soundtrack.

There is something captivating about the way a grand piano dances that I’ll never be able to put my finger on or emulate in any other context. Despite my ears becoming more well versed with 808s and heavy bass as the typical summer songs start infiltrating through our speakers, hearing Klaus Weissmuller’s ‘fabienne’ and Sampha’s ‘No One Knows Me Like the Piano’ earlier this afternoon has not failed to place me in some kind of lucid trance that the hitters of this season could never really achieve in quite the same way. There is too much noise, both within our own heads and in our immediate surroundings, governing our daily activities for us to take a second to really listen.

We are highly emotional creatures, yet we are complete failures in our ability to bring emotions to our conscious surface layers. The emotions we harbour barely poke at the sides or burst at the seams in our repetitive, often monotonous cycles of behaviour, but all it takes is a sombre melody or an uplifting anthem to bring us in touch with ourselves and make us feel good about it. Whether that be our ecstatic, serotonin-feasting personas or our compassionate, gentle selves, something within us perks up, stirs and finally boils over. Like an amplifier boosting a signal, music takes our own sound and makes it louder.

I often feel that I don’t know how to just be in a given moment and react in a way that is both appropriate and emotionally intelligent. We watch movies with scenes that are filled with accompanying music to convey the lust, action and sadness that we are meant to experience as an audience. Maybe our deep resonance with music is our own introspective soundtrack for the story of our lives.