INTPs and Music

(This is Part 2 in my current series on INTPs and Christian ministry. Go here for Part 1.)

Intro (Important)

In some ways it's difficult to even write about music for me, rather like a bird trying to write about air density. I can't speak for all INTPs, but I suspect we have much of what I will share in common.

1. I should note here at the beginning that when I say "music" I mean 1) the music itself. Lyrics are another thing, which I'll mention if relevant. Depending on the song, they might "join with" the music to produce the effects I'll describe later, or they may stand apart from and be separable from it. 2) Not: this artist and that artist. To me that's like thinking about auto parts primarily according to which company makes them versus what they do in your car. ("I need to repair something on my car." "Ok, do you want a Nissan part, or a Honda part, or..?")

2. Another very important fact starting out is that INTPs, stereotyped as creatures of soulless (and tactless) logic, experience what I'd call the "revenge of the feelings." We don't "speak the language of emotion" well at all. (Being a guy this is more or less expected; I imagine it's more difficult for women) That's great when dispassionately analyzing something, or when having an argument where you find it easy to stay icy cool and the other person gets all blustery. But when the feelings do pop up, whether positive or negative, they tend to surge strongly and unstably and we don't know what to do with them. (This theory suggests that's the norm for INTPs, and that one of the reasons we're so skilled at rational thinking is that we had to become so, to reign in our own dialed-too-high emotions. The description is a little more exaggerated than my personal experience but some good stuff over there) INTPs can get a bit odd during these times. It's like we're intensely focused on reading an eyechart and then someone throws a bucket of blue paint on it. "T... Q... P... Blue. Blue. Blue? Blue!? *sigh* Blue... Blue everything."

As linked above, the INTPexperience website posits that it's not that we're robots
it's that we feel things too strongly and have to learn how to keep control with reason
It's an interesting chicken-and-egg problem, at least

So when I talk about "feelings" in this post, understand that's where we're coming from. Not because we're delicate snowflakes, but because finding quick and effective ways of dealing with unpredictable, disruptive feelings is an important issue for INTPs, and Music is probably our primary ally in this struggle.

Music: Some Personal Background

For INTPs, including myself, music is much more than just "something to listen to," something to provide a low level of mental stimulation to help alleviate boredom. (Even less is it primarily a background track for me to express myself by singing over) Rather, music itself and the act/process of listening to it is a primary and necessary means of self-expression. Sometimes it feels inseparable from the act of being conscious of the persistence of my own existence.

Thanks to parents who had me take lessons, I have played piano since childhood (I can read music, but rely more on my natural ability to play by ear). I actually play rather poorly, because I am doing too many things at any given time in my life to devote a lot of time to practicing. (And I tend to move on when I have a certain song down about 90%, which doesn't work when playing for other people) I realized years ago, however, that there was a strange paradox in my piano abilities. Ask me to play in a church service next Sunday for people to sing along and I will break out in cold sweat. I can possibly get through it without any mistakes, but it's extremely mentally taxing and requires disproportionate amounts of practicing beforehand. That kind of playing comes from a different place in my brain, one that is not very skilled. I can and have improved it by practice in the past, but the stress involved is worse than that of public speaking.

On the other hand, if I am improvising, I could go for half an hour regardless of whoever might be listening, easily weaving in chunks of those songs I am all but unable to perform "as written" if ordered to. Indeed, much of my problem with trying to perform music from rote memory is that my brain is constantly trying to be in improvisation mode instead, so it's almost impossible to just play what's on the sheet, which is what most people want from a non-professional musician. It seems that music performed as "rote" is weirdly difficult and stressful for me, like pushing against a mental block, but music that flows out naturally is not stressful at all, and people do seem to enjoy listening to the result.

Moving to Taiwan this time, I found myself initially living for several months without a piano. This was very difficult, because it meant one of my primary (as an INTP, there aren't many) means of emotional catharsis was denied to me. Yes I could listen to music, but I needed an outlet, a way to draw out the turbulence building inside as the pressure of a host of new cultural and social experiences mounted. Some people have very natural ways to let out this kind of emotional stress, but INTPs are not so fortunate, we need aids of some kind. When I recognize my emotional state is becoming noticeably disordered, sometimes I need to go hide and play whatever comes into my head for an hour, and though I don't understand how the process works, by the end I feel better. It's the musical equivalent of walking it off.

