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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   5437 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 11, 2022

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Does anyone else have trouble truly enjoying music anymore?

Specifically, in a world where I can hear any song I want at any time on demand, and I can listen anywhere and everywhere I go, I've found that I get weary of the same ~1000 songs that end up cycling through my playlist, though they're all good songs, and even branching out to less-repeated songs I rarely find one that actually gets an emotional reaction or strikes me as a 'banger' as the kids say. Its just the Diegetic background music of my life.

Occasionally I find a new artist with some solid songs that I end up playing on loop for a couple weeks, then I add a couple good songs from them into my larger playlist, and go back to baseline.

Note, this is NOT a complaint that "all modern music sucks." More like I've saturated my brain with the music I like to the point that I can't properly enjoy it anymore?

Also, live concerts are still a blast, so I also don't think its a general sense of anhedonia.

Yes, absolutely. My experiential peak w.r.t music was 16-17 years old. I could lie in bed in the dark and have vivid visual hallucinations in-step with a song. These days, no matter how hard I try, I can't replicate that experience.

Part of me thinks this isn't just age -- it's also just overexposure to music in general. Most teenagers and young adults play music between 4-8 hours per day, every day, and that's definitely having an impact on our brains.

jumbled thoughts

  • Music is strongest for the young, as you get older its emotional strength reduces, just as other emotions reduce in potency.

  • Music is in some sense charged from everyday experience and auditory phenomena. Its patterns are an arrangement of real life phenomena. As you listen to more music without re-experiencing its charging antecedents, the music will refer to fewer emotionally charged experiences.

  • As you listen to a song more and more, it’s surprise reduces, and emotional potency is associated with surprise.

  • Your tastes may have just evolved. I find a lot of music to be garbage that I enjoyed in my teens, not because I can’t see its allure, but the allure is toward an emotional state that I no longer consider beneficial. At the same time, I experience intense emotions listening to religious music.

Good points, all.

This in particular, though:

Your tastes may have just evolved. I find a lot of music to be garbage that I enjoyed in my teens, not because I can’t see its allure, but the allure is toward an emotional state that I no longer consider beneficial. At the same time, I experience intense emotions listening to religious music.

My tastes have evolved some but also crystallized a lot around my early twenties, it feels like. Definitely got past my more angsty and awkward stage where music that spoke to outcasts was a lot of my go-to. Find hard rock to be kind of silly now but I embrace it nonetheless, and I'm more open to genres like country, once I saw past the boring pop schlock that actually gets radio play.

The last time I think I felt an intense emotional connection to a song was back during the pandemic when the internet suddenly got obsessed with Sea Shanties for a couple months, and This song was produced from one of the most popular ones. Not even sure exactly why but I was very taken with that version in particular and it became a personal anthem of mine for surviving lockdowns.

And, very similar to religious music (good choice by the way) I cannot help but feel a deep, almost primal sense of joy and frission when I hear a bunch of people singing a Sea Shanty together. There's some deep psychological programming at work there, I think. But I don't become obsessed with it like I might have when I was younger.

Few hypotheses (based on experience, wrapped in theory):

  1. Hedonic treadmill. Your rotation system might still have a low "essential" variation, so that brain can predict/remember the most salient patterns, after which new songs don't excite/surprise it. Intermittent silence helps

  2. Attention. When you listen as a background to other activities, it might feel much less exciting, as attention spreads among inputs. Concert, in contrast, grabs all your sensory inputs at once

I think both of those on are point. I've been thinking a LOT about the hedonic treadmill and how so many people probably burn themselves out unintentionally because they can binge literally any media they want constantly, and especially for TV shows and movies, there's really a very limited number of truly unique, top-quality works in a given genre. Once you've sampled those, you're pretty much left with nothing but increasingly inferior imitators. After you watch The Godfather, you can slide over to Goodfellas et. al., then maybe Scarface, and there's a handful of other contenders for 'classic' gangster flicks. Then maybe watch The Sopranos, maybe Boardwalk Empire and then I'd wager that nothing else will measure up.

So funny enough I try to avoid doing this to myself with, e.g. books, TV shows, and video games.

But music is so much more of an ambient, omnipresent factor one might not think about how much is consumed every day. People never really describe themselves as 'binging' music, right?

Also, in concert the artists can improvise or add new elements to existing songs so the combination of pleasant familiarity and intriguing novelty, on top of the full engagement of the senses, helps revive the musical experience. IMO.

So funny enough I try to avoid doing this to myself with, e.g. books, TV shows, and video games.

How do you avoid it? Watching different stuff, not watching anything/doing something else, or another way?

Yup.

With video games, in particular, if there's a game that gets exceptional acclaim from critics and players alike and it seems like it'd be right up my alley, I make a conscious effort NOT to board the hype train and jump right into playing it at the earliest chance. Indeed, I'll usually wait until it has been out for several months before even purchasing it.

