Instru(mental)

The Best Wedding Music

• Episode 17

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What's the best music for a wedding? In this episode, I explain how I lightly manipulated my guests with music to make my wedding as fun, engaging, and memorable as possible. We'll cover research about the music and social bonding hypothesis, the brain's reward circuitry, and statistics about my own wedding playlists that explains how music contributed to the celebration. And, if you're in wedding planning mode, this episode has tips for curating the best music for your special day!  

Resources

References

  • Cevasco, A.M. (2008). Preferred vocal range of young and older adults: Implications for music therapy majors’ clinical training experience. Music Therapy Perspectives, 26(1), 4-12. https://doi.org/10.1093/mtp/26.1.4
  • Montag, C., Reuter, M., & Axmacher, N. (2011). How one’s favorite song activates the reward circuitry of the brain: Personality matters, Behavioural Brain Research, 225(2), 511-514. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2011.08.012
  • Savage, P.E., Loui, P., Tarr, B., Schachner, A., Glowacki, L., & Mithen, S., & Fitch, W.T. (2021). Music as a coevolved system for social bonding. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, e59. doi:10.1017/S0140525X20000333

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0:01: Hey everyone, it's Brea, and it's been quite a while since I released an episode of Instrumental. During the pandemic, we all had a lot to deal with, and for me, this podcast fell really far down my list of priorities, but I'm ready to start up the podcast again and start putting out more regular episodes. With this soft launch starting now, I'm going to be putting out three episodes during September, with an official relaunch of season four in October 2025. If you've been a listener since before the pandemic, thank you for continuing to listen, and if you're a newer listener, then welcome!

0:39: Instru(mental) is an applied music science podcast, which means that we dive into the latest music psychology research, and I use my experiences as a music therapist to explain how music operates in our everyday lives, but in a more digestible way, of course. As a music therapist, I care most about using good research to improve people's lives, so we apply what we learn from the research into our everyday lives. If that sounds like a good plan to you, then I hope you stick around, because I have some really fun episodes planned for 2025.

1:12: The topic of today's episode, though, has been on my mind going back almost two years. I am coming up on the one-year anniversary of getting married, but I started planning the wedding almost a year before that. I know it sounds cliche to say this, but my wedding day was honestly one of the best days of my life. I attribute a lot of that joy and gratitude to our friends and family who helped make the day so festive. Everyone was so sociable and up for all the wedding celebration activities we had planned. Everyone was so sociable and up for all the wedding celebration activities we had planned, and while I knew that my husband and I had great friends and family, when I was planning our actual wedding day I applied just a little bit of music science to help my guests get in the friendly spirit and make the day as memorable as possible.

2:01: Throughout the year-long process of planning my wedding, I kept asking myself, "what makes the best wedding music?" If you are planning a wedding as well, first off, congratulations! If you're in wedding planning mode right now, I will share some tips to consider for building your best wedding day with music. Or even if you're not planning a wedding, if you just want to hear how I lightly manipulated my guests with music to have the best wedding day for everyone involved, then keep on listening.

2:56: I know it probably sounds a little calculating, a little contrived perhaps, to say that I tried to manipulate my closest friends and family with music, but it was all in service of having a wedding day that felt the most like me and my husband as a couple, and I am a music therapist who enjoys translating research into real life, so being intentional about the music is pretty on brand for me. Before we get into how I chose the best music for my wedding and why I chose that music, I wanted to give some disclaimers and let you know what kind of day we were planning for, because the music I used and how I used it may not fit with every type of wedding out there. The best thing about the best weddings are that they really reflect the people that are being celebrated. Here's some of the factors that were specific to our wedding. First, my husband and I didn't have a huge, huge wedding. We ended up having about 50 guests. We also decided not to have dancing or a DJ at our wedding reception, so we DIY'd all of our music via Spotify playlists, so I had a lot more freedom to choose music that I thought aligned well with the alternative reception activities that we had planned. I also have a very talented and generous group of musician friends who helped us with lending us their gear and their talents throughout the day. So that was definitely an extra part of my budget that I didn't have to really account for that other wedding planners might. And finally, I had a very flexible fiance, now husband, husband who really trusted me to choose the music that I thought would best shape that day. So I got to really plan the music exactly how I wanted, but, as a disclaimer, I did run everything by my husband to make sure that he was on board.

