Intro to West and World Music

Chapter 10: Music and Identity

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How Music Connects to Our Emotional Identity

• Music alone is a form of art, designed to take you to another world, somewhere away from what you’re dealing with at the moment. It helps us connect not only with other people, but it can also help us connect with ourselves.

How Music Connects to Our Emotional Identity

• As a person who has had depression for years now, music has been the one thing to help me cope with that. For me, I find it as an escape from whatever I’m dealing with at the time, as I’m sure many of you do as well.

• Also, music helps us connect with other people on a greater level. I personally love when someone tells me about their favorite song, or a band that they’re into. Listening to those things can really teach you a lot about people you thought you already knew.

How Music Connects to Our Emotional Identity

How Music Began to Shape Our Identity

• As young children we all grew up learning, and listening to the same typical children songs for example the ABCs, or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star; because we were so young that's the only music that we really could be identified with.

• Around 4th and 5th grade is when we all began to form our own little personalities, and drifted off into our own musical world whether it was music we heard at home, or music we choose ourselves.

How Music Shapes Our Identity

• Music connects us to our emotions when we alone cannot find our voice. My favorite quote is

“Music touches us emotionally where words alone cannot”,

-this speaks volumes about us as individuals.

How Music Shapes Our Identity

• Music doesn't just come to us, we go out and find our style of music as we are finding ourselves.

• There are many different factors that shape our identity and a large percentage of those factors are made up of music.

• By our crucial pre-teen/ teenage years we have already subconsciously befriended, and began hang out with people who listen to the same music as us.

[Emily]

[NAKAELA]

• The average individual listens to at least 4 hours of music each day.

How Music Sociologically Affects Cultural Identity

• Music has the influential power to create sociological identities for countries and regions.

• Media has a strong influence in how we identify with certain people and products.

Examples:

• Degrading the female gender through vulgar, highly-sexualized music.
• Recognizing certain products/services after hearing an advertisement using a melody/jingle to promote business. (i.e. McDonalds Jingle)
• Hearing country music and identifyng it with the South; stereotyping.

• Whether it be from the outside looking in or vice versa, pop culture says a lot about society and values within a nation.

How Music Psycologically Affects Individual Identity

[ERIN]

• Music is completely open to interpretation, just like any other art, therefore no one percieves a particular piece in the same manner.
• Every individual has their own psycological journey when listening to certain pieces; individual works of music have the power to turn back time and fill human beings with nostalgia and reminescence of occurances in the individual's life during the time they connected with specific pieces.

Chapter 10 Group Members:

• Emily
• Erin
• Marjorie
• Nakaela

[Marjorie]

Identifying Cultures Through Music Ritual

-Ritual

-Music Ritual

Identifying Cultures Through Music Ritual

• What is the purpose of music rituals?

Examples of Cultural Music Rituals

• United States

• Australia

• Canada

Intro to West and World Music: