“There’s something in the DNA of ‘Eye of the Tiger’ that I wish I could clone,” he says. “It’s just magic.”
4.
Compared with a motivational tool like a pep talk, music has a distinct advantage: Depending on the type of performance you’re doing, you may be able to continue listening to it while you perform, not just beforehand. That’s particularly true if you’re engaged in office work, where the right kind of music can help you remain focused and energized.
This isn’t a new idea. Factory managers first began trying to use music to enhance the productivity of workers nearly a century ago, their interest sparked by the scientific management movement known as Taylorism and the development of electronic public address systems that allowed people to broadcast music in a large facility. In those early days, companies tended to play upbeat music to keep workers working briskly. In fact, long before it became synonymous with elevator music, Muzak built a large and successful business creating productivity music that it delivered on records to factories.
In the twenty-first century, people listen to music at work differently. Instead of managers selecting the songs, workers choose the music themselves, and generally play it on headphones. But does this really make people work harder, better, or smarter?
The answer is: It depends.
Anneli Haake earned a doctorate in music psychology at the University of Sheffield, and her dissertation focused on the use of music in office settings. Based on her own research and the research of others, she created a flowchart that suggests whether music is going to help a person perform better at work. She starts with a person’s personality and preferences: Is the person an introvert or extrovert? (Extroverts are better at working while listening to music; introverts are more likely to find it distracting.) Did the person grow up in a home where music was often on in the background? What is the person’s attitude toward silence? Does she find it peaceful, or does she complain about an environment being “too quiet”?
Next she looks at situational factors. Even the least distracting music—say, a lyricless classical composition a person has never heard before—consumes some amount of a listener’s “attention capacity,” even if he’s not trying to listen to it. So Haake looks at how much attention capacity the person has, the complexity of the task he’s doing, and his familiarity and confidence at performing the task, among other factors. All else equal, if you’re an extrovert, you don’t like silence, and if the work you’re doing is very familiar and you’re good at it, music is more likely to be beneficial. If you’re an introvert who favors the Amtrak Quiet Car and you’re studying for a physics class in which you currently have a C-minus, it’s probably best to put away the iPod.
But that analysis ignores one huge factor: the acoustic environment in which you’re working. If everyone worked in an office as quiet as a library, music might be less essential. In our cubicleized world, wearing headphones is largely about blocking out other kinds of distracting noise, as well as signaling “Do not disturb” to colleagues. Haake’s research suggests that a lot of the people who work with headphones on are probably having their concentration interrupted, at least slightly, by the music, but they’re less distracted by music than by the environmental noise. (In other words, the music is the lesser of two evils.) This scenario is, in fact, the way Haake works herself: Since she’s somewhat introverted and much of her work involves writing (a complex task), she prefers to work in silence. But if she’s working someplace noisy, she’ll wear headphones and play music.
There’s little research on what kinds of music work best to put workers into a flow state, but there are anecdotal rules of thumb. Lyrics sap attention, so lyricless music is better. Familiar tunes are likely to make your mind wander, so vaguely unrecognizable music is a superior choice. And headphones are a must: A manager who thinks he can make workers more productive by choosing and broadcasting music to the entire office is almost certainly fooling himself. “The main thing that came out for me in my study was that it has to be a personal choice. If the music is not a personal choice, it can actually have a negative impact,” Haake says.
To find out what songs large numbers of people use to get psyched or to focus, the best place to turn is Spotify, the streaming music service that currently has more than 1.5 billion user-created playlists on its site. Most of the lists are geared to particular contexts. People create playlists for commuting. Or for dinner parties. Or for “sexy time.” Within a general category, there are often multiple subcategories: Among workout playlists, for instance, there are some for walking, spinning, jogging, CrossFit, strength training, or yoga.