4:48: Okay, with all those parameters laid out, I chose the music for my wedding day with three goals in mind. First, I wanted my guests to feel as welcomed and sociable as possible. I know that weddings can be a little awkward because you may not know most of the other guests and because this was a rare chance for so many people we cared about to come together. I wanted to encourage people maybe subliminally with the music, to feel like they belonged and to chat and connect with others from the other side of the aisle, so to speak, that they didn't know before the wedding. My second goal was to make the day as memorable as possible.

5:28: For me and my husband, your wedding day is one of those life milestones that's filled with so much emotion and I knew that I wanted to reinforce those personal, autobiographical memories with music that I could listen to later to remember our wedding in a really authentic way. And if you've ever been part of a wedding, you know that the day of is a marathon, from waking up early to getting ready for the ceremony, through the reception and the send-off, and it takes a lot of stamina to pull it off. So my third goal for the music was to shape the energy going throughout all different parts of the day. With these parameters and three priorities in mind, I'm going to explain how I decided what the music should sound like at three different parts of my wedding day. First, during the wedding ceremony. Second, during cocktail hour. And third, during the general reception activities after dinner. For each part of the day, I'll outline what music I chose and I'll share some research or data that justifies why that music fulfills at least one of the goals of my wedding day. So let's get into it.

6:43: The most intentional music choices I made was about what music was going to be in the ceremony, the actual reason why I had asked my friends and family to set aside a weekend and witness one of the most important moments in my life. I knew that the ceremony was the first experience of the day when everybody would be together and it would kind of set the tone for the rest of the day, and so I made everyone sing to open my wedding ceremony. Yes, I made everyone sing without telling them ahead of time. I could not have done this without my best friend, Daniel, who is also a music therapist and has one of those personalities that can lead music with immediate connection and trust.

7:28: So, if you can picture it, the ceremony space was a former decommissioned church with beautiful, natural light, warm wooden floors and exposed beams and a vaulted ceiling. So you know the acoustics are going to be great. Everyone was on time, thankfully, and seated and chatting politely. A few minutes after the formal invitation start time, Daniel comes up to the front of the hall and explains that everyone is going to make some music together before the formal ceremony begins, Daniel started with a light vocal warm-up, like a quick version of the audience choirs that Jacob Collier does in his concerts.

8:09: (Daniel): We're going to do something related to music science. We're going to make music together before the ceremony starts. So we're going to start with something a little, a little weird and then we'll get to something a little lesser. Everyone go, "..." Now people in the aisles, I want you to go, "..." Beautiful, now, everyone, hold those again. Now we'll go over here to the sides of the aisles, "...". Beautiful, now give yourselves a little...

9:13: In that clip you can hear that people were actually pretty into it and I chose the hall in part because it was such a resonant space, so even if someone wasn't completely comfortable with their voice, they would blend in together with everyone else really well. Then, Daniel directed everyone to check out the abbreviated lyrics provided in the ceremony program. Daniel led the first two songs on guitar, which were "My Girl" by The Temptations and "Wouldn't It Be Nice" by the Beach Boys. Here's a little bit of what that sounded like.

10:01: Well, I got sunshine on a cloudy day, when it's cold outside, I've got the month of May. I guess you'd say what can make me feel this way? My girl, my girl, my girl, talking bout my girl, my girl. Beautiful. Wouldn't it be nice if we could wake up in the morning when the day is new, after having spent the day together, holding each other close the whole night through. But happy times together, we've been spending. I wish that every kiss was ever ending, Oh wouldn't it be nice.

