Popular Music is a Secret Sauce for your Routine!
- David
- Sep 3
- 3 min read
This article was drawn from the following sources
The book This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J Levitin
and the work of:
Professor Cat Hobaiter https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/psychology-neuroscience/people/clh42/
Professor Costas Karageorghis https://www.brunel.ac.uk/people/costas-karageorghis
Sound, language, and music are known to be very important to humans. Cave paintings and other rock art are one of the earliest examples of human art, depicting hunting and people drumming with their hands. They were also typically situated at places in cave systems or at cliff faces where the soundscape of echoes would also embellish the experience (for example to mimic the thundering hooves of a herd of animals). These were also commonly sites where rituals were carried out.
It was originally thought that speech came first for us, with rhythm and music appreciation as a ‘side-effect’, but more recently it became accepted that they were stepping stones for the pattern recognition in our brain that would evolve to facilitate speech.
Fun fact:
The natural process of our brain forming neural connections in childhood and how it learns to recognise “what is music” is also the reason why each generation thinks the music that was around in their teens is “the best” - other types of music literally don’t match the pattern of what they learn is “music” growing up...
Your brain is an incredible pattern matching ‘computer’, both visually and also for sound - where it is constantly trying to predict what is going to happen next.
When your brain gets its prediction right, as with the next beat of a steady rhythm, a release of dopamine gives your brain a pleasurable kick, second only to the kick it gets when it gets it wrong but is surprised by what happens next in a positive way - syncopation.
Until recently the consensus was that rhythmicity was unique to humans, but new evidence shows this is not the case. Instead it is likely that rhythm was a part of our social world long before we became human.
And it is also known that rhythm is fundamental to human social behaviour – whether in music and dance, or in the back and forth of a conversation.
Our human brain’s ‘obsession’ with rhythm and music means that music has naturally made its way into one of our other passions, sports.
Choreographed sports athletes such as gymnasts, figure skaters, artistic swimmers and more all use musical accompaniment as part of an intentional, meaningful, interpretive whole sporting performance.
Some of the sports using music as an accompaniment to their performance.
In fact music has been proven to improve athletes performance in training, and the use of headphones in competition is banned by track athletics. See more details in our previous blog “Music is a Performance Enhancing Substance - and its (mostly) Legal…”
As described above, as humans we have at least a natural affinity for music, and in many cases it can be called fandom or even an obsession, as people identify both with the music and personality and ethos of their favourite artists. Most athletes would prefer to use music that they love in their routines which evokes their individual personality and identity.
This means that there are many positive implications for using well-known music as the accompaniment to your routine.
When it's music you love, you not only train better, you perform better - and get more easily into the sporting high-performance ‘flow state’. In team disciplines athletes will bond over their shared music choice.
And of course when you use music that the audience knows and loves, they engage and react even more enthusiastically to your performance.
All choreographed sports include some form of artistry, composition, and music / musicality elements in their scoresheets, such as
synchronization between music and choreographed movement
intentional, developed and/or original arrangement of the repertoire of all types of movements into a meaningful whole according to the principles of proportion, unity, space, pattern and musical structure
expressiveness and engagement, commitment and involvement based on an understanding of the music and composition
quality of choreography, and
quality of music editing.
The judges will note your elevated performance (not to mention the crowd reaction!), and your score will go up.
ClicknClear’s mission is to make the use of popular music by athletes simple, and under its agreements with its music industry rightholders is authorised to license you the permissions pre-cleared for sports use to alter the original work, set it to choreography, and combine works with others for each of its tracks, along with the ability to copy tracks licensed from us as part of your music accompaniment (useful for team members, coaches and choreographers individual use), and provide an official music industry download of the track (for creating your music accompaniment / mix).
So using popular music as accompaniment really can be your routine’s secret sauce!