Now I am sure there are INTPs much more disciplined than me who have spent the necessary time to better train themselves to pour their musical self-expression into songs they have memorized and play according to the sheet. (Though it does seem the "too many irons in the fire to focus on one" problem is pretty common for INTPs)

But in general I am given to understand that a peculiarity of INTPs is that for us music is not something primarily external but reflective of our own inner emotional state. It's a means of sympathetically connecting with our own isolated Fe, perhaps because it entirely skips over the "does not compute" roadblock that INTPs encounter when trying to process their emotions and simply accesses those emotions directly. It is perhaps rather like someone asking an awkward person who actually does want/need to be hugged if they want a hug: if it depends on them, due to their awkwardness the hug is not likely to happen even though they want it, whereas just hugging them proactively would solve the problem.

Music itself does not ask permission to do what it does, it just rushes through the subterranean tunnels of our auditory nerves and pops up into the otherwise-heavily-guarded innermost parts of our minds and hugs us (or encourages us, or motivates us, or irritates us, or sedates us, or yells "on your feet, boy!" like a drill sergeant, or dances us down wet city streets under luminescent globes of multicolored light, or lures us out to bleak paths of monochromic solitude) without asking. That's the delight and beauty and usefulness and danger of it.

In case you were worried, yes I did solve my piano problem

"Existential resonance" and the Usefulness of Music

Music is a vital part of self expression for a INTP, but it's more than that, and I don't mean that in a "music is totally a huge part of my life" way. Our relationship with music is two-fold: we use music as a tool to efficiently manipulate or regulate our emotional/mental state, and also to reflect or express it, as a means to embody those difficult-to-analyze feelings so we can get a better look at them.

For example, we might wonder how to explain, say, "What it felt like on Monday morning at 7:10AM when I went out to my car and after several days of rain the air had been washed clean and now the morning sky was perfectly blue and I was aware of the rush of a sensation that an eternity of potential lay ahead into which I was constantly moving and for a moment I felt deeply alive and joyful at being so" using human language. A smell-memory might come close, but those tend to be narrower in scope. One is left using words to describe it, as I just have, and hope to evoke similar emotions in someone else. A good painting or well-taken photo might be able to do it as well, though visual art tends to be even more subjective.

But for me, the song Cyberbird is what represents and evokes that complicated and very specific emotional state fairly precisely. So if I perceive on a given day that I am feeling lethargic and melancholy and would benefit from feeling more like what that song represents for me, I might listen to that track. (If you follow the link you'll notice that the song is not in English. That's more or less irrelevant for what I'm describing, if anything it helps; lyrics you understand can be distracting. [Question for INTPs: Do you find yourself often listening to music with lyrics in languages you don't understand? That's never bothered me] Also, recognize that watching the video will influence the impression you get from the song, but listening to the song alone, you might be able to get a little of the impression I described)

This is what I mean by music being "useful" for INTPs. We use it music in an intentional way to achieve desired emotional states, and I am willing to bet good money that every INTP with access to the internet has a rich and complex mental -and probably also digital- set of playlists of songs which apply to different situations and can be used to push emotions in the desired direction. (For my readers: I would actually really like to hear some examples of what yours are, if you would be kind enough to share them below)

Of course everyone does this to some extent; there's a reason we have "workout mixes" or "pop hits from the X'ies." We all know music can evoke certain feelings in us; INTPs have just gotten this phenomenon down to a science and turned it up to 11, as it were. Rather than "energetic" or "calm" I have certain tracks for "that comfortable feeling of mental alacrity after sundown" or "pivoting away from melancholia to the warmth of a lonely sun-washed beach in a place I've never been before" or "wandering Taipei at night between the time the restaurants close and the subway stops running" I doubt we're the only ones who do this, but it seems consistent across the personality type.