11:09: For the third song, Daniel moved over to piano and told guests that they would sing through the lyrics of the last song once and then the music would continue as an instrumental version for the wedding processional as we walked down the aisle. I'm choosing to keep the third song private just to keep it a little bit more special to us. But I will say that the third song was kind of a ballad type of song that wasn't written as an overtly romantic song but held a lot of meaning for the life my husband and I wanted to build. The third song kind of had like "What a wonderful world vibes to it, even though that was not the song that we went with.

11:57: As a music therapist, listening back to those recordings, I can hear little music facilitation tricks that Daniel used to lead the music to get people to join in. For example, Daniel chose really singable keys that fit in most folks' voices. According to research by Andrea Cevasco-Trotter, most non-singers have a comfortable singing range of about 15 semitones or half steps, which is roughly a little bit more than like an octave. For female singers this falls roughly between a G3 note and a B4 note, and for male singers their comfy range falls roughly an octave below these notes. The keys for the songs sung in my wedding ceremony roughly fell in these comfy voice ranges for non-singers. Specifically, "My Girl" was played by Daniel in the key of G major with the majority of the melody falling between a D4 and a B4, which is a total of 10 semitones. The second song, "Wouldn't it Be Nice?" had a bigger melody range of 16 semitones, but Daniel led that song in the key of F major which had a low note of A3 up to C4, which is just one semitone higher than female non-singers comfy singing range. So hopefully not too much of a stretch for our guests who aren't musicians. And along with these strategic key choices to make the melody as singable as possible, Daniel led the songs with really clear rhythmic and verbal cues to help make the music as predictable as possible. The songs were not too fast, they weren't too slow, which also may have enhanced guests' ability to predict what was musically coming next, even if they hadn't heard those songs in quite a while. Almost a year later, I still sometimes listen back to those recordings that we got on my iPhone of the ceremony music. It still makes me really happy to hear everybody singing together.

14:11: My underlying goal for the group singing, was to get all of the guests to participate directly in the ceremony in a way that felt as comfortable as possible for the guests who maybe don't sing in front of strangers regularly. My intention was that if our guests felt as comfortable as possible to give singing a try, then singing would help everyone feel more bonded and subconsciously united by the music in celebrating throughout the day. And there's research that supports this idea throughout the day. And there's research that supports this idea, specifically an article titled Music as a Co-Evolved System for Social Bonding that was published in the academic journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. In that article, the authors argue that human musicality is a co-evolved system for social bonding. Let's break that sentence down just a little bit. Musicality is not the same as music. While music are cultural products like songs and instruments, musicality is the biological capacity that allows humans to perceive and produce music. Humans across the globe and throughout history have been able to perceive and create an underlying beat, sing discrete pitches, learn repetitive structures in music and recognize cultural features within familiar music, all of which contribute to building and strengthening relationships with others to building and strengthening relationships with others, particularly in larger groups. Altogether, the researchers call this the music and social bonding hypothesis, which says that human musicality is like a neurocognitive toolkit which all helps to facilitate social bonding and, evolutionarily, when prehistoric human communities made music together, they felt more socially bonded, which probably provided an evolutionary advantage.

16:13: Reading about the music and social bonding hypothesis put a lot of my wedding ceremony choices into perspective. For example, I chose the three songs for the sing-along that were kind of timeless and were likely well known by all of our guests, no matter what generation they were from. "My Girl" was released in 1964 and was The Temptations' first number one hit, and "Wouldn't It Be Nice" was released by The Beach Boys in 1966, but both songs have remained relatively popular across generations since being released. I chose the first two songs especially to be maximally familiar and fun for guests to join in, which meant that I didn't end up choosing my own personally favorite songs. For example, in my initial wedding plan I wanted everyone to sing "God Only Knows" by The Beach Boys because it's my favorite song of theirs, but I cut that song because that melody was a little too slow and had a little bit too wide of a pitch range in the melody. The third non-traditional song that I had everyone sing was not as familiar as the first two songs, but I checked with a random sampling of folks if they knew the third song when I was planning and I got the sense that enough people knew that song that it would work in the ceremony by setting up the sing-along so that guests would be maximally likely to join in.

