Finding Home in Harmony

Pavlov’s Dogs is a common known scientific study done by Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, in the 1890s. He was studying salivation by putting a tube in his dogs’ mouths and measuring the amount of saliva when food was placed in front of the canines. He discovered that the dogs would start salivating before they even saw the food. Their owner’s footsteps where enough to tell their brain that it was time for eating. The dogs never had to learn to salivate at the sound of footsteps, it came as second nature. I’ve experienced a similar effect with music. My mother is a Christmas instrumental fanatic. She has one specific Christmas CD that she played often while pregnant. After I was born, when she would get up in the night to feed me, she would play it while I ate and I would gradually fall back asleep. As I became a toddler she would play it nightly and I continued to fall asleep to it. Now I’m a teenager and, although I don’t need the music to fall asleep, the second I hear it I can’t help but yawn. If any given night I am struggling to fall asleep, all it takes is me imagining the song in my head and I’m instantly tired. Music triggers my brain. In this case, the CD triggers my sleep. In others, it triggers emotions. There was a song that I listened to one year, after a particularly hard break up, that really hit me. Now, almost two years later, the song still brings back those emotions. As people, music is not something we have to strive to learn. We don’t have to make any effort to transform songs into mental, physical, or emotional triggers. It just happens. Melody ingrains itself deeply in our psyche from the first lullaby sung to us, or even the first sounds we hear in the womb. It connects to us in ways that words alone cannot. Listening to the old Christmas CD doesn’t just tell my head it’s time to sleep. It puts me at ease. It puts me in my mother’s arms. It puts me at home. There are very few things in this world that have that capability and I do believe that even if society was in ruins people would still hold onto music, because maybe for a second while they listened, they too would feel at home.