The Tuning Fork Theory
Welcome to Music Class
I looked at her face, crumpled with emotion. Her eyes were closed, her chin slightly lifted. She sang softly under her breath, murmuring as we all do when she didn’t quite know the words. Music played on the little speaker she’d brought over to the couch and placed between us.
“I just want to show you this one song I love,” she had said to me moments earlier. As the verses unfurled, I watched this display with awe.
The artist playing? Taylor Swift.
My friend was gripped in a state of anguished ecstasy, and I felt literally nothing.
I’ve known for a long time that Taylor just doesn’t do it for me, so that wasn’t the surprise. I have my own favourite artists who stir similar emotional reactions in me. I know what my friend is feeling. I empathically could feel my friend’s enjoyment of the music in my own body.
The true insight about this “feeling nothing about Taylor Swift” revelation came a few days later. A friend posted a short clip that got me thinking about tuning forks.
I’d completely forgotten about them from elementary school music class. If you also need a refresher, a tuning fork is that metal tong device that is designed to resonate at certain musical note frequencies when it’s struck. You can use them to tune instruments to the right string tightness so they resonate with the correct tone.
My “Ah ha!” moment of insight was when I remembered what we were taught happens in a room full of string instruments.
“When a tuning fork in the key of D is struck, all of the D-strings on the instruments in the room will vibrate too. The other strings, though, are completely unaffected.”
And I thought back to my moment on the couch with my friend, listening to Taylor Swift, feeling like a C-string in a room full of D-string reverberations.
I can only imagine how I’d feel at one of her concerts.
Of course, each of us has some song, or artist, or favourite band whose music does nothing short of transport us. It’s the transporting that is the shared experience, not the music itself.
It’s a good exercise to take an inventory of your music taste and reflect on what it might say about you in the current moment.
I can look at the genres that Spotify generates from my “Liked Songs” playlist and do a little diagnosis. For context, this is a list I’ve curated nearly over the last ten years.
The songs I’ve selected to listen to over and over again apparently fit the categories Moody, Dance, Chill, Dark, Gentle, Nostalgia, Ibiza, Soulful, Motivation, Disco, Rap.
Those feel like accurate descriptions for my inner world.
One of the best parts about Spotify is that it shows me new music based on what it already thinks I’ll like. It’s built into the appeal of the platform. That’s how my Liked Songs list grew from whatever 100 songs I probably knew before to more than 3x that.
So Spotify is kind of like its own tuning fork, picking up on what I’m putting down and reverberating back what I might like.
And of course, there is value in how well it does that. Music has become a huge part of my life.
How big?
I listened to 60,000+ minutes of Spotify in 2022. That’s more than 11% of my time in the entire year. And more time spent on the platform than 94% of the entire population of United States Spotify listeners.
I don’t know how much dollar value Spotify would put on an incremental minute of my attention. But I do know that it’s not the only tuning fork influencing me in my life. Given the joy and pleasure I take from music, it’s not one I’m particularly concerned about. I like spending my attention dollars on music.
No, one that concerns me far more is social media. Because another huge insight I had from this little tuning fork clip is that social media is nothing less than an enormous tuning fork, calibrating 24 hours a day, every day.
It’s getting better at it, too. For years, pre-Reels, my daily Instagram usage was basically bang-on an average 39 minutes a day. Now, it’s at 52 minutes a day. That’s an extra 13 mins a day more than I used to spend. Maybe 13 mins a day isn’t that much to you. But that’s an hour and a half per week that I could really get back.
There are worse, more important implications to this level of exposure than just the opportunity cost of my time. What makes social media so powerful is that like music, it combines emotion and sensory experience to draw us in.
But unlike music, social media exposure feeds on the power to influence our thinking and our emotional states. And it knows that our negative emotional states are the most attention-attracting ones of all.
There’s nothing inherently wrong about a key of D or G or C, just like there is nothing inherently wrong about anger, or rage, or sadness.
Have you ever stopped to think why we express emotion? What purpose do emotions actually serve?
I believe emotions are designed to externalize whatever is happening inside of us. Physical pain slows us down so the body can heal and repair; sadness and anger make it visible to ourselves and to others that we are in distress when there’s no tear in the skin.
Teardrops of sadness contain painkiller hormones, which is why crying is literally cathartic. Rage expresses adrenaline.
Your body wants to get better. It wants to achieve homeostasis, and safety.
Carrying around a highly powerful tuning fork in our pockets means that whatever emotions it picks up in you and magnifies back become homeostasis.
I know it’s nothing groundbreaking to say that social media is incentivized to keep us in a fuming rage or a near-catatonic state of shock. But the insight I’m sharing here is the mechanism by which it wields control.
And if you understand the mechanism, you can break it.
The past few weeks have been awful. When I open Instagram, I cannot avoid deeply distressing scenes of mangled children and the smiling, frozen faces of the mourned and slain. And I know that I shouldn’t avoid the images. The pain generated inside me by exposure to these scenes is a reverberation of the pain felt by millions, all over the world.
And I should be made to feel aware of the privilege I have to put the phone down and to walk away from it all. I understand this.
In other words, my banal entertainment, provided by stand-up comics and new outfits to buy, has been hijacked by the most desperate and distressed among us.
Anguish expressed in music, as searing and poignant as it can be, is very different from being shown distressing images over and over and over again. Music is soothing. It’s also different to hearing the recorded screams of people who are thousands of miles away. Screams that we cannot respond to, cries for help that we cannot answer.
Our brains and our bodies are not wired for giant, global tuning forks that are designed to exploit us. And so the adrenaline builds, and is never released. The cortisol levels remain heightened. Our hands curl around tools that do not build, nor fix. We reach a new homeostasis of even greater pain.
If you are feeling any way about your life that is less than positive, immediately look at your social media feeds and take inventory.
Ask yourself these questions:
What emotions are coming through?
What kind of humour are you being shown? Who is the butt of the joke?
Which ads do you see? What are they selling?
Which anxieties are being reflected back to you?
We become what we consume.
What we hear, we believe.
What we read today becomes tomorrow’s thoughts.
Whatever you see is your homeostasis.
When I began to think about writing this piece a few weeks back, the world’s attention had not been hijacked by terrorist attacks. But now, more than ever, it’s important that we understand that social media is a tuning fork.
It is designed to put out material that will stir something inside of us. It will manipulate and use information about us to show us whatever makes us more emotional.
Emotions are our evolutionary response designed to focus our attention on what matters. And negative emotions capture our attention more than any other kind.
And I believe that you cannot take any kind of constructive, meaningful action about the source of distress if you are in a state of shock and pain. Social media keeps us there, not towards resolution.
And take heed: I believe that this is what makes AI computing so powerful, and so scary, too. Its capacity to be an ever more precise tuning fork can be wielded in ways that are far too easy to exploit. And an AI-powered social media algorithm will have the ability to hold us in longer, tighter grasps.
But it’s just a tuning fork. You can put your hand over the metal and stop the noise.
This is a very insightful view of the virtues and risks of the 'artificial intelligence' (an over-used pop term these days) of social apps.... The metaphor certainly resonates for me!