17:37: I was also trying to draw on the power of singing to get our guests to feel connected to our wedding, to the others around them, and to feel uplifted and celebratory for the entire day. Music is a really effective, aesthetic way for people to engage with each other all at the same time in a way that gets around needing to interact one-on-one. Imagine if I had tried to get all 50 guests to spend one minute connecting with every other guest. It would have taken so much time and social energy on their part. The music and social bonding hypothesis predicts that when we activate our musicality through the sing-along in this case, then we increase the benefits of social bonding, like having a shared intention and feelings of closeness and empathy. Honestly, I think it totally worked! During the reception I kind of like, took a moment to check in and look around, and I on always so tickled and happy to see people my people, my husband's people, everyone starting conversations together, teaming up to play games we had provided, taking pictures and sharing memories even though they had not met before that day. I felt like the group singing sparked an energetic buzz that really sustained itself and our wedding for the rest of the day.

19:02: After the ceremony, there were still two main parts of the wedding reception in which I used music to strategically shape our guests' feelings. Immediately after most wedding ceremonies, there's a cocktail hour where guests enjoy drinks and appetizers while the couple takes pictures and takes a little break before joining the wedding reception activities. For this portion of the day, I knew that the guests would have just come off of a more serious, reflective part of the day and I wanted the music to start the day. I knew that the guests would have just come off of a more serious, reflective part of the day and I wanted the music to start the party shifting to a more fun but still intimate vibe as guests started to mingle with each other and before we joined everyone, and the best way to get people to buy in is to give them what they all love their own favorite music on our wedding website.

19:51: When people digitally RSVP'd, I gave guests the option to share a song about love that they thought that we should include on the wedding playlist. Out of our 50 or so guests, 18 people gave me specific song recommendations. The recommended song spanned all sorts of styles and included songs like "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry, which was suggested by my college roommate, to "Can't Help Falling in Love" by Elvis Presley, which was suggested by our wedding day coordinator, and even I got a request for the "Imperial March" from Star Wars, as suggested by one of my husband's best friends. After the RSVPs came in, I compiled all of these 18 song suggestions into a Spotify playlist that lasted about an hour and 10 minutes. When ordering the songs, I listened specifically for which songs paired and flowed well together. It was actually a really great puzzle to compile the playlist, and it was also great hearing the tastes and personalities of guests who had contributed.

20:58: The order was more determined by the energy of each song, and I was going for a soft wave kind of effect between more upbeat songs with space for slower songs in between. There were a few songs whose original recordings just did not fit in anywhere. So in this case I usually swapped in a cover version that fit the overall playlist flow a little better. And, if you were wondering, I did figure out where to put the "Imperial March" from Star Wars in, even though I know it was probably a joke. I did find a lo-fi version of the track that I put at the very end of the cocktail hour playlist as a subtle cue that people should start walking to their dinner seats Maybe. I don't know if anyone actually got that cue. I also rounded out the cocktail hour playlist with a few extra songs, like my parents' wedding song and a song that was special to my husband's parents to bring it all together.

