At 7:30 a.m. last Thursday, I woke up to the rumbling of construction that sounded so close, I was convinced someone was drilling on my windowsill. In my sleep-addled state, I mistook the rat-ta-tat-tat of the jackhammer for maracas, and I worried for a second that I’d failed at my task before the day had even begun. I rolled over, trying to reclaim that last hour and a half of sleep before my alarm went off, but, unable to drown out the banging with my usual white noise, I tossed and turned until it was time to go to class.
***
The other night, while on a walk through the Nichols Arboretum with some friends from high school, my closest friend and I split off from the rest of the group. As Itamar and I wandered through the tree-lined paths, we exchanged stories from our summers before moving on to more typical conversation topics:
“Have you listened to anything good lately?”
Every time I see Itamar, this is one of the first questions we ask each other. During our freshman year of high school, we took the bus together every morning, oftentimes splitting earbuds to listen to freshly discovered songs that the other person needed to hear. To this day, we constantly swap recommendations, even though our tastes couldn’t be more different. I love random indie bands, and he’s into classic rock, but music is an all-encompassing force in both of our lives.
Thus, as we walked onward toward the Huron River, Itamar said something that piqued my interest: “I don’t think I could go a day without music.”
I guess in that moment I was hungry for a challenge, or maybe I was just eager to commit to a new bit for the school year. Either way, in reaction to this idea, I told Itamar that for the week of Sept. 3, I would attempt to make it an entire day without listening to music.
The first two days were total failures: My headphones seemed to find their way onto my ears before I even had a chance to think about it. It was an unconscious action — a habit I didn’t even know I had to break. Perhaps I should’ve known, since I listen to music almost constantly: on my walk to classes, while getting ready for bed, while studying, while reading and even while writing. In high school, my parents tried to limit my music listening time to only while doing my math homework, worrying that I would be too distracted to finish my work at a reasonable hour. But I quit math after junior year and seized the loophole, again listening to music when preparing for any class. I currently have a playlist, maybe even two, for every situation I might find myself in: the hourlong drive down to my family’s favorite beach, the songs I play to look cool in front of people I have just met and the monthly playlists spanning over five years. I house lists and lists of song recommendations (from friends, in movies, etc.) in my Notes app — I could regale you with astounding Apple Replay statistics about my music-listening habits across the last few years, but you get the point.
I have always been wholly, maybe irrationally, afraid of walking into crowded rooms by myself. The minute I step through the threshold, I see everyone’s eyes snap toward me, and their laughs and conversations turn pointed and sinister — I must have something in my teeth, or maybe on my face? My walk to class holds similar anxieties: Is my backpack wide open with invaluable papers flying everywhere? Did I unknowingly sit in something? No matter how much I try to reassure myself that I rarely judge others while walking with groups of friends — let alone look at them with anything other than a passing glance — I can’t quite seem to get my mind to settle down.
Music is always my way of quieting those voices, both in my head and in real life. Thus, I felt a wave of anxiety emerge when I couldn’t reach for my headphones on the way to class — the first time I truly felt the absence of music. Since I couldn’t drown out the Diag with my cheesy yacht rock playlist, I used my 10-minute passing period to check in on friends and family, calling at seemingly random intervals throughout their days. It filled the hole of sensory input, although not in the same way — I still found myself wishing for a melody. While eating lunch by myself in the Michigan League, I decided to put my headphones on and turn them to peak noise cancellation, drowning out the chatter of those socializing around me. If I had been blasting “Linger” by the Cranberries, I wouldn’t have been able to hear the snippets of others’ conversations, perhaps about me, that my brain twisted into barbs.
In situations where I can’t avoid walking home alone late at night, music usually manages to block out the various catcalls and lingering stares, or at the very least, suppress a flinch. During my week of no music, I felt exposed, as if I was somehow inviting glances and comments. I realized how much of a barrier music had created between me and the parts of the world that put me on edge.
Even in the daylight, in times when I feel like I’ll fall apart if a piece of paper looks at me the wrong way, Samia seems to glue the jagged edges together just enough to make it through the day. When I couldn’t blast Julia Jacklin into the depths of my soul, I attempted to suffocate the persistent silence by surrounding myself with my friends, hoping their voices would drown out the terrible horror of having to sit alone with my thoughts for longer than a few minutes.
Since curbing my music-listening habits was way harder than expected, I decided to have a discussion with Allison Earl, a University of Michigan social psychology professor. In our conversation about the constant presence of sonic stimuli, we focused on a specific study conducted by Timothy Wilson, a professor of social psychology at the University of Virginia. In Wilson’s study, UVA students were told to rate a variety of positive and negative stimuli, including an electric shock, in accordance with how enjoyable each one was. Participants were then asked if they would pay money in order to not experience a specific stimulus, and many said that they would pay money to not be shocked again. Participants were then left in a room with a button able to deliver an electric shock. When asked to sit quietly with their thoughts, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to shock themselves at least once. One male shocked himself 190 times. As Dr. Earl and I discussed, it seems that as a society, we are quickly and collectively losing the ability to exist without some sort of stimulus in front of us at all times — a wholly terrifying reality to face.
On my third and first successful day attempting to exist completely music-free, my solo walks around campus became significantly less scary. I listened to the cicadas hum, enjoyed the warmth of the late-afternoon sun and felt all those cliche things my mother is constantly telling me will happen if I “just put down the damn phone.” Sure, I consciously avoided places like the League, choosing to study in my room at home or even at The Michigan Daily’s newsroom (with varying degrees of success). But while I was moving, I felt less of that itch under my skin, begging me to satiate it with my latest playlist creation. This is not to say that I enjoyed the experience any more than when I began, but that it became less and less disagreeable the more I did it.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting we all stop listening to music, or even reduce our consumption of it — I’d be both a liar and a hypocrite if I said that was my takeaway from this experience. Just three days ago, I bought tickets to a Hozier concert, and I’m quite literally listening to music as I write this article. I didn’t enjoy the process of being without music, and I don’t plan on depriving myself of the very real joy I get from listening to it in the future. However, I do want to be more conscious of the reasons why I’m choosing to listen to music. If I find myself using music as an escape, I want to be aware of that choice instead of letting my thought-escapist tendencies linger unconsciously and instinctually. I guess what I’m really trying to say is: instead of being tuned out, I want to be tuned in.
Statement Correspondent Lucy Del Deo can be reached at ldeldeo@umich.edu.