The renowned musicologist goes from classical to Spotify to study the link between what we listen to and eroticism. Why the same songs generate different effects.
Playlist (excerpt)
Sex playlists
OLYMPE, born in 1989 in the suburbs of Paris, showbiz worker, bisexual, had her first relationship at the age of 14 listening to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (→14e). She was with her boyfriend in his bedroom and she put on music by launching an mp3 playlist on her computer. She wanted to play Cat Stevens, and Pink Floyd followed without her planning it. She says it was the song Breathe, at the beginning of the album, that was in her ears when he penetrated her. She accurately describes the intro, Speak to Me, with the scream followed by the big crescendo before the pulsing, constant throughout the rest of the song. “It really calmed me down, helped me feel good and everything was more relaxed,” she says, evoking a pain-free relationship with a partner “who knew how to listen.”
On that day, Olympe’s playlist wasn’t meant for sex, but was just the result of the order of her downloads from Torrent, an illegal peer-to-peer site. During the four years she spent with her first lover, they often played that Pink Floyd album. Later she listened to it again when she had relationships with other people, sometimes remembering “the moments she had already lived with this music”, not for nostalgia, she says, but to go “further in pleasure”.1 Since her adolescence she has been adding to that album other favorite love songs, such as Heaven by I Monster or Boyish by Japanese Breakfast, but without making a real playlist, identified as such on her computer. It is more of a mental and timeless collection, in which recent experiences are mixed with the first memories of his sexual life.
Other people do have playlists explicitly designed for sex. Tom, born in 1979 in the French region of Aveyron, amateur musician, unemployed, homosexual, tells that about ten years ago he recorded a CD with a “compilation ideal for sexual relations” (→4c). He keeps a precise memory of the temporal form of the selection: “It started with a bit dark music”, “a bit electronic, slow, conceptual, and little by little it went towards something more cheerful, more melodic, but always a bit melancholic”. He went so far as to distribute the CD among his friends, “as a kind of joke”, but it didn’t really work out because his choice was too strange, he says, “a bit cold music”. In other words, his playlist was too personal to share.
Who is Esteban Buch
- He was born on July 30, 1963 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
- He is a professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, where he directs the Center for Research on Arts and Language (CRAL).
- He has received awards and recognitions such as the Prix des Muses, the Guggenheim fellowship and the diploma of merit in musicology from the Konex Foundation.
- He has denounced the presence of exiled Nazis in Bariloche, has participated in a documentary on the disappeared of the Argentine dictatorship and has written librettos for contemporary operas.
- Among his books are: El pintor de la Suiza argentina (1991) Música, dictadura, resistencia (2016), La marchita, el escudo y el bombo (with Ezequiel Adamovsky, 2016), El caso Schönberg (2010), Historia de un secreto (2008), The Bomarzo Affair (2003), La Novena de Beethoven (2001), and Breve historia de nuestra música grabada (2020), an essay on the different music supports from vinyl to streaming .