21:57: My intention was for people to randomly hear the song that they had suggested during the cocktail hour, reminding them that they were personally contributing to our day and maybe starting a conversation among guests about which song they had picked out or whose song they were personally contributing to our day, and maybe starting a conversation among guests about which song they had picked out or whose song they were listening to right now. There is research that suggests that when we hear a favorite song, it strongly activates parts of our brain's reward circuitry, specifically in the ventral striatum, which is associated with high positive feelings, and the caudate nucleus, which is associated with anticipating that positive peak. The researchers also observed that a part of the brain called the insula was activated when participants heard their favorite song, which might be related to mentally singing the song to yourself. To make a quick methodological note, the researchers' fMRI measurements of brain activity compared people listening to their favorite song to fMRIs of the same people listening to their least favorite song. So the fMRI differences described in this research emphasize how your brain activation changes between these kind of extreme listening conditions. Still, the results do provide clear evidence that my guests were likely experiencing a little extra moment of pleasure when their song came on during the cocktail hour, even when they were kind of just hanging out before my husband and I joined the reception and the final part of the wedding celebration I planned the music around was the main reception after we had enjoyed dinner.

23:42: As I mentioned earlier, my husband and I are not really dancing people, so instead our reception had a choose-your-own-adventure mix of activities to keep our guests busy. Guests could choose to do things like playing a quick board game from a selection of games that we had set up in the main hall. Signing our guest book, getting a selfie with the bride and groom and attempting to complete a seven-minute escape room with memorabilia from our relationship that my husband built at the wedding venue. We had a little stamp passport on the back of guest name cards and if they got all the stamps by trying or doing all of the activities, then they got a lotto scratcher as a wedding favor, because who isn't motivated by the prospect of winning money? Anyways, I loved our wedding reception alternative activities that were not dancing.

24:35: For this part of the day, I needed to build a playlist that would work with all of the activities the guests might be participating in and also work if people just wanted to sit around and chat. For the evening, my husband and I were circulating around saying hello to guests for the two-ish hours of the wedding reception and I wanted the music to be festive but also maximally meaningful for the two of us. For me especially, I feel like I imprint my autobiographical memories onto the music that I hear. So I built a two and a half hour reception playlist with two priorities in mind. First, that I could listen back to the reception playlist songs to help me relive the day and second, that the playlist could still give guests the familiarity and buy-in that would keep the social energy going to finish the wedding day off strong.

25:30: Now I've been to other weddings as a guest and I've noticed some missteps for reception music, and I knew that if I wanted to choose more music that was personally relevant to just me and my husband and perhaps unfamiliar to our guests, that I would need to make sure that the music's acoustic features simultaneously guided the evening's energy. Every wedding reception I've been to has been pretty loud and noisy, because people are having a great time. What this"my means, though, is that the music is not clearly discernible over all of the conversations and the laughing and whatever else is going on. I knew that for this final part of the wedding, the reception playlist needed to be balanced between familiar and energetic. If I chose a less well-known song that had more special meaning to my husband and I, then I needed to make sure that there was a clear and upbeat energy to the song, and if I wanted to have a more low-key part of the playlist, then I better choose a really familiar song so that guests had some kind of anchor that they might be able to like, recognize or hear the song in their head, even if some of the acoustic features like the beat weren't that prominent and they might be getting muddied up by the other sources of sound across the different reception activities.

26:49: I was pretty much trying to avoid a situation where the music was just an extra layer of sound. I built my wedding reception playlist intuitively, first pulling love songs that were personally meaningful to me and my husband, but prioritizing songs that had an upbeat but not overwhelmingly fast tempo and that also had a clear sense of rhythm and groove. For example, I had a couple songs from indie pop band Saint Motel like "My Type" and "It's All Happening" because we went to one of their concerts once and I really love the group. I also love Saint Motel because their music features a brass section and it has a really fun vibe that sounds modern and vintage at the same time. I also had songs from my favorite artist, Ingrid Michaelson, who's in the singer-songwriter genre, but I included her more. upbeat songs like "The Lotto" and "Celebrate", whose lyrics still fit the wedding vibe. I balanced those more personal choices out with some pretty typical wedding type of songs like "Marry You" by Bruno Mars, "September" by Earth, Wind and Fire, because that's the month our wedding was in, and "Lover" by Taylor Swift. These were songs that fit the general wedding context and I knew that most guests would probably recognize and enjoy them, even if they weren't the most personal songs to my husband and I.