Paul Lamere is director of platform development at the Echo Nest, a Spotify subsidiary that analyzes how users choose music. Sitting in his office one day, I ask Lamere to find playlists for psyching up. It’s a use case he hasn’t considered before, so he plays with his computer. “We have golf prep, football prep, so yes, people are definitely creating playlists for this.” I suggest he search for playlists using the word “psych or “psyched.” There’s a long pause. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “There’s ‘Locker-room psych.’ There’s ‘Get psyched.’ There’s a lot of them, in fact.” He quickly aggregates the data, finding the songs most likely to be in a psych-up playlist. The list is dominated by 1980s rock: Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Kiss, Poison, Journey, Mötley Crüe, and Guns N’ Roses all have songs in the top twenty.
He ponders the list. To his mind, they suggest forty-year-old guys choosing songs for workouts, songs that, in most cases, were popular when they were teenagers. It’s not so much the lyrics that make these good songs for getting psyched up, he says, as the heavy guitar riffs and the high energy.
Personally, I can’t imagine Poison’s “Talk Dirty to Me” helping me mentally prepare for anything, but it’s apparent from both research and anecdote that the right music for mental preparation is a very personal choice.
Consider a story told by a high-level administrator at a prestigious East Coast college. In 2005, he was interviewing for a chief marketing officer job at a large company, and he was invited to give a presentation on the company’s marketing strategy to the CEO and ten other top executives. Earlier in the hiring process, he’d learned the search had narrowed to him and one other finalist, and that the other guy had been offered the job but turned it down. Now the company had come back to my acquaintance as the second choice. “It was clear there were some people in the group who really wanted to hire me, and some people who really didn’t want to hire me, so they were going to grill me,” he recalls.
Sitting in the parking lot before the meeting, he put on a song he’d specially chosen for this moment: “Boogie Shoes,” by KC and the Sunshine Band. “It’s this preening 1970s disco tune,” he says, one he recalled from high school dances. “It sort of gave me a little strut that I took into the room.” He nailed the presentation. After he was hired, a colleague told him he’d never seen someone command a boardroom the way he had. The college administrator declined to let me use his name because he finds the story embarrassing, but no matter how silly he looked rocking out to KC and the Sunshine Band in the parking lot, he attributes his stellar performance, in part, to the unusual psych-up song.
In the early 2000s, Amy Perlmutter was working at a state agency that politicians wanted to eliminate, but they lacked the votes to do so. Every few months, she’d be called into tense meetings where the department’s haters would criticize her. “It was a ridiculous, no-win situation,” she recalls. “I had to really psych myself up to go see them, and the way I did it was I’d put on the sound track from Annie. I’d sing along in my office, then I’d try to get my staff to sing along, too.” At first Perlmutter recalls choosing songs like “Tomorrow” and “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” simply because they’re upbeat and cheery, but as we talked, she recalled something more specific. She’d seen Annie on Broadway with a close friend in high school—a warm and r
ich visual memory, which may have helped her mood improve before the meetings. “Afterward, I’d walk into the meeting with a big smile and a lot of energy, and I think things ended up being friendlier and more positive because of that.”
5.
On a Monday in late April, TJ Connelly enters Fenway Park’s production booth at 2:30 P.M., to get ready for batting practice an hour later.
Connelly has flowing dark hair and a long beard. He’s dressed in a ratty black golf shirt and gray checked pants. He stands before a Yamaha soundboard, black headphones around his neck, clicking on a laptop that holds more than thirty-five thousand songs. In front of him, a breeze blows in through a large open window, and below, Red Sox players congregate around the batting cage.
A few minutes into batting practice, he’s playing rap songs like “Super Disco Breakin’” by the Beastie Boys. Many of these songs contain expletives, so Connelly has painstakingly edited “clean” versions with the profanity excised. He keeps meticulous records of what he plays, to avoid repeating songs too frequently, all the while noting the players’ reactions. During today’s batting practice they hear nineteen songs by artists including Jay Z, Cypress Hill, and Kendrick Lamar. The visiting team, in contrast, will conduct batting practice to organ music.
