The Soundtrack and The Architecture

Dick Clark said music is the soundtrack of our lives.

But what if music - and words - are more than that? What if they are the soundtrack of our architecture - the scaffolding that holds up the culture we live inside?

The architecture in sound. Lets think about this: “Hearts and minds" wasn’t only a phrase - it was an attempt to pour concrete in language, to fix a precedent into foreign policy. Much like “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” “God Save the Queen.” The Pledge of Allegiance. Not just recitations, but daily acts of building - word by word, note by note - a structure of belonging.

Hymns, anthems, chants. They don’t just echo. They construct.

I remember myself as a child on the playground, singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” at the top of my lungs with friends - full-hearted, insistent, wanting to keep singing it over and over.

And yet, even then, I felt unsettled.

The words didn’t feel like they belonged to me. The song carried a resonance that pulled me in, but the content did not represent me at all. I wanted to dissect it - to understand why the melody stirred me
while the meaning felt foreign. Why I wanted to keep singing what did not sing me back.

That’s the paradox of language and music as architecture: we inhabit structures we don’t always choose, but they still shape the rooms we live inside. Words become walls, music becomes memory. A phrase repeated long enough becomes a foundation.

A song sung together becomes a shelter.

A ritualized lyric becomes a roof we all live under.

Where precedents creep quietly into culture, music and words carve their way faster - rhythm and repetition hardening the frame.

I’ve been thinking of this as the Operating System of Belonging - the way culture codes itself not just in structures and blueprints, but in sound. It’s why nations sing, movements chant, corporations brand in sound. Why silence, too, is never truly empty. The architecture of culture is carried in melody, in mantra, in the words we allow to repeat until they feel like home.

If precedents are the beams and joints of culture, then words and music are the soundtrack of its architecture. They are the lines that echo, the harmonics that hold.

So the question is not only what we are building, but what we are singing while we build. What soundtrack are we giving the next generation to inherit, to hum, to live inside?





Sincerely,
Amber Eltaieb