28:10: In researching this episode, I actually found a Spotify playlist analyzer app called SongData.io that analyzes public playlists for key popularity, tempo and several other factors across all of the songs on the playlist. Running the statistics on my wedding reception playlist, about half of the songs, or 47%, had a popularity rating of 70 or higher out of 100. The most popular songs on my reception playlist were "Heat Waves" by Glass Animals and "Espresso" by Sabrina Carpenter, with popularity scores of 86 out of 100. Only four songs, or 9% of the entire playlist, had a popularity rating of 30 or below and most of those songs still had an above-median tempo positively- keep the energy up. Speaking of tempo, the median tempo of the songs across my entire playlist was 118 beats per minute, which is roughly the tempo of "Stand by Me" by Ben E. King or "I Can Feel the Earth Move" by Carole King, and both of those songs were also on my playlist.

29:19: Looking at the song's release years, the playlist does pretty much cover my reminiscence bump really well, with 60% of the songs being originally released in the 2000s or 2010s, which roughly corresponds with my teens and twenties and my parents' reminiscence bumps were also kind of represented, with 21% of the songs being originally released in the 1960s and 70s. The other 20% of the songs were from the 1980s, 1990s and 2020s. Also, according to SongData.io's analysis, most of the songs 83% were in a major key, with only 17% of the songs in a minor key, which makes sense because, to Western listeners, major keys are generally more associated with positively-valenced, celebratory feelings. If you are interested in analyzing the songs on one of your Spotify playlists, I will link the Song Data web app in the show notes your Spotify playlist I will link the Song Data web app in the show notes, and that's how I curated the best wedding music for my and my husband's wedding.

30:30: If you were planning a wedding, congratulations, and I hope that this podcast episode gave you some ideas about what's possible for the music at your wedding. Thanks to the generosity of our friends, all of the music-related activities cost us nothing, unless you count the price of my premium Spotify subscription, which I already pay for. Even if you will be hiring musicians or a DJ, I hope this episode gave you some new ideas for how to plan the music so that it's both meaningful and engaging for everyone involved. Of course, it is the married couple's day, so whatever music you want to play is what goes, but it can be helpful to think of what the music is going to be like from a guest's perspective as you put together a set list for your musicians or DJ. First, be clear on what you want the vibe of your wedding to be.

31:17: But, I would recommend that during the more active parts of the reception, to have more upbeat music, which to me meant at least 100 beats per minute, which is roughly the tempo of "Ain't it Fun" by Paramore, "Single Ladies" by Beyonce or "Dancing Queen" by ABBA. Whatever music you choose, consider how the lyrics, the instrumentation and the speed and volume of the music can reinforce and support the emotions that you're trying to set for youself and your guests.

31:47: Whether you're hiring live musicians or using Spotify playlists, you can also arrange for alternative cover versions of songs that you love but whose original recordings might not be the right fit for a certain part of your wedding. I will say that the best part of our wedding was not the music. It was our guests, to whom I'm so thankful that they went along with all of my unconventional plans, from singing before the ceremony to the escape room and even the Costco wedding cake. One thing I did learn from my wedding day is that the best wedding guests go along with whatever the couple has planned. So if you will be attending a wedding in the future, do your best to give the couple the best day that they can have. Even though planning a wedding can be so stressful and busy, it's also marking a profound day in their lives and it's important that all of the pieces come together as well as possible. I'm so glad that music got to be a part of my wedding day that I get to listen back on for the rest of my life.

32:49: Alright, so with that, the first episode of the soft relaunch of Instru(mental) is out! As always, you can check out the show notes on our website, instrumentalpodcast.com, for all of the references and resources mentioned in this episode. I'll be releasing two more episodes in September, so please keep an eye on whatever app you're listening on. Thank you so much for your support and I'll see you again at the next episode.

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Brea Murakami

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