Some of the musical cues at Fenway are routinized. Connelly always plays the intro from the TV show Cheers fifty minutes before game time, and “Sweet Caroline” always marks the middle of the eighth inning, with the crowd singing along.
Connelly puts little thought into those preprogrammed choices. Instead, he obsesses over finding songs that fit the tone and moment of game situations. He keeps ready an entire folder of songs for rain delays, including “Here Comes the Rain Again” and “Invisible Sun.” He has a song ready in case a fan reaches out from the stands to interfere with a ball in play (“Keep Your Hands to Yourself”), or if a fan jumps onto the field during play (“What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor?”).
Tonight’s game quickly gets ugly. Four minutes after the first pitch, the Red Sox are losing by a run; eleven minutes later, they’re down by three. There is no music playing, because there’s nothing for hometown fans to celebrate.
As each Red Sox player comes to bat, Connelly queues up the batter’s walk-up song. The practice of playing specific songs for certain players dates to the 1970s, but according to a history of the practice by Daniel Brown of the San Jose Mercury News, it grew rapidly after the 1993 Seattle Mariners began playing a walk-up song for each player. For some stars, the musical introductory number becomes a key part of their identity: A generation of Yankee fans can’t hear Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” without recalling closer Mariano Rivera’s entrance from the bull pen.
Players have different motivations in choosing their walk-up songs. Connelly recalls one player using a Miley Cyrus song, because it made him think of his daughters, and he drew a connection between succeeding at the plate and being able to provide a good life for his family. Some players don’t care much about the music and let Connelly play whatever he likes. Connelly recalls relief pitcher Andrew Miller, who didn’t express any song preference until Connelly introduced him with a snippet of the Johnny Cash song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.” The next day, a call came from the clubhouse: Miller approved of the pick. “That one. Every time. It’s perfect.”
If Connelly had to choose his own walk-up song, he’d opt for the opening of “I’m on a Boat,” by the Lonely Island. Sometimes players ask for suggestions. On the night I visited, David Ortiz had chosen two songs of his own, and directed Connelly to pick a third “dealer’s choice”; Connelly chose “The Devil Is a Lie” by Rick Ross and Jay Z. Connelly noticed Ortiz bobbing his head to the song as he approached the plate; apparently, it’s a keeper.
As play progresses, Connelly is constantly thinking about songs that might be appropriate for the situation. In the top of the fourth, with the Sox behind, the Blue Jays get two men on, and the atmosphere is tense. The batter tries to bunt. He gets under it, and hits a tiny blooper toward shallow third base. The Sox third baseman lays out to make a spectacular diving, belly-flopping catch. The crowd begins to roar, and less than a second later, the theme song from Superman comes over the PA system. The crowd’s noise level increases noticeably as they recognize the song and its connection to the superhero catch. Along with the higher volume, this cheer takes longer to die down. It’s exactly the amplification process Connelly aspires to achieve. Looking down on the crowd, Connelly gives a satisfied smile.
“I sit here waiting for those moments.”
In the middle of the eighth inning, the Red Sox are losing to the Blue Jays, 5-4. Connelly plays “Sweet Caroline,” turning down the volume during the “so good” chorus so the crowd can take over the vocals. As Connelly turns off the music, the crowd remains standing and singing. Even on a chilly night, the right song can bring a crowd to life.
Suddenly, the ballplayers seem to come to life, too. The Red Sox lead off with a single. Connelly cues “Blitzkrieg Bop” by the Ramones. The second batter singles. The runners advance to second and third on a wild pitch. Connelly plays “Wild Thing.” The pitcher intentionally walks Ortiz to load the bases, with no outs. The next batter hits a sacrifice fly, knocking in the tying run. Connelly plays “One More Time” by Daft Punk. As the inning ends, he cues up the synth-heavy song “Sandstorm” by the Finnish DJ Darude, the intro song for Red Sox closer Koji Uehara. Earlier in the evening, Connelly had pointed to the volume control on his soundboard, explaining how he’s not supposed to push the volume above a certain mark. But with the score tied and the closer walking toward the mound to start the ninth inning, the green lights flicker noticeably above that threshold.
