re already slowly creating the soundtrack of our college season.
Astrid Alomia (she/her) is a sophomore studying journalism with a concentration in public relations and a minor in marketing.
