The Listening Mind

A Life Set to Music
How music becomes memory, identity and a lifelong companion

Music has been a constant companion throughout most of my life. I suppose I could call it the soundtrack of my life, although when that soundtrack began taking shape I certainly didn't think of it that way. I was simply a kid discovering music and realizing that there was something in those records that reached me in ways I didn't completely understand. 

For me, that journey really began around the age of thirteen in 1967. Music had already been around me, of course, but somewhere around that time listening became something more deliberate. Music wasn't simply something playing on the radio anymore. I began developing preferences, seeking out particular artists and deciding what I wanted to hear again. Without realizing it, I had begun assembling a collection of music that would eventually become inseparable from the person I was becoming. 

Looking back nearly sixty years later, I realize that I've essentially been the music supervisor of my own life, much like the person responsible for choosing the music for a film. A music supervisor searches for songs and pieces that complement the story, heighten an emotion, define a moment or somehow become inseparable from what is happening on the screen. Over the years, I've been doing much the same thing, although the story unfolding wasn't on a screen. It was my life. The music I discovered and chose became attached to particular people, places, emotions and periods of time until the songs and the memories began to feel as though they belonged together.

That's an interesting idea to consider in 2026 because increasingly we have the option of outsourcing that job. 

For most of my listening life, I couldn't ask an algorithm to decide what I might enjoy next because it didn't even exist. I had to find it myself. Sometimes radio provided the initial exposure. I'd hear something that caught my attention and then begin searching. A friend might mention an artist. A magazine might point me toward an album. Later, working in a record store provided an almost overwhelming supply of possibilities. Sometimes one album led naturally to another artist, another genre or another musical direction entirely. 

Discovery wasn't always intentional. Serendipity has always been one of music's great gifts. But even when discovery happened accidentally, there was still a second step that mattered enormously: I had to decide whether I wanted that music in my life. 

That distinction seems increasingly important. 

There were streaming services before Spotify, but none became embedded in our everyday listening habits quite the way algorithmically driven streaming eventually did. By somewhere around 2008, this new way of discovering music had entered my consciousness. Suddenly a computer could examine what I'd been listening to and suggest what I should hear next. 

That can certainly be useful. I'm not suggesting that we throw the algorithm overboard and sail back to 1967. There are millions of recordings available to us today, far more than any human being could possibly explore, and a little assistance navigating that ocean isn't necessarily a bad thing. 

But I do wonder whether we've gradually surrendered something along the way. 

Who is the music supervisor of your life? 

Is it still you? 

Because choosing music isn't simply about finding something pleasant to listen to for the next four minutes or forty minutes. We may actually be choosing something that will remain with us for decades. 

Artists and composers create the music, but once they release it into the world, something remarkable begins to happen. We listeners become participants in the process. We take their creations and blend them into our own lives. A composer may have written a piece because of something deeply personal that happened to them, but I may hear that same piece during an entirely different moment in my own life and give it a meaning the composer could never have anticipated. 

In that sense, the artist creates the music, but we help create its place in our lives. 

Sometimes that happens gradually. A favorite album becomes associated with a particular period. Perhaps it was something you played constantly during a summer when everything seemed possible. Maybe it accompanied a long drive, a relationship, a new job or simply an ordinary period of life that didn't seem especially important at the time. 

Years later, those ordinary moments can become extraordinarily vivid when the music returns. 

Other times the connection happens instantaneously. 

A song might be a new release at the moment of great joy or tragedy. From that point forward, the song and the event become intertwined. Sometimes lyrics that had previously seemed opaque suddenly become crystal clear because life has finally provided the experience necessary to understand them. 

The recording hasn't changed. 

We have. 

And because we've changed, the music has changed with us. 

That song may now occupy a permanent place in our musical DNA. Decades can pass, but a few notes can suddenly collapse all that time. You're no longer merely remembering something intellectually. For a moment, you may remember how it *felt* to be the person who originally heard that music. 

Music can be an extraordinarily efficient container for memory. 

