The Soundtrack of Our Lives
Series | Making Sense · SOUND
The Music We Carry Into Every Space
One afternoon, I was grocery shopping when Ace of Base came on over the speakers. It was music from my teenage years, and before I knew it I was singing along in my head and actually enjoying what's usually a pretty routine errand. I wondered if someone had put that playlist together with the afternoon crowd in mind. Maybe it was a coincidence, but the music changed how that place felt to me. At another store, the opposite happened. The instrumental background music was so mournful that I ended up putting my headphones on just so I could keep browsing. I was struck by how something so seemingly minor could make me want to stay or leave, and it got me thinking about how much of our everyday experience is shaped by what we hear.
To me, music is like a tinted overlay on a place. The architecture keeps its proportions and the objects stay right where they are, but what we perceive shifts with the sound around them. A familiar song can make a place you've never been feel strangely like yours, and an unsettling track can bring tension into a perfectly calm room. But the effect also depends on who's listening. We all walk in carrying our own associations, tastes, and memories, and they color how we hear the music someone else picked for us. What feels like a lovely atmosphere to one person may leave someone else cold, or even make them uneasy.
The Music We Carry With Us
A few weeks ago, I found myself watching Guns N' Roses videos. I saw them live when I was eleven. It was my first concert. Watching those videos took me back to learning their lyrics as a teenager, following along in the lyric booklets that came with the albums. Since the songs were in English, I often learned the words through the music before I really understood what they meant. Listening to them again all these years later brought some of that back, including the thrill of discovering something that completely captivated me back then. It still amazes me that a song you've heard a hundred times can stay so tightly bound to one chapter of your life, and for a few minutes carry you back to a way of feeling you thought you'd left behind.
Plenty of research has looked at the link between music and autobiographical memory. Researchers like Petr Janata have studied how familiar songs can unlock memories tied to specific moments in our lives. Other studies have shown that the music we hear in our formative years tends to carry special emotional weight, although that varies from person to person and from culture to culture. We also inherit music from our families and our generation, songs that were around long before we were old enough to choose them. Over time, a single song picks up layers: where we first heard it, who we used to listen to it with, something that happened later and changed what it meant. And that story keeps unfolding every time we hear it again.
Memory explains a lot of what music does to us, but some reactions happen right there, while we're listening. Certain voices or passages can give us chills, goosebumps, or a rush of emotion we feel right in our bodies. Scientists studying the so-called “musical chills,” also known as frisson, have linked these reactions to the brain's pleasure and reward systems. What I find most intriguing is anticipation: we wait for a voice to come in, for a melody to come back around, for the chorus to finally kick in. A composer plays with those expectations over time, deciding when to deliver, when to hold back, and when to surprise us. Part of the emotion lives in that gap between what we expect to hear and what actually happens, and it's something I think about a lot when I imagine how experiences unfold in space.
Composing an Experience
In film, it's easy to see how music shapes the way we read what's on screen. Put the same sequence of images to different music and it can mean something completely different. Sound can build tension before anything visible happens, hint that something is about to change, or turn an ordinary scene into an intensely charged moment. Spatial design works with sequences in time too, just with different materials. We shape paths, transitions, and shifts in intensity. We decide what someone finds when they walk in, how long they linger in a room, and what happens as they move into the next one. Music can be part of that composition, moving alongside the visitor or tying the passing of time to the space they're moving through.
Tempo, volume, instrumentation, and the cultural associations each genre brings with it all help shape the atmosphere of a place. Sound also plays off the physical space: the size of a room, the surfaces that bounce back or soak up certain frequencies, how far away you are from the speakers. In a hotel, music can be as much a part of its identity as the lighting, the materials, and the way the furniture is arranged. In an installation, it can mark the shift from one room to the next, build anticipation, or set a rhythm that's different from the world outside. Each of those choices quietly feeds into how visitors perceive the space, often without them noticing the music at all.
Studies on the music played in stores and public spaces have found connections between certain qualities of sound and how fast people move, how long they stay, and some of what they buy. The results depend on context, and researchers have also found that musical elements interact with one another and with everything else going on in the environment. That matters a lot in multisensory experiences, where music is one piece of a bigger composition. A musical choice can serve an aesthetic, emotional, or functional purpose, but whether it works also depends on who the audience is and what kind of experience you're trying to create.
Who Builds the Experience?
When we design a sound environment, we're deciding how we want a place to be perceived. We might choose music to bring calm, anticipation, or energy, and pair it with certain materials, colors, and lighting. But every visitor walks in with their own story, and that story inevitably becomes part of the experience. A song that brings back a happy memory for one person might make another feel a little sad; an unfamiliar piece can spark curiosity, indifference, or discomfort. Even the same song can hit us differently depending on the moment. That's the point where the designer's intention meets the visitor's interpretation, and something built with great care ends up carrying meanings its creator could never fully have predicted.
In some sound installations, that relationship between design and participation becomes physical. In Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet, forty choir voices play separately through forty speakers placed around the room. You can walk among them, lean in toward one voice, step away from another, or listen to them blend from different spots. The composition is set in advance, but no two walks through the room sound quite the same. The body shapes what you hear, and where you stand becomes part of the work. I'm drawn to this idea because it lets us think of spatial experience as a meeting point between the conditions we create and the choices, associations, and perceptions of the people moving through them.
Everyday life complicates this even further. These days we can walk into any place with our own music, picking a soundtrack to get across town, kill time at the airport, or wander through a shared space. Headphones let us lay our own atmosphere over one someone else designed, and that changes how we relate to our surroundings. For those of us who design experiences, this raises an interesting question about how far our choices really reach. We can compose an environment, set certain conditions, and point it in an emotional direction, but every visitor is still free to read it through their own story, or even to change it.
Something I love about music as a design tool is that a song chosen for hundreds of people can become deeply personal to just one of them. A place's soundtrack is part of its identity, but its effect is also shaped by what each person recognizes, remembers, or imagines while listening. That afternoon at the grocery store, someone had picked a handful of songs to keep a bunch of strangers company while they shopped. For me, those songs came loaded with decades of memories. At that other store, I'd put my headphones on to escape music that didn't feel like mine. In that aisle, I didn't need them: without realizing it, someone had put on part of the soundtrack of my life. What a fascinating idea: that one song can live inside so many personal stories at once, and that an ordinary space can become, for a few minutes, the place where different times in our lives meet again. //SC