This year is the year that I really get to think about why and how people listen to music.
Not only am I writing my master's thesis on pop music and the production of fiction, but I am also living in an environment where I can hear my flatmate's music and my neighbour's music.
Flatting has always provided interesting music experiences, because everyone has a different way of listening to music.
I've lived with people who avidly consume new music every single day, with people who are moderate listeners and consumers, and with people who are obsessive and particular about what they are listening to and how many times they are going to listen to it.
This year I am living with a moderate music listener, someone who picks a song and listens to it on repeat for about a week, and myself, an obsessive who can listen to the same album on repeat for months at a time.
All I know about my neighbours so far is that they like the new Justin Bieber album (I am very on board with this), and sometimes I think I can hear the radio.
So, I assume the neighbours have moderate listening habits.
Part of what I am thinking about for my thesis is this idea that popular fiction - romance novels, adventure stories etc - provides a space for people to insert themselves into stories, a space where they can self-identify with what is happening in the story.
Novels used to be a primary, popular source of self-identification, but now we have more immediate means, and music is almost endlessly available.
What you listen to is a pretty common way of aligning yourself to a certain group or aesthetic.
This implies that listening to music allows you to insert yourself into a certain narrative at the same time as you encourage others to identify you in a similar way.
But when people are at home, privately listening to music, what does this say about them?
I'm wildly conjecturing, but do people who listen to a wide variety of music feel more comfortable not fitting into certain groups?
Are these people so comfortable in themselves that they cannot fit in exactly anywhere, even when they are by themselves?
Or are they actually the most anxious and alienated of all?
I do not have any hard and fast theories about what listening to music does to your identity, because I don't think listening to music really does say anything inherent about who you are.
But, I think it can say quite a lot about your mindset.
Right now, it is early in the year.
Things have not started getting really stressful for all of us in the flat yet.
One flatmate is finishing a research scholarship and has been listening to the same My Chemical Romance song for about a week now, but my other flatmate is still a little way off finishing her honours degree and is calmly listening to many different artists.
I count myself as an outlier because my listening habits are diabolical, but I wonder if, as the year heats up, we will all be furiously listening to the same song to stop ourselves from seeping out into a thousand different stress- and life-related narratives.
I think probably people don't worry too much about music holding their identity together, and listening is just enjoyable and occasionally comforting.
I can't help but wonder, however, when I observe how other people are consuming music, what that says about what we need or want at any given moment.
Does music give us all a little bit of the same thing in varying quantities, or is it just reinforcing what we already have?
I'm not sure I will ever know, but it is interesting to wonder.
●Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