I did this for Red Dead Redemption 2, which was a REAL challenge since RDR1 is one of my top 10 faves of all time. The idea is to hold off on playing it until the mood strikes me 'naturally,' when I actually feel the urge to play that sort of game! And when I do play, I make a deliberate effort to finish the game in a timely fashion even if this means not going for 100% completion.

So I end up switching between genres and series and try to avoid crippling my ability to enjoy a new game by playing too many similar ones. I've found racing games are a useful "palatte cleanser" for me. It helps that recently so many extremely anticipated games have, upon release, ended up being massive disappointments. I think I've saved myself a lot of grief and wasted time.

Similar with books and movies. Don't read/watch stuff in the same series without taking a break. Switch between genres, switch from fiction to nonfiction.

On that note, the final book in one of my favorite series is releasing soon and I'm genuinely excited for it!

TV is the hardest to self-regulate since it is so easy to just veg out on the couch and watch 10 episodes in a sitting. But I've narrowed down the series that I actually follow to a bare handful, and I force myself to pace my watch speed a bit.

It sounds like a neat trick for tv shows and books, and I am going to try to apply it there (cheers!) but I already do that with games sort of. With most games I give myself a week to finish them, or hook me, otherwise I move on. And with exploratory platformers I try to do it the week they are released, so I can potentially find secrets no one else has (it's very satisfying).

But rdr2, I could never get sick of that game. If a game leans heavy into making shit diegetic I try and get lost in it, and often succeed. I got kind of addicted to it in far cry 2 (the best one) and then rdr (I actually appreciated how much of a pain in the ass it was to get the horseman horses in undead nightmare, because it gave me an excuse to cowboy it up) and now rdr2.

I got kind of addicted to it in far cry 2 (the best one)

You and I would probably get along really well. FC2 is one of my favorites as well despite admitting it has flaws; I truly appreciate almost all the game design decisions that went into it and wish that later entries has retained more of them. Far Cry 4, by comparison, is great fun, but it doesn't quite scratch the itch.

But rdr2, I could never get sick of that game. If a game leans heavy into making shit diegetic I try and get lost in it, and often succeed

Same thing happened to me. Basically I accepted the fact that I was mainly going to treat RDR2 as an old west simulator and all the plot shit was just background.

In fact, I tend to treat most open-world games that way. Assassin's Creed IV was a pirate simulator. Valheim for viking simulator (never tried AC: Valhalla). Arma if I want to feel like a front-lines grunt. I just wanna immerse myself in an alternate world for a while sometimes, right?

That's effectively how I determine what games I am actually in the mood to play. "What do I feel like being today? Pirate? Cowboy? Goat?" Then pick accordingly from the best option available.

I have the same problem.

The issue is largely compulsive listening, I think. The more you listen to music, the more it feels weird to go without it for any extended period of time, so you keep recycling the songs you like over and over again until they ultimately lose their lustre. For me, the problem also extends to songs I haven't listened to before. If I've already listened to songs of the same genre extensively I know roughly what to expect from them, and even on first listen the emotional impact is already diminished.

Granted, in my case it could be possible that anhedonia might be partly contributing to it, but I don't think that's fully the issue with me either. Fatigue-by-overexposure is a very annoying thing that I suspect is only really possible to overcome through abstaining.

If I've already listened to songs of the same genre extensively I know roughly what to expect from them, and even on first listen the emotional impact is already diminished.

This is similar to my feelings. Especially in the 'simpler' genres, it feels like most of the space of melodies and tunes has been explored. Even the lyrics get stale after a while. You can switch things up by mixing in new instruments or genre-swapping an existing song, but I'm pretty confident I'll never encounter a song that actually breaks the basic conventions of the genre in a new way. I guess that's the whole point of genres, though. To define a particular finite area of all possible music-space, for easier identification.

But I think I have entirely killed off the genre of "Alternative Rock" for myself (sans a select number of particularly good songs) simply because I've listened to the best the genre has to offer and there's almost no novelty left at all. I listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers (among others) obsessively in college, now I just don't bother with their songs. And I do NOT think its because my 'tastes have changed' either!

Just to make the point, I've gotten myself listening to new age/Flamenco music similar to that by Govi because the melodies are complex and hard to predict (so far, I'm sure I'll learn them eventually) and just pleasing to the ear.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_JUiwctrffY

But still, I wouldn't say I'm having some rapturous response to the music.

Yep, the problem is very pronounced in the simpler genres for sure, which incidentally is the type of music that seems to have most widespread marketability. I think initial accessibility often comes with tradeoffs when it comes to how much you can listen to that type of music without getting bored.

I think I've fundamentally ruined most genres for myself, having learned the conventions of all the genres I like, and a lot of the artists and songs that have any staying power for me are fairly odd and veer towards being quite maximalist in style. Stuff that's initially more difficult to get used to. I think about 50% of what I hear would be considered unlistenable by most people I know, who don't seem to acclimatise to (and get bored of) genres as fast as I do.

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