Music Was Never One-Size-Fits-All

We have gotten very good at personalizing music around what we like. I am more interested in what happens when we do not yet know what we need, and why the same piece of music can meet the same person differently depending on the moment.

We all have the playlists we don't have to think about. The road trip. Dinner with friends. A summer afternoon. The songs we played over and over after a breakup until one day we realized we hadn't put them on in a while.

There are songs attached to people, cities and whole periods of our lives. Sometimes a few notes are enough to bring back a version of ourselves we haven't thought about in years.

In those moments, we know what we're reaching for. The music is already attached to a feeling, a memory or the version of ourselves we want to inhabit for a little while.

But I became more interested in the moments when we don't know.

When something is lingering and we want to understand it. When we can feel that we need some kind of movement but aren't quite sure where. When we're overwhelmed and the idea of opening another app and choosing among thousands of songs feels like one more decision we don't want to make.

I started my career at Atlantic Records, so music entered my professional life long before I ever started thinking about it in the context of emotional wellbeing. But the part of music that has stayed interesting to me has very little to do with the industry. It is the strange precision with which a piece of music can find us, sometimes before we have found the words ourselves.

Why does music feel so personal?

There is a scientific answer to this, although I don't think science makes the experience any less mysterious.

What we feel in response to music seems to come from more than any one feature of the music itself. Musical expectation and rhythm can matter, but so can memory, learned associations and the context in which we are listening.

That helps explain why the exact same song can feel completely different at 17, 35 and 50, or why someone else's perfect song might leave us completely cold. Our histories arrive with us when we listen.

That connection between music and memory can be surprisingly direct. More familiar music can bring personal memories forward more quickly and evoke more of them than less familiar music.

I love this because it puts language around something most of us already know without needing a study to tell us. A song is never only a song once we have lived with it. It begins to carry where we were, who we were with, what we wanted then, sometimes even what we thought our life was going to become.

Rick Rubin said something in a 60 Minutes interview that I have thought about often. Asked what he was listening for as a producer, he said he was "listening to the feeling."

There is a lot in those four words. He was describing an instinctive recognition that something in the music had connected. Science can help us understand some of the mechanisms underneath that recognition, but I don't think understanding the mechanism makes the experience any less extraordinary. We often feel the effect of music before we have begun to explain it to ourselves.

That is part of what keeps it interesting to me.

We have made "wellness music" much smaller than music itself

Somewhere along the way, a lot of the language around music and wellbeing became organized around a fairly narrow set of outcomes: calm, sleep, focus, relaxation. Those are useful things for music to support, and I reach for music in some of those ways too. But when I think about the role music has actually played in my life, that list feels strangely incomplete.

I have used music to stay inside a feeling I wasn't ready to leave. I have played the same song because there was something in it I was still trying to understand. There are times when music has made something I was already feeling bigger, not smaller, and I was grateful for that. Other times it has given an emotion just enough movement that I could begin to feel myself changing with it.

We seem to understand this intuitively in ordinary life. Nobody thinks it is strange to listen to a sad song when they are sad, or to choose music that carries the same intensity as whatever they are going through. People often choose music that feels emotionally congruent with what they are already feeling.

Our tendency to reach for sad music also suggests that feeling more of an emotion can sometimes be meaningful, or even pleasurable. I know this intuitively because I do it myself. When I'm sad and want to stay with the feeling for a while, I will deliberately put on sad music. I'm not trying to deepen the sadness so much as give it somewhere to exist, which says something about how naturally we understand that an emotion does not always need to be moved away from immediately.

That feels important because so much of wellness still begins with an assumption that difficult feelings are states we should be trying to leave. I don't experience my own emotional life that way. Sometimes I want to move. Sometimes I need a little time to understand what is there before I do.

The more I thought about sound in Thea, the less interested I became in assigning a particular kind of music to a particular emotion. Fear does not always mean someone needs to be soothed. Sadness does not automatically mean they need to be lifted out of it. Even joy can ask for different things depending on the moment.

The question began to shift for me from What music belongs with this feeling? to something closer to What kind of relationship does this person want to have with the feeling they are already having?

Personalization is also about context

Music technology has become extraordinarily good at learning us. It knows what we listen to repeatedly, what we skip, which artists tend to travel together in our listening habits and, increasingly, the kind of moment we are trying to create.

Spotify's Prompted Playlist takes this further by letting people describe something much more specific than a genre: a mood, a memory, an aesthetic, a cultural reference, a particular kind of day. Its newer Taste Profile gives listeners more visibility into how those preferences are being interpreted.

I find this evolution fascinating because it mirrors the way we already think about music. We rarely want "music" in the abstract. We want music for the moment.

The distinction is that most personalization still begins with the assumption that we know what to ask for. We know we want nostalgic songs, or music for a run, or something that sounds like the summer we were twenty-two.

There are plenty of moments when we do know, and I love that technology is getting better at meeting us there.

The moments I keep returning to are the ones in which we don't.

There are days when I can tell I am carrying something before I know exactly what it is. There can be something almost relieving about hearing music that does not rush ahead of me, as though I am being given permission to stay where I am long enough to understand what is there. In those moments, being given more ways to articulate a request is not necessarily the same thing as being understood.

That distinction has become increasingly important to how I think about personalization. Most music personalization begins with what we like. I have become more interested in what changes when we also consider where we are emotionally.

Other times I know I am ready for some movement. I don't necessarily want something cheerful or dramatically different from how I feel. I just need to sense that the emotional ground is beginning to shift.

The artists still matter

This is the part I feel most strongly about. The music inside Thea comes from real musicians and artists. As technology becomes capable of creating more and more sound for us, I have found myself moving in the opposite direction. I care more about knowing that there was a human being on the other side of what I am hearing.

When we recently asked some of the artists whose music appears in Thea what music had raised them, their answers stayed with me. Phoebe / IKSRE talked about discovering Enya's Watermark when she was seven and only recognizing years later how directly that early listening experience connected to the music she now makes. zakè traced his own musical life through Radiohead and Boards of Canada, artists he has returned to since his teens. Emma Jackson remembered Dido. Divasonic said Madonna.

What interested me wasn't the range of artists they named. It was how quickly a question about music became a question about memory and identity.

We absorb music long before we think about what it might be doing to us. It follows us through childhood, relationships, losses, moves, ordinary Tuesdays. Eventually some of it becomes part of the way we understand ourselves.

That human history is not something I want technology to flatten.

For me, the interesting role for technology is not to replace the person who made the music, it is to become more sensitive to the moment in which someone might need to hear it.

Personalization can be simpler

For a long time, I thought better personalization meant better recommendations. More precise suggestions. A system increasingly capable of narrowing a nearly infinite library down to something I would probably like.

I still think that is useful.

But I am beginning to think the more interesting version of personalization may have less to do with predicting taste and more to do with paying attention to context.

We already know how intimate our relationship with music can become. A song can carry a person back twenty years in seconds. It can keep us company inside an emotion without requiring us to explain it. It can make something inside us feel larger, steadier or somehow newly in motion.

None of that is one-size-fits-all.

The question for me is whether the technology we build around music can respect the same complexity that music itself has always held.

I think the future of personalized sound may actually be simpler: one piece of music that feels right for where I am, especially on the days when I would not have known how to find it myself.

That is the idea behind sound in Thea: music selected for what you are feeling in the moment and whether you want to sit with what you're feeling or begin to shift it. Explore how Thea uses voice, breath and sound to support you in the moment.