Maya Montoya’s soundtrack of the year was white noise. Specifically, a track on Spotify called “Celestial White Noise”: three full hours of soft, relaxing heat.
Montoya, who is 27 and lives in Everett, Washington, was a nanny until the pandemic. But when she found herself unemployed in April, she started napping during the day, which ruined her sleep routine. “I have heard white noise all the time,” she said.
Despite playing the track most nights for most of 2020, Ms. Montoya was still surprised when “Celestial White Noise” topped her Spotify Wrapped chart this month. She posted a screenshot of the app on Instagram, which was met with a barrage of statements from her followers.
“So many people sent me messages saying that they received exactly the same thing,” she said. “It was nice to know that I wasn’t the only one blowing white noise into the ether so I could sleep through it all.”
In a normal year, Spotify Wrapped is a news optimized for sharing that depends on the nostalgia of a time that has barely passed. But in 2020, this mirror of data presented many users with unexpected empirical evidence of their pandemic coping mechanisms: a strange parade of background music hits, background noise and calming sound effects that calmed them down during an unusual period of anxiety and insomnia. . (Spotify declined to comment on this trend.)
While thousands of users posted unbelievers about their stress-influenced results, the situation made sense to Liz Pelly, a cultural critic who has written extensively about how Spotify and its competitors work to shape our listening habits. “It says a lot about the ways in which corporate streaming services have taken root in our lives and made listening to music easier by becoming more of a background experience,” she said.
Some listeners have used sound as a coping mechanism for years, but have come to trust it more in the past nine months. Isobel Snellenberger, a 21-year-old girl in Fargo, ND, has anxiety and is neurodivergent (a category that includes a range of neurological differences, including autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia), both of which she manages in various ways, including with music.
“Especially in early Covid, my mind was filled with intrusive thoughts about the safety of my friends and family, and my brain was panicking,” said Snellenberger. Then, she started playing rain sounds almost 24 hours a day, which helped her turn off cognitive noise.
When your Spotify summary arrived, nine of your top 10 tracks were rain sounds. “Although I listen to them a lot, I was still taken by surprise,” she said, noting that Harry Styles and David Bowie usually dominate their list. Like Mrs. Montoya, she found the results sad and funny.
The findings of some future research on pandemic coping mechanisms suggest that environmental listening may be part of a broader pattern. Pablo Ripollés, a professor at New York University who studies music and the brain, was part of an international team of researchers who researched blocking habits in Italy, Spain and the United States.
Of the 43 activities mentioned in a survey conducted by the team, such as cooking, praying, exercising and sex, listening or playing music, had one of the biggest increases in involvement during the block, as well as the largest number of respondents who said it was the activity that helped them the most.
“People realizing with Spotify Wrapped that they were listening to a lot more background music to deal with the pandemic adjust to what we saw,” said Ripollés.
But not everyone wants this year’s darkness to be reflected back to them. With the expectation that the pandemic will last, at least in some countries, until 2021, some more experienced subscribers are using an alternative solution to ensure that next year’s recap is a little less bleak.
Dylan River Lopez, a 29-year-old video editor who uses genderless pronouns, relied throughout the pandemic on a track called “Brown Noise – 90 Minutes” to drown out many distractions, including calls from his partners on a newly shared office website and nocturnal restlessness similar to that of Mrs. Montoya. “I practically developed a relationship with noise”, Mx. Lopez said.
When it appeared as number 1, Mx. Lopez researched online about how to prevent Spotify from counting those minutes. The answer: a feature called Private Session, which they now activate along with the brown noise.
“The main thing I learned from that experience”, Mx. Lopez said, “it’s like preventing Spotify from tracking you.”