Livy Wicks’ Wonderfully Easing Theme Tune for the emPOWER Pod

A HUGE thank you to the team at String and Tins who every month have pulled out the bag an amazing emPOWER Breakfast POD for you to listen to. They’re all female team on the project pulling out the stops and going all in.

The studios, based in Gresse Street Fitzrovia, offer a salubrious setting for this intimate emPOWER experience, where Athene gets to deep dive into the childhood and background of her guests, all through the power of music and memory. 

Our brains are remarkable time machines when it comes to music. A single guitar riff can transport us back decades, conjuring not just the memory of a moment, but its entire emotional landscape. The scent of summer rain, the warmth of a first kiss, the taste of coffee in a long-forgotten café – all sparked by a few musical notes.

This isn't just poetic musing; it's neuroscience at work. When we experience music, it engages multiple regions of our brain simultaneously, creating a neural network far more complex than almost any other human experience. The hippocampus, our memory's master archivist, works in concert with the amygdala, our emotional core, to create a rich tapestry of memory that interweaves sound, emotion, and context. Which is why sound design, music/composition and mnemonics are so important in the advertising process! Often the best productions think about the music and sound right up front in the conception of the idea. 

As yet you will need to click the Spotify playlist in the show notes to listen to our guests playlist (we need likes and follows to qualify for sponsorship, so we can purchase a license which in turn should finally reach the Artist - therefore completing the wheel of commerce.. phew) but Livy Wicks our wonderful engineer at String and Tins is also an artist in her own right and has written and produced the theme tune and we just love it!

On the POD we ask guests about what piece of music relates to a certain moment in their lives, and it unlocks something! What makes music particularly powerful is its ability to encode memories with emotional timestamps. Think of how certain songs become the unofficial soundtrack to different chapters of our lives. The song playing during your first slow dance, the album that got you through a difficult breakup, your child's favourite lullaby – these become more than just melodies. They transform into emotional anchors, capable of pulling up not just the memory itself, but the full sensory and emotional experience of that moment.

This phenomenon, known as the "music-evoked autobiographical memory" (MEAL), is particularly resilient to the effects of aging and even some forms of dementia. It's why someone who struggles to remember what they had for breakfast might suddenly light up and sing every word to a song from their youth. Music seems to create a kind of neural shortcut to our memories, bypassing the usual routes of recall and tapping directly into our emotional and autobiographical memory banks.

What this means is we are getting a unique insight where the memory is triggered around things that might not have been thought of for years. 

The wonderful setting and the amazing team go a long way to the sense of security and ease for our guests that comes with working at String and Tins on the POD. 

MD Rachel Hough was instrumental in making the collaboration happen, championing emPOWER along with producer Esi Jonuzi who has wrangled the diaries of some very busy guests and made the record sessions seamless. 

We hope that you are enjoying the podcast series and if you are please follow and like, share and comment! We would love to know what you think.