The Blue Jays go down 1-2-3.
In the production booth, there’s a quick debate. “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” by the Dropkick Murphys used to be the intro song for Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon. When Papelbon was traded to the Phillies after the 2011 season, the song was retired at Fenway. A year or two later, however, the Red Sox decided to reclaim it: Now Connelly plays the rousing anthem only in the middle of the ninth inning of very close games. With a tie score, Connelly and his boss decide the situation warrants the Dropkick Murphys signature tune. Outside, the crowd of 34,769 is standing and cheering.
In the bottom of the ninth, shortstop Xander Bogaerts hits a one-out single. Then Ryan Hanigan singles. Connelly spins “This Is How We Do It” by Montell Jordan. With runners on first and second, Mookie Betts singles up the middle, scoring the go-ahead run and a walk-off victory. The Red Sox mob Betts as he rounds second base. Connelly hits a button, and the PA system blares “Dirty Water,” the song that concludes every Red Sox home win.
Perhaps in a few years, Costas Karageorghis will be able to wheel a functional MRI machine onto this field to do scientific A/B testing to see how well players hit, field, and throw after listening to different kinds of songs, or to no music at all.
Until then, we will draw what lessons we can from both the researchers and the practitioners. We can consider whether rhythm and musicality or emotional associations are more likely to get us excited or keep us calm. We can search out songs that help bring us closer to the magical state of flow.
And if all that fails, we can put on “Eye of the Tiger” and turn up the volume.
Chapter Five
THE KEYS TO CONFIDENCE
SHOULD YOU RELY ON YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND, YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND, OR GO ON AUTOPILOT?
John Quinn, the backup goalie on the West Point lacrosse team, is sitting in an enclosed, egg-shaped chair, listening to an elaborately produced audio track that talks about how great he is.
From inside the chair comes the opening chords of the AC/DC song “Shoot to Thrill.” Then a narrator begins to speak: “The time is now and the place is here. . . . This is where I take my game to the next level. . . . I’ve paid my dues along the way and earned the right to be here. Wh
at’s important now is to stay charged up and a little bit pissed off.”
As Quinn listens to the sound track, Nate Zinsser, the lacrosse team’s sports psychologist, watches biofeedback data on a video screen.
During four previous appointments, Zinsser and Quinn had talked about his lacrosse résumé—his career highlights in high school, his strengths and weaknesses, and the skills he needs to improve. Zinsser, who’d been co-captain of his high school lacrosse team and now works at West Point’s Center for Enhanced Performance, used those conversations to write the script for this personalized, ten-minute motivational sound track. It’s narrated by a voice-over performer kept on retainer by West Point for just this purpose. Today is the first time Quinn is hearing it.
Quinn’s imagery sound track continues: “From here on in whenever I think about playing lacrosse, I think about playing great. I accept that the best goalies in the world are going to let in some goals sometimes—but they don’t let it bother them. They treat every mistake as temporary, limited and rare. . . . As I look honestly at myself, I think of so many things that I do well, and so many ways I am really good at what I do: The way I had fifteen saves against New York state champions West Islip in my junior year. . . . The way I shut down Smithtown’s All-Star attack. . . . Whenever it gets tough, I just remind myself that I am an impact player on a team that’s going all the way—it was meant for me, and it was meant for us!”
After a few minutes, Quinn emerges from the egg chair smiling. “I was picturing a lot of the images,” he says. “I would see myself throwing the outlet, or watching the shooter come across. When it went into the good memory part of it, I wasn’t zoning out. I was locked in, just totally digging it.”
Psyched Up Page 10