In manipulating your own mental state you can only force it so far, of course; there has to be correspondence/resonance with your external state to achieve the desired effect on the internal state. So, say, I want to feel less sorrowful about something bad that has happened but it's a rainy night and no friends are available to talk to. Certain jazz tracks work perfectly for this, because they mesh perfectly with the current "noir-ish" external state but jazz tends to shortcircuit sorrowful feelings for me because it doesn't resolve, just like the sorrow is like a failure of life to "resolve" successfully, so there is catharsis.

I may still be sad about what happened -I may even want to be, as sadness is an appropriate and healthy response to tragedy- but my mood will have leveled out some, the overwhelming "spike" that INTPs experience blunted. It's too much of a stretch to try to feel "happy" immediately, but hey, I'm an INTP so I don't expect that anyway. After a couple of the right tracks (I know more or less which ones I'd play) I'll probably feel balanced and regain my mental equanimity. If I'm feeling inventive or the situation calls for it, I can carefully work my way from one emotion to a very opposite one with the right playlist.

Music is not merely about our mood or mental state, however, but provides a kind of window even deeper into the nature of being and reality. Perhaps the closest an INTP comes to experiencing timeless joy outside of the overwhelming presence of God Himself is when both of those processes -music influencing our mental state and also embodying it for us- fuse together and provide a sort of existential resonance, where the music perfectly syncs up with reality as we experience it and becomes the language, or perhaps the reflected shadow of the language, in which the persistence of our being is written.

In a sense it is like, maybe, how we are rarely aware of the existence of air around us, and may have trouble conceiving of ourselves as constantly living, moving through, and breathing a mix of gases (not so hard to recognize in Taiwan, thanks to super-humidity). But when a breeze is blowing just right, you can feel the air moving around you. Music is like that. Music captures passage through time in a form you can hear, but experience more deeply than that, so you are aware of time flowing around the fact of your continued existence, like a fixed needle testifies to the persistent existence of a turning record on the turntable by the ongoing stream of music it produces.

As a limited example of the experiential side to this, it might be helpful to think of a movie. While it would be silly to suggest the characters in the film could hear the soundtrack itself (that's what we call "breaking the fourth wall"), as the audience we experience the film holistically, and the music is an integral part of what's happening, maybe even subconsciously. (We "notice" the music but we don't usually give active thought to it when our attention is engaged by the film, it's just "persuading" us to feel a certain way about what we're watching happen)

For me, life is experienced both as an active participant and on (at least a couple) higher levels of mental abstraction as a spectator, so when I actively choose to listen to a given song at a given time, to some degree I'm intentionally providing a soundtrack for the movie of my life that I'm also watching. There are times when I start to listen to a song and think "no, this doesn't work for Now," (using our analogy, it isn't the right soundtrack for this part of the movie) and I change it. But "Now" really represents both my external state (experienced weather, time of day, what I'm doing, location, what I can see around me, etc) and my internal state (excited, weary, ticked off, depressed...), and when chosen properly, music can become the perfect expression of the ongoing interaction between the internal and external states.

Music and Ministry for INTPs

So after all this you may be wondering where the ministry connection might be. (Actually if you are an INTP you may have been wholly occupied in comparing and contrasting my own perspective on music to your own and developing a potential explanation for the source of any discrepancies)

I hope the ramifications of what we discussed above are pretty obvious as pertains to our personal lives, which are intimately and inextricably linked to any ministry we set out to do. Of course, music may play a more direct role in your ministry as well. Either way, there are several applications for believers, and for those of us in ministry or considering it:

1. Filter. The first point is simple; anything which affects us so deeply, which grabs and holds our attention as spiritual beings and even resonates with ongoing reality as we experience it, is something that as believers we have to be careful about.
All music contains implicit propositions, assertions made by the form of its composition, and we need to be aware of what they're suggesting to our minds. This is entirely apart from the explicit propositions made by lyrics which may be present. Both are important, and both need to be payed attention to, as there is a cost to letting in too much unhealthy content- GIGO: Garbage in, Garbage out, as they taught us in computer engineering school.
I am going to guess that most Christian INTPs don't have problems with listening to all different kinds of music; we're curious, have very wide-ranging interests, and are mostly cognizant of the message of what we're listening to, and can make the distinction. But while I personally would never presume to do the job that Paul clearly leaves up to us as individual Christians with our own discernment about what is profitable and right according to our own consciences, it's obvious that we can't be prideful either; there are limits to how effectively the human mind can block influences when we choose to immerse ourselves in them. We are probably not as immune as we imagine ourselves to be. I'm merely advising caution.


