The red truck that appears above looks rather rustic and benign.  Not so with the one I was recently faced with.  Through no fault of my own, I nearly had a low-speed head-on collision with a big red 18-wheeler diesel truck while cruising past Buck Owens Blvd. the other day, and the irony of it all was that at that very moment I turned around the bend and saw the collosal red vehicle right in front of me, a Red Simpson song called Burnin' Up the Road was playing from my car audio system.  There's a song in there somewhere, and I'm going to find it.  I think I'll call it Red-on Collision. 

Speaking of collisions, I have selected careers and semi-careers (no pun intended) that involve me constantly having to change hats and shift gears (pun intended).  As a psychologist, I am a scientist-practicioner.   As a singer/songwriter, I play the role of artist.  As a university instructor and writer, I allowed the luxury of constantly juxtaposing and attempting to integrate artistic and scientific approaches, concepts and phenomena in general.  I encourage my students to do the same.  We live in a world where we have access to all of the great tools, the tools of science, allowing us to reinforce the delusion of some sort of control over phenomena that is outside of the realm of our control.  And we also have the key to door that opens the arts, allowing us to gain a sense of existential mastery over internal and external elements we often experience as chaotic. Some see science and the arts as incompatible.  I do not.  They both involve the experience of striving to gain control over elements we only have ostensible control of, at best.  To find scientific hypotheses, for example, the sky is the limit, and songs are often the starting point for me.  

I happen to be a big fan of the Bakersfield sound, so I turned to three songs representative of that genre and discovered within them, three scientific hypotheses which, if developed, could have the potential to become full-blown scientific experiments.  

The first is Red Simpson's classic, (Hello) I'm a Truck.  This song got me curious about identity and truckers.  The hypothesis that followed was this:  The type of truck one selects, the way in which one takes care of that truck, and the extent and manner in which one soups up or "pimps" one's truck reflects the personality of the truck driver or truck owner.  

The Susan Raye song, LA International Airport inspired this hypothesis: A big, crowded place tends to intensify one's sense of being alone and isolated following the a heartbreak.   

Here's a third one: One of Penny Marie's brand new songs, I'm Not Going to Stay led me to this hypothesis: When a relationship between two individuals is complicated by the relationship between one individual in the dyad and alcohol, the decision to leave the alcoholic person in the relationship is often followed by an intense urge to reverse that very decision. 

There you have it, three country songs, two Bakersfield sound classics and one from a relatively new Bakersfield sound-grounded artist of the younger generation, and three corresponding scientific hypotheses looking for a full-blown scientific experiment that will confirm or disconfirm each one. 

Why don't you try this for yourself so that you can find a bridge for yourself that will link science and music?  Listen to some songs, old and new, and use those songs to spawn scientific hypotheses.  Use the music and the lyrics to prime your cognitive pump to create new science.  

I would suggest you start by listening to Bakersfield and Beyond tonight, 8/20/09, beginning around 6:40 pm.  If you're out of the FM range surrounding Marin County, stream the show here:

KWMR 

For more information, visit here:

Bakersfield and Beyond

Whether you find the songs here, or elsewhere, why not take two country songs, one old and one new, and generate your own hypotheses, one from each.

Then take an old rock, pop or R&B song, and a new one, and from these, generate two additional hypotheses.  If you come up with four hypotheses, you'll have beat me by one.  Offer your song choices and your concomitant hypotheses in the comments section below, and then tell me this: Which genre and which era of music did you find most fruitful in terms of yielding songs that most easily lent themselves to hypothesis formation?