Only when I felt lost in my life did I try to record and savor moments that happened every day, but here’s one exception. Music tracks catch a person’s attention even while they are engaging with their life, and, serendipitously, become fragments of my vanishing time even without their notice. When I compose my own music, it then becomes the key to retrieve the memories, and that makes my life meaningful.
When talking about memory retrieval, music is a perfect medium to demonstrate this. Janata’s experiment with 329 students and 1515 pop tracks showed that about 30% of music excerpts successfully evoked autobiographical memories, often with strong positive effects (Janata et al. 845–860). This was because most of the students had listened to those pop music tracks frequently in their teenage years, as they played the role of a background without intention. Sedikides extended this further and stated that music-evoked nostalgia “strengthens meaning in life and augments self-continuity” across social, self-oriented, and existential domains (Sedikides et al. 2044). Both resources suggest that music behaves as a passive archive to record the experiences of people without their awareness, and this also directly reflects the concept of pointless.
Although listening to music already provides such a strong effect, composing music has the same mechanism with stronger memory. Brian Eno wrote in his 1995 diary that “The big surprise for me when I work like that is discovering myself capable of an almost ‘automatic writing’ way of working. I cease to evaluate much, instead just letting something carry me along. Listening back later, I think, ‘How on earth did I get an idea like that?’” (Eno 18), and although he did not write the diary for a recording or memory purpose, the document became a complete record of his life retrospectively. The metaphor “automatic writing” would be an illustration of unintentional.