Musical Sex

“It’s like bread and butter, like ham and eggs,” says David Ritz, ghost-writer of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.” He isn’t talking about breakfast foods. He’s talking about music and sex.

Making music is an act of bringing people together, just like having sex, Ritz claims. “Yearning for union is what I think underlies the sexiest songs of all.”

According to The Independent’s 2022 sex survey, many Harvard students agree. 44.2% of respondents said they like to listen to music during sex. 26% were either “unsure” or responded “other.” Out of the 29.5% of respondents who opposed listening to music during sex, some said it said distracted or detracted from the experience. One student said that he is a “fan of the silence,” with another describing it as “more intimate.” Some expressed indifference, but stated they would not go out of their way to turn music on.

However, Ritz argues that music can act as something of a “lubricant” (though he cringed at this term), particularly in young relationships. “We’re all awkward, we’re scared, we’re confused—we don’t know what the dance is. We haven’t done that sort of dance before, and to have a musical backdrop to the dance is instructive,” he said.

The idea of sex as a dance is fitting: it is learned over time, a dialogue between people, and inherently rhythmic. Music helps establish this atmosphere, or the literal tempo of the dance. “It just makes it better, gives you lots of rhythm, lots of heat, lots of passion,” one student said.

Music can also reduce any awkwardness during sex, especially for new partners. Just like watching TV or Netflix, listening to music has the function of background noise. It also mitigates the risk of being heard by roommates: “I have sex with music more in college because the walls are thin,” one student said.

For Azim Raheem ’25, the value of listening to music is “all about the person you’re with. To listen to music with someone that you’re just hooking up with is the equivalent of being in an elevator and listening to elevator music.” Another student concurred: “I feel like playing music during sex is something you would do with a significant other—I can’t imagine playing music with a hookup.”

“What’s a good song to play during sex?” the Independent asked students in its survey. Responses ranged from the highly popular choice of pop artist The Weeknd to the genre of Jazz. According to Ritz, jazz was first played in brothels in New Orleans: “it had the full flavor of rhythmic screwing,” he said, just as “intercourse has a rhythm to it.”

Students also showed a preference for slower R&B and Soul, with the likes of Frank Ocean and Daniel Caesar, which would offer a more sensual experience. Suggestions of “WAP” and other rap songs, as well as some classic rock, would offer a faster pace. One respondent even suggested Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, echoing Ritz’s sentiment: “Mozart is sexy to me, Maller is sexy to me, Bach is sexy.”

Here is The Harvard Independent’s 2022 sex playlist, a combination of students’ preferences and our own selections to set the mood. It includes a variety of genres and moods, so you may need to skip around for your desired effect.