December Days: Music
Dec. 25th, 2014 11:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackThis is a good prompt in a possibly surprising way. It's funny, I never really got into the habit of listening to music. My parents rarely listened to music, and somehow I never formed the habit. I like listening to music occasionally, when it happens to come up, I really love it when people show me some of their favourite music and it clicks, I hear things in the background and have the appropriate emotional responses, but I never developed the habit of listening to music as a specific choice myself.
I'm not tone deaf -- I can clear hear the difference between notes, and sing badly but comprehensibly. But I have a very poor sense of rhythm, I find it really hard to dance in time to music which doesn't have a very blatant beat. I don't think those things caused my not getting into music, I think it was that I just never practised them.
And I find it very hard to hear lyrics. For most music, I find it hard to understand the words at all, even when I try; and even when I can, I fall back to just absorbing the sound and not the meaning if I don't concentrate. So I sometimes have lyrics I find powerful, but more often from plays or poetry than music (and even poetry I find hard to listen to, even though some of it I like); with music, I usually like or dislike the sound and am completely oblivious to the words (or theology).
So it happens that, I like music occasionally, but I rarely listen to it specifically. If I'm doing something else, I end up tuning it out or getting distracted by it. I'd like to listen to something strong and carry-me-away when I'm running, and listen to things when I'm just sitting, but have never been organised enough to choose things. I sometimes listen to Classic FM or Radio 3 in the car driving. I would like to get into the habit more, I like it when people share music with me (whether I like it or not), but never enough to devote time to it.
What have a liked? A lot of classic orchestral music, but not with enough attention to be more specific than that. Some classics from bands like Queen. Swing, and Jazz, which have been out of fashion for a while, but always set my blood fizzing and my feet dancing when they come up. Christmas carols, which I was pleasantly surprised to realise how many, even though I didn't know well, I could recognise all the way through.
I like joining in with singing, but don't have many songs where I'd expect to do that. I used to do ballroom dancing, and country dancing, and liked doing those, although the music was more of a means to an end.
And, a note on media. I'm very glad never to have accumulated tapes or CDs, they just seem inconvenient. But I do love vinyl records as things -- I don't agree with the bizarre claim they have more fidelity, but I like visiting people with record players, and like the pop and hiss of putting them on, it makes music feel special.
I'm not tone deaf -- I can clear hear the difference between notes, and sing badly but comprehensibly. But I have a very poor sense of rhythm, I find it really hard to dance in time to music which doesn't have a very blatant beat. I don't think those things caused my not getting into music, I think it was that I just never practised them.
And I find it very hard to hear lyrics. For most music, I find it hard to understand the words at all, even when I try; and even when I can, I fall back to just absorbing the sound and not the meaning if I don't concentrate. So I sometimes have lyrics I find powerful, but more often from plays or poetry than music (and even poetry I find hard to listen to, even though some of it I like); with music, I usually like or dislike the sound and am completely oblivious to the words (or theology).
So it happens that, I like music occasionally, but I rarely listen to it specifically. If I'm doing something else, I end up tuning it out or getting distracted by it. I'd like to listen to something strong and carry-me-away when I'm running, and listen to things when I'm just sitting, but have never been organised enough to choose things. I sometimes listen to Classic FM or Radio 3 in the car driving. I would like to get into the habit more, I like it when people share music with me (whether I like it or not), but never enough to devote time to it.
What have a liked? A lot of classic orchestral music, but not with enough attention to be more specific than that. Some classics from bands like Queen. Swing, and Jazz, which have been out of fashion for a while, but always set my blood fizzing and my feet dancing when they come up. Christmas carols, which I was pleasantly surprised to realise how many, even though I didn't know well, I could recognise all the way through.
I like joining in with singing, but don't have many songs where I'd expect to do that. I used to do ballroom dancing, and country dancing, and liked doing those, although the music was more of a means to an end.
And, a note on media. I'm very glad never to have accumulated tapes or CDs, they just seem inconvenient. But I do love vinyl records as things -- I don't agree with the bizarre claim they have more fidelity, but I like visiting people with record players, and like the pop and hiss of putting them on, it makes music feel special.
no subject
Date: 2014-12-26 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-28 06:38 pm (UTC)Superficially, vinyl gives something equivalent to 11-bit audio compared with CD's 16 bits. That means CDs are higher fidelity and, indeed, they are. But as well as the emotional connection with the process of playing an LP, and the less abstract more intuitive process by which sound is getting from the medium to your ears, there are a few considerations which mean CDs took longer to displace LPs from audiophile systems than might have been expected:
For me, the advent of 20-bit delta-sigma DACs in the mid-nineties marked the point at which I was willing to say CD playback was superior by every objective measure. I still have the nostalgia, though. (-8
no subject
Date: 2014-12-28 06:49 pm (UTC)What I said the other day about emotions and rationality and how they interrelate for different people, I think, has a lot to do with how people respond to music.
I can "play out" a piece, simply by listening to it repeatedly until I'm bored of it, and for that reason the staples of my audio engineering test track collection deliberately don't include my very favourites.
On the other hand, I can listen carefully several times over, teasing out first one detail and then another, appreciating the quality of the playing, the ensemble, the delivery, the composition's structure, the lyrics, the studio engineering, playing around with the piano to replicate and better understand parts of the music… then let my rationality take a back seat while I listen again with a greater emotional connection than ever before.
Many other people I know, however, think that opening up a piece of music and seeing what makes it tick destroys the magic.
On the subject of lyrics, alas I fear a great many of them are largely expendable. But then I'm not much of a fan of poetry. Artists like Leonard Cohen, Annie Lennox, Marc Cohn, Roger Waters and Paul Simon who write lyrics worthy of attention also tend to make sure those lyrics remain comprehensible on their journey from mouth to ear. On a good hi-fi in a quiet environment with an attentive listener, at any rate. And there are always lyrics sheets…