A tropical beach.
The song Orinoco Flow is by an Irish singer named after a South American River with an infectious, if not fanciful beat. It was released in 1988 but seems like the type of song that would have been made much later. It obviously has pop elements to it, but also seems to be something from New Age. But then again, there's something classical about it. Like the singer that created it, it's hard to really pin down what it is. Regardless of what label you give it, it's quite unique. The song was released by Enya in 1988 and reached within the top ten in a number of genres in the US, to include Alternative and Adult Contemporary. And it reached number one in other countries like Switzerland and Belgium.
But again, the song is so different. Although the lyrics make it plainly about travel with its name being centered on a South American river and a chorus periodically chanting "sail away," you feel like you should do exactly that even if there seems to be more to it. When I hear it, I want to get on a plane going somewhere. It doesn't really matter where--just somewhere far and exotic. Despite the lyrics telling you it's about traveling around the globe, the musical elements evoke something even more exotic. There's a sense of going to a different state of being instead of a merely just a different nation-state.
The "Mozart Effect" isn't necessarily about Mozart. The famous 1993 study showing a temporary boost in spatial reasoning after listening to Mozart has since been shown to work with any music or stimulus people find enjoyable. It seems to be a mood or alertness effect and not unique to classical music.
One February morning in 2004, I heard the song Orinoco Flow in what I remember to be my first time ever encountering it. It was thundering but not in an overpowering way. It echoed in the particular space I was in and I felt a little lost, but in a way that you embrace and enjoy. There were colors and objects I didn't recognize around me. Slowly, the scene changed and I started to make out elements I knew very well until I could name them--my desk, my textbooks, and then finally my alarm clock from which the song was playing. The alarm clock went off at the moment the song was playing on the radio. Or, I guess you can say the radio station played that song at the exact moment I had my alarm clock set. And because of that, I had difficulty knowing if I was actually in whatever space I saw while dreaming or the world of my bedroom. It still took me another minute before I felt I was fully awake.
A depiction of Pavlov's experiment.
That's the thing about music though. It can literally change how you perceive the world. And I'm not writing just about the haziness I sensed in the transition from being alseep to being awake as Enya played in the background. But I won't get into the scientific studies about this. I'll instead focus on how the people that produce mass media use it to influence your mood in order to influence your actions. For instance, advertisers have known from experience how adding a jingle or positive song to an ad for a product creates a more positive perception of that product by those who see the ad. And it doesn't even have to be a jingle. Sometimes a single, distinctive tone can be enough to link certain things together to change not just your emotional reaction, but also your physiological response as well. Ok, I guess I will mention one study even though I said I wouldn't. Russian researcher Ivan Pavlov discovered what is now called classical conditioning when he was able to consistently get dogs to associate a bell with food. He did this by ringing a bell whenever he served food to the dog. The dog naturally salivated when he saw food but Pavlov was eventually able to get the dog to salivate just at the sound of the bell because the bell had become associated with food.
The same film scene can feel completely different in terms of the viewer's mood depending on the score. Experiments using identical footage paired with different musical tracks have shown that the change in music can shift a viewer's judgment of a character's intention.
As for Orinoco Flow and what it means to most people, I have no idea. But for me, I'll always associate it with the dream-like state I was in when I first heard it. Maybe that's classical conditioning at work since my first memory of it will always be tied with a dream I was having at the time. Or maybe that initial time is irrelevant and I would have always associated it with some other worldly state regardless of how I first heard it. Either way, the song flows well and I'll just go with the flow.
