We’re all alive with the sound of music

The Sound Of Being Human

It’s easy to take music for granted. Since free streaming and smartphones became ubiquitous in our lives, it’s become something of an on-tap commodity

Never has music felt so universal, or so invisible.

And yet, as Jude Rogers illustrates, it is the stuff that shapes us. For connoisseurs and casual listeners alike, it’s one of the most primal connections we have to our past. Part memoir, part culture and popular science investigation, The Sound Of Being Human explores the impact of music throughout our lives, along with the internal and social mechanics that lead to this. It’s a love letter to the profound, lasting power of our favourite songs – and, ultimately, to Rogers’s music-loving father, who died when she was five.

Each of the 12 chapters is built around a track (a mix of Rogers’s favourites including ABBA, Martha Reeves And The Vandellas, above, Kate Bush and Kraftwerk), through which she mixes expert insights with lively slices of her own life, from her upbringing in Wales to her adventures as a young music fan and then a successful music journalist.

Taking in bite-size chunks of music history, neuroscience and social anthropology, the book flits between Rogers’s memories, essay quotes and new interviews with assorted professionals. She explores the role of music in key human experiences; childhood, adolescence, falling in love, becoming a parent, remembering those we’ve lost. In this way, its appeal is not confined to music geeks. Instead, it reads like a series of light but salient reminders that, as she puts it, ‘music… is a necessity that helps all of us restore ourselves to ourselves’.

The key, poignant theme is music’s relationship with memory. Rogers’s anecdotes about her family and friends come to life via the songs they shared.

The nature of movement and muscle memory is also tapped into, and through stories of meeting her heroes Rogers gets under the skin of what it feels like to really love a band, or a genre. Inevitably, with such a vast, subjective subject, there are stones unturned. The presence of women in the rock and heavy metal world, for instance, is largely ignored in musings about music journalism. Minor quibbles such as this aside, The Sound Of Being Human is a thoughtful, big-hearted celebration of an art form that moves us like nothing else.