That's one reason we often return to familiar music during difficult times. When the present becomes unsettling, we sometimes reach backward toward songs associated with happier periods. The music can't erase whatever is troubling us, but for a few minutes it can reconnect us with another place, another time and perhaps another version of ourselves. 

Those connections aren't limited to our private lives. 

Music also becomes part of the broader cultural soundtrack surrounding us. Certain songs become inseparable from moments in history. "Ohio" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Edwin Starr's "War" carry associations extending far beyond the individual people who first bought those records. They became expressions of something larger happening within society. 

A song doesn't have to be a protest song to perform that function. Sometimes music captures optimism, freedom, uncertainty or simply the general emotional atmosphere of an era. Years later, hearing it can summon not only our personal memories but something of the world in which those memories occurred. 

That's where the soundtrack of a life becomes fascinating because it exists on several levels simultaneously. 

There's the music itself. 

There's what the artist intended. 

There's what the culture attached to it. 

And then there's what *you* attached to it. 

All of those things can coexist within the same three-minute song. 

I've accumulated thousands upon thousands of pieces of music during my lifetime, but they aren't all equal in my memory. Some passed through and were enjoyed before quietly receding into the background. Others planted themselves so deeply that I suspect they'll remain there for as long as I'm able to hear them. 

Genre has very little to do with it. The music might contain lyrics or be completely instrumental. It could be pop, rock, jazz, electronic, ambient or something that doesn't fit neatly into any category. What matters is the connection. 

That's why I think we should be careful about surrendering too much of our musical curiosity to automated systems. 

Let the algorithm make suggestions. Let it point toward doors we might not have noticed. But perhaps we shouldn't allow it to decide which doors we walk through. 

There's still something meaningful about the search. 

Have you ever heard a song on the radio and wondered who it was? Of course you have, we all have. In the years before the internet, that question wasn't always answered immediately. Depending on the station and when you tuned in, you might hear an entire song without ever catching the title or the artist. Maybe a lyric stayed with you. If you were lucky, the chorus lodged itself firmly enough in your memory that you could repeat a few words to someone later. You might listen to the station again hoping the song would come around, ask a friend if they recognized it, or walk into a record store armed with little more than a half-remembered lyric and an enthusiastic description of what the music sounded like. 

Finding a song could require some detective work. There was no search engine waiting for a handful of lyrics and no phone listening over your shoulder ready to identify the recording in seconds. Sometimes you found what you were looking for and sometimes the mystery remained unsolved for years. But when you finally connected that sound in your head with an artist and an album, the discovery felt earned. The radio had opened the door, but curiosity made you walk through it. 

I don't necessarily want to romanticize inconvenience. Being able to identify almost any song within seconds is a remarkable thing. But something about that old process reinforced our participation in musical discovery. When a piece of music reached out from the radio and grabbed our attention, we had to reach back. We weren't simply waiting for the next recommendation to arrive. We were pursuing something because we'd already decided that we wanted it in our lives. 

Those acts make us participants rather than passengers. 

When I look back at the soundtrack I've assembled since 1967, I realize that it amounts to a kind of autobiography written in music. Songs preserve people, places, relationships, discoveries, disappointments, joys and entire periods of my life. Some contain memories I deliberately placed there. Others became containers without my permission. 

And the soundtrack isn't finished. 

There's still music I haven't heard, artists I haven't discovered and recordings that may someday become attached to moments I haven't lived yet. That's one of the wonderful things about remaining curious about music. The past may occupy most of the soundtrack after nearly sixty years of listening, but there's always room for another song. 

So perhaps the question isn't whether algorithms have changed the way we discover music. Clearly they have. 

The more important question is whether we're still actively choosing the music that becomes part of us. 

I'm grateful that the thirteen-year-old kid who began seriously discovering music in 1967 had to search for it. Every record, every radio discovery and every musical detour helped build the listener I eventually became. 

At the time, I thought I was simply choosing music. 

I didn't know I was also choosing memories.

Michael Foster, editor Ambient Visions