Experience: Suddenly My Walk Has a Soundtrack

There are songs you listen to while doing something, and then there is Ludovico Einaudi’s Experience, which immediately convinces you that whatever you are doing must be extremely important. You may only be walking to the supermarket, but once the piano begins and the strings slowly enter, you are no longer a person going to buy yogurt. You are a man carrying the emotional history of Europe through the streets. A plastic bag may be waiting for you ten minutes later, but for now you clearly have a destiny.

This is one of the reasons I love the piece. It takes ordinary time and gives it cinematic importance. The music begins with a simple repeated pattern, then adds layer after layer until something very small becomes unexpectedly large. Mechanically, that does not sound extraordinary. A few notes repeat, other instruments join, tension grows. Yet when you listen to it, the effect is completely different because repetition slowly changes your sense of time. You stop hearing each note separately and begin waiting for what will happen next.

That is very close to ordinary life. Most important changes do not arrive with an announcement. Before something changes, there are usually many normal days. You wake up, work, drink coffee, answer messages, sleep, and repeat the process. Then one phone call changes a year. One conversation changes a relationship. One decision changes a city. Someone enters your life and quietly divides time into before and after. Maybe repetition is not the opposite of change. Maybe repetition is where change prepares itself.

Listening to Experience while walking is especially dangerous because the music increases the apparent importance of your movements by several hundred percent. Crossing the street becomes a symbolic act of leaving your past behind. Looking out of a bus window becomes a meditation on mortality. A bird flying past becomes freedom itself. This would all be very impressive if the people around you could hear the soundtrack, but unfortunately they cannot. To them, you are still simply a person standing near a pedestrian crossing while looking unnecessarily serious.

I do not think this is a weakness of music. I think it is one of the pleasures of being human. Reality gives us objects and events; imagination gives them meaning. A street is only a street until a memory becomes attached to it. A train station is ordinary until it becomes the place where you last saw someone. A piece of music is only sound until it becomes connected with a particular year, city, journey, or person. Then the same sound can suddenly open a door that no longer exists anywhere else.

Instrumental music is especially powerful in this way because it refuses to tell us exactly what to feel. Songs with lyrics usually give us some direction. Someone is in love, someone has been abandoned, someone regrets something, someone definitely should not have sent that message at two in the morning. Experience gives us emotion without an explanation. The listener has to provide the story.

That freedom is probably why the same piece can mean very different things to different people. One person may hear love in it, another loss, another ambition, childhood, travel, loneliness, or hope. The music politely accepts all of these interpretations. It never interrupts to say, “No, actually this part is about something else.” It allows each listener to behave as if Einaudi secretly composed it for their own private biography, which is a remarkably generous arrangement.

What I enjoy most is the way the piece grows. It does not immediately throw emotion at the listener. It earns it slowly. One musical idea becomes larger through repetition, and eventually something that began quietly feels enormous. There is a lesson here that motivational speakers would probably destroy if they discovered it: large things are often created through very small repetitions. A language is learned one word at a time. A friendship is built through ordinary conversations. A career becomes a career through thousands of working days that seemed unimportant while they were happening. Even love is often less dramatic than memory later makes it appear. Many relationships become important through small acts repeated long enough that one day another person has become part of the structure of life.

The title, Experience, also fits the music perfectly. An experience is strange because it exists only while disappearing. The moment something happens, it begins becoming memory. A concert ends. A journey ends. A dinner ends. A beautiful evening becomes yesterday before we fully understand that it was beautiful. We cannot hold an experience still, no matter how much we want to.

The music itself seems to understand this. It repeats, but it never remains exactly where it was. The pattern continues while the context around it changes. Human beings may be similar. We wake up believing we are the same person who went to sleep the night before, and mostly we are, but every experience leaves some tiny modification. Most of these changes are too small to notice individually. Then ten years later we see an old photograph and realize that a stranger has been slowly created.

Memory makes all of this even stranger because memory is a terrible editor. It does not preserve life fairly. It removes thousands of ordinary days while keeping one completely unnecessary sentence from fifteen years ago. A three-minute conversation can occupy more space in the mind than an entire year. A face remains clear while a voice disappears. A smell survives when the date is forgotten. If memory worked like a proper archive, life would probably feel completely different, but perhaps remembering every Tuesday equally would be unbearable anyway.

Music seems able to reopen some of these badly organized archives. One melody can suddenly bring back a place, a person, a version of yourself, or even the atmosphere of a year. The return is never complete, which may be why it is so powerful. We do not get the past back. We get only enough of it to feel that it once existed.

There is also something funny about the “main character” effect of music like this. Dramatic instrumental music can make anyone feel as if the universe has temporarily reorganized itself around their inner life. Of course, from my point of view, I am the main character. Unfortunately, everyone else appears to have reached the same conclusion. This creates certain philosophical complications.

The man standing in front of me in a queue is not an extra. He has childhood memories, failures, ambitions, people he misses, embarrassing moments he remembers at night, and perhaps his own piece of music that makes him stare dramatically out of bus windows. The woman sitting alone at another table is also experiencing reality from the absolute center of existence. We are surrounded by people whose private worlds are as large as ours, even though we can see almost none of them.

This is one of the useful things art can do. It first makes our own inner world feel enormous, then gives us enough imagination to realize that everybody else may contain an enormous world too. Somewhere between these two thoughts is probably empathy.

Near its emotional peak, Experience becomes almost excessive, and I mean that as a compliment. The music seems to say that this moment matters, then becomes louder and insists that no, seriously, this moment matters very much. I am happy to cooperate. Restraint is useful, but not every emotion needs to behave politely.

There are moments in life that deserve a little exaggeration: seeing someone after years apart, arriving in a city you once dreamed about, finishing something difficult, saying goodbye, or realizing that an ordinary period of your life is ending. We spend enough time behaving reasonably. A few minutes of emotional drama inside headphones will probably not destroy civilization.

I think I keep returning to Experience because it changes scale. It begins small and becomes large without abandoning the simple pattern from which it began. That feels true to life. We often imagine meaningful lives as collections of meaningful events, but most lives are actually made of breakfast, work, traffic, messages, errands, walks, jokes, conversations, and evenings that we will completely forget. Only later do we realize that these small repetitions built something enormous: a friendship, a profession, a family, a personality, a life.

Maybe experience itself is accumulation. One note means almost nothing. Repeat it, place another sound beside it, change something slightly, give it time, and eventually it can move thousands of people. Humans are probably built in much the same way.

So I put on Experience and go outside. Cars pass, someone carries groceries, a dog investigates an object of enormous importance, and another person is visibly losing an argument with their phone. The city has no idea that a masterpiece is currently playing inside my headphones. For several minutes, however, everything fits the music. Buildings look more important, the sky seems to have received a promotion, and even I appear to have acquired a complicated and meaningful past.

Then the music ends. The street remains. I still have to buy whatever I originally went outside to buy.

And strangely, I like that.

Art does not always need to change life permanently. Sometimes five minutes is enough. The world was ordinary before the music started and becomes ordinary again after it ends. But in between, for a little while, I was not simply walking somewhere.

I was having an experience.