“It is the Soundtrack for my Life” – Cinematic Construction of Self- Identity Through Music Listening

Transitional changes in youth are directing young people to ponder about themselves and who they want to become. Previous research has largely focused on identity construction as a psychosocial process, overlooking the way these processes are situated in our everyday life. This study explores identity construction processes in young people's everyday lives through music listening within the framework of musical affordances. We conducted interviews with 15–25-year-old Finnish participants ( N = 64) utilizing photo-elicitation methods to discuss their self-collected digi-ethnographical material related to their everyday music uses, which consisted of photos, videos, and/or audio-recordings of a one-week time period. The interview material was analyzed using Braun and Clarke's reflexive approach to thematic analysis. In our analysis, four psychological mechanisms for self-construction processes were identified: a) self-exploration, b) self-enhancement, c) self-efficacy and agency, and d) self-regulation. These four mechanisms were further defined by processes relating to 1) self-awareness, and 2) self-enactment. We suggest that music listening provided affordances for cinematic musical episodes, such as situating self within current time and space, creating fictional narratives of self and own life, and seeing self as a main character of one's own life from a third-person perspective. Based on our results, music provides affordances for self-constructive processes by increasing listeners’ self-awareness and abilities exercising self-enactment through these cinematic musical episodes. These episodes illustrate the rich and multidimensional affordances that can be picked up for construction of self-identity. Our study empirically identifies how identity construction processes are situated within personal, environmental, and temporal dimensions of everyday life. We encourage future research to investigate identity construction processes from the perspective of 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) to deepen our understanding of how music listening can support young people's psychological development and well-being by providing a set of affordances in their everyday lives.