The use of digital portable music devices such as MP3 players has rapidly increased during the last decade, and the sheer availability of music offered by such players raises questions about their impact on listeners’ mental and physical health and well-being. This article explores MP3 player use as an everyday tactic for affect regulation, here understood as an individual's efforts to maintain or change the intensity or duration of a given affect. The ability to understand and regulate affects has significant health implications, and among the tactics relevant to such regulation, engagement with music has proven to be particularly successful. The material presented in this article is based on a qualitative interview study focused on MP3 player use as a medium for musical self-care. Because MP3 users can listen to whatever they want, whenever they want, and target their music in the interests of managing and regulating moods and emotions, the MP3 player represents a valuable and convenient technology of affect regulation.

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In 2011, a terror attack by one of its own citizens shocked Norway and led to deep mourning in the population. Music played a vital part in the way people processed this national tragedy. By looking at the collective and individual musicking that took place in response to the terror attack, this article explores the role and importance of music in this particular context,particularly with regard to its abilities to contain, give resonance to, and express difficult emotions; create feelings of community; and contribute to the individual’s self-care and work toward recovery and the achievement of well-being.