Mapping the Music of the Soul
When I began my healing journey, I found that music could express feelings that I had no words for. It was like each song was a map of a hidden place inside me. As a data professional, I’ve always been drawn to visualizing information. I started to wonder: what if we could create a literal map of our emotional world? It turns out, there is a powerful therapeutic method for this very purpose: Emotion Mapping. This page explores how we can use this creative tool to navigate the emotional landscapes of our own lives, using music as our guide.
What is Emotion Mapping?
Emotion mapping is a creative method for visualizing and understanding our feelings. Pioneered in family therapy by researchers like Davina Gabb, it’s a way to explore our inner world by externalizing it onto a map. Instead of just talking about feelings, we give them a shape, a color, and a location.
This approach acknowledges a profound truth: emotions are not just abstract concepts; they are tied to our bodies, our memories, and the spaces we inhabit.
How It Works
Emotion mapping is an action-oriented process. It can involve:
- Drawing or Sketching: Creating a floor plan of a space (like your home) and labeling different rooms with the emotions they evoke.
- Body Mapping: Using a silhouette of the human body and coloring in the areas where you feel specific emotions (e.g., anxiety in the chest, joy in the heart).
- Journey Mapping: Charting the emotional highs and lows of an experience, like a relationship or a period of recovery.
Why It’s Powerful
The benefits of this practice are deeply therapeutic and align perfectly with our mission of fostering self-awareness.
- It Bypasses Words: For those who find it hard to articulate their feelings, maps allow you to “show, not tell.”
- It Enhances Self-Awareness: Creating a map gives you a bird’s-eye view of your own emotional patterns.
- It Uncovers Hidden Knowledge: The process can reveal insights that traditional interviews or simple reflection might miss.
Bridging Art and Science: A New Way of Knowing
For too long, a false wall has stood between science and art—between “objective” data and “subjective” emotion. However, as art-based research demonstrates, this is a “debilitating binary” that limits our understanding.
In their groundbreaking study on injured athletes, Aura Goldman and her colleagues used emotion mapping to explore the trauma of long-term injury. They found that this creative method was highly effective, especially for participants who struggled with verbal expression.
The Power of Phenomenal Knowledge
The study revealed that emotion mapping doesn’t just collect data; it generates phenomenal knowledge. This is the deep, nuanced, lived experience of a person—the kind of understanding that statistics often miss. For example, athletes mapped the physiotherapy room—a place of healing—as a “conflicted space” filled with both joy and anger, connection and loneliness. This complex reality was only visible through the map.
This validates a core belief of our project: that creative expression is not just “entertainment,” but a valid and powerful way of knowing and healing.
Mapping the Emotional Arc of Music
If we can map the emotions of a physical space, can we also map the emotional journey of a song?
Music is not static; it’s a dynamic landscape that carries us from one feeling to another. Each of our songs is crafted to be an emotional journey—a sonic map that guides the listener through states like grief, resilience, hope, and peace.
Researchers like Alan Cowen at UC Berkeley have even begun creating scientific emotion maps of music, using data from thousands of listeners to chart how different sounds evoke specific feelings like amusement, anxiety, awe, and triumph. This confirms what we know intuitively: music is a map of the human heart.
You can use this technique to deepen your connection with our music and your own inner world.
- Choose a Song: Pick one of our tracks that resonates with you.
- Prepare Your Canvas: Take a blank piece of paper and some colored pens, pencils, or paints.
- Press Play & Map: As the music plays, let your hand move freely. Don’t think too hard. Use colors, shapes, lines, or words to represent the feelings that arise.
- Does the emotion feel sharp or soft? Jagged or flowing?
- Where does the song begin emotionally? Where does it take you?
- What memories or images come to mind?
- Reflect on Your Map: When the song is over, look at what you’ve created. What does it tell you? Your map is a unique snapshot of your inner world, as experienced through sound.
For a richer emotional vocabulary, we highly recommend exploring Paul Ekman’s Atlas of Emotions, a tool that helps identify the nuances between feelings like frustration, anger, and fury.
Conclusion: Your Inner Cartographer
Emotion mapping is more than a technique; it’s an act of deep listening. It’s about becoming the cartographer of your own soul. By pairing this practice with music, we create a powerful vehicle for self-exploration.
The maps you create are not meant to be perfect or beautiful. They are meant to be honest. They are a conversation between the music, your heart, and your hand—a tangible record of your journey toward understanding yourself more deeply.