2A. Observe your tendencies. Since INTPs often listen to music which reflects their internal state, the music you find yourself drawn to is a reasonably helpful indicator of your spiritual state as well. So while there is a lot of music that is more or less "neutral," (How do you categorize the Blue Man Group?) if you never find yourself naturally drawn to praise or worship music, songs that explicitly honor God, it doesn't mean you're an apostate, but it might be something to consider, a reminder to reexamine yourself spiritually.
I certainly have songs that remind me of scriptural truths and attributes of God that it's safe to say the writer/composer never intended, but to make these the entirety of one's spiritual music diet would be like only reading books about scripture and never scripture itself.

2B. Instruct your habits. By the same token, since music affects us as spiritual creatures and INTPs have often mastered the art of selecting music based on how it affects them, it only makes sense (indeed, in some sense it is our spiritual duty) to intentionally fill some of our music consumption time with music that points us to God. If we can lift our mood from ourselves to consider Christ and the nature of the God we serve and love by listening to music composed for that purpose, we certainly should be making a habit of it. I am guilty of not always being as intentional about this as I should.

3. Let the Music Testify. If we consider ourselves to be more aware than most of the power of music, we should be making full use of it as we serve God in our ministries. It's easy to see how much the right music changes the mood of an event, and so we might put more effort into doing this intentionally. Lots of people know there should be music of some kind, but I suspect few will have put as much thought into what music might suit a particular situation as INTPs will often have. (Note: Just don't be surprised or offended if ministry coworkers reject your suggestions and put on whatever music they always do because they personally like the familiarity of it and aren't thinking in terms of what mood it might or might not give to the event as perceived by those attending. Not everyone thinks in those terms. Just be patient and be willing to accept the fact that your choices might indeed not give everyone else the impression they give you personally.)

Some might ask, isn't choosing music to produce a desired mood "brain-washing" or "emotional manipulation"? It all depends on your motive. Are you trying to trick someone into doing something they wouldn't normally do? Do you believe anyone can be convinced into truly accepting the gospel simply by you creating the right atmosphere? I hope not. Yes some churches do intentionally try to use music for emotional manipulation, sadly, and all I can say is either they are foolish to think they can use man's intelligence to use tricks to accomplish what only the power of God can, or else they are wolves in sheep's clothing whose punishment will be justifiably severe.

But I certainly don't think inviting someone to your home to share the gospel with them means you have to serve bad-tasting food for fear that delicious food would be a kind of manipulation. Good music is something we enjoy as the Church. Martin Luther reportedly asked why the devil should have all the good music, and I am pleased to report that he does not, even in what some like to call his particular style of music. And much of the world's good music came out of Christianity one way or another, so there's no reason not to use it as a testimony. So bring on the pipe organs of cathedrals and the cute kids with plastic ukuleles and everything in between, and let them hear our God is worthy to be praised with skillfully played music.
(Yes, Christian pop radio stations, I said skillfully played)

About those plastic ukuleles... I was speaking from experience.

Summary

Music is a powerful drug, they say. In that context, INTPs are like pharmacists, who can self-administer with the right medications and doses to keep a healthy mental state. The "dark side" of this would be INTPs who purposefully misuse those drugs. You can mess yourself up with music too. But be aware of the power and potential of music, and it can not only transport you to other worlds, but anchor you more firmly in this one and redirect your gaze from the trap of endless introspection outward to reality as it passes by, moment by moment, opportunity by opportunity, the only place where we can serve God and proclaim His gospel.