iLife imitates art

I love my iPod. Over the summer, I bought one of these slim, white, wondrous devices, and it changed my life. Now, thanks to six ounces of silicon, I can carry all the songs I love around in my pocket and play them whenever I want. Hell, I can even carry around all the songs I don't love, just because. How else am I going to fill 20 gigabytes?

No longer am I a slave to the same Top 40 crap that plays on my local radio station, or to the 18 songs I can cram on a mix CD for my discman. Now, thanks to my iPod, my entire music collection is accessible at the touch of a ClickWheel.

iPods allow for impressive variety, but that is only part of the story. The unit's portability means that you can listen to all that music anywhere -- on your couch, walking down the street or waiting in line at Freshgrocer. Now, for iPod-enhanced individuals, music plays whenever and wherever they want. In short, iPods give your life its very own soundtrack.

This soundtrack-effect has the potential to make the musically enhanced moments in life more emotionally charged. Music often "works" because our minds have connected a piece with a specific emotional state, and hearing it brings out or reinforces that feeling. In cinema, the soundtrack is one of the most critical factors used to draw the audience into the story and make them care about the characters. iPods now give regular people the same capacity to fuse emotion into their own lives.

Here's a good example of what I mean: I applied early to Penn, and during December of my senior year, I thought about whether I would be accepted to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. One day, as I was leaving school, I called my mom to see if the mailman had delivered my letter. He had. I drove home, palms sweating and heart pounding. As I neared home, Carol of the Bells by Trans-Siberian Orchestra, a sweeping, dramatic, high-octane version of the famous Christmas carol, came on the radio. I remember thinking to myself, 'If this was a movie, this is the exact song they would be playing right now.'

Before the iPod, this musical augmentation of life was possible only in a few circumstances. For instance, if the radio happened to play a certain song at an opportune moment. Now, however, I can switch on the appropriate soundtrack in an instant. Sitting in the park becomes more relaxing with Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, finishing my last exam becomes more exciting with School's Out and waiting for my turn at the dentist becomes more ominous with the Jaws theme da-dumming in my ears. The soundtrack-effect creates an additional emotional trigger, making the experience more understandable, more intense and more cinematic.

But there's a paradoxical flip side to this soundtrack-effect. It makes life more like the movies, but it also makes our experience simultaneously and intrinsically more clich‚d. It works because we've watched movie characters in similar situations, and appropriate music always accompanies their exploits. Thus, in our never-ending quest to imitate our cinematic idols, when we find ourselves in those same positions, we want to hear the music in the background also. A romantic song reminds us of the kiss in Bridget Jones's Diary (complete with 360-degree camera shot), not of our own romantic interlude, which we believe would somehow be more romantic if only we could hear the music.

Besides turning life into a series of half-scripted clich‚s, the soundtrack-effect can also lead to a series of letdowns. People want their lives to be more like TV -- more perfect, more simple and with more happy endings. The whole concept of a "storybook romance" is predicated on the notion that fiction is more fun than fact. When was the last time you heard a girl say, "I wish my boyfriend was more like Bill Campbell in Enough," where he plays a horribly abusive husband? Never. No one dreams of a bad relationship, or getting cheated on. People dream of happiness and perfection, of Cinderella and Snow White sans the evil stepmothers. Sadly, such tales are much harder to come by in real life, and people who live in a world where they believe that they can make their lives better by slipping on their headphones are going to wind up sorely disappointed.

Humans have wanted to act like their mythical role models ever since the dawn of storytelling (after all, what medieval knight didn't dream of being as brave and gallant as Lancelot?), and there is nothing wrong with a little hero-worship once in a while. But the soundtrack-effect is a new outer boundary of this behavior, and the question still remains -- is it a welcomed and exhilarating addition to our technological existence, or is it a way of making us feel less like ourselves, and more like someone we saw on TV?

Josh Gordon is a junior history major from Newton, MA. I think, therefore... appears online over the weekend.

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