About ten years ago when asked: “What would you take with you if you were stranded in an island?” my common answers would be food, clothes and my partner; but now it’s different – an answer to this question is most likely to be “food, clothes and my mp3 player.”
“I can’t live without music!” Have you ever heard or said that statement? The average person can survive three minutes without air, three days without water, and forty days without food. How long can you survive without music?
With music being such a staple in youth culture, it seems that every person has a “soundtrack to their life.” Today, it is very common for us to see people of all ages carrying MP3 players even when travelling short distances.
Has it become an addiction? Have they become musicoholic??
The answer to whether or not music can affect a person’s behaviour is not a simple matter of a yes or no answer.
Nowadays, listening to an MP3 player is extremely easy to do and you can find people listening to music, learning new languages through MP3 recordings, etc. Consequently, teenagers in precise, will be able to come up with thousands of reasons why they absolutely need an MP3 player.
image by FabianReichert
You can listen to music while you study, travel to and from school, when you exercise, as the music for your alarm clock, before you go to sleep to relax, and the list goes on. Personally, after observing a host of people who got an MP3 player recently, I noticed that the majority of them stopped talking to their friends or acquaintances when they are listening to their mp3 players and this seems to lower their level of socializing.
This might also affect their studies, since they might be tempted to play games on their MP3 player or to listen to music while they study. Some researchers say that listening to music while you study helps you remember better, but it depends on the type of music they listen to, of course.
If I were to relate this to myself, I will have to say that I was a music addict myself; I pretty much behaved the way most musicoholics did; it really does cause isolation, affects studies and it may even cause ear damage. Of course, like everything music has its pros and cons. It is crucial for us to avoid letting the cons get to us and affect our lives.
by Betül
Betul this essay is just wonderful! Thank you so much. Your English is fantastic!
Also… I just realised… I was listening to my mp3 player while I read it!
‘if music be the food of love, play on’ – mp3s and digital music has definitely made the whole music scene more interesting, diverse and democratic – we vote with our ears! look back at the 80′s and 90′s and see how spoon-fed we were (I am giving away my age!)