Jal’s a punk snob, IIRC, so anything with key changes and guitar solos is apt to disagree with him.
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Hell no. Home stereo is great, just wanted to make sure you weren’t listening on laptop speakers or some other hugely flawed device that can’t produce all of the frequencies.
Snap judgments seem fine and normal to me. In general, I don’t think it takes more than 30 seconds to a minute to figure out where you’re gonna land. However, I consider critical listening to be special and it’s like meditation in my house. For that I remove distractions and either do lights out or eyes closed and it makes a big difference in how much of the fine detail I’m able to resolve. Just wanted to know if you take it that seriously so I’m not picking things that require all of your attention.
Oh man this takes walrus is a serious business to a new level
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I would probably be so distracted in trying to be not-distracted that I’d tune out from the song.
My brain would go on a 20-paragraph tangent on why I can’t meditate, but maybe that means I need meditation more than anyone, but maybe meditation is just crap, but probably not. Oh yeah, I’m supposed to be listening to the song. Shit. But man that Trinh Tran Tren or whatever guys’s book was hard to get through. And it was TINY. If I can’t handle that, how can I do real meditation? My uncle used to do transcendental meditation and said he got into weird scary parts of his brain that he felt like he shouldn’t be allowed. Sounds like a k-hole. Can you get yourself into a k-hole without drugs? That would be cool. But what if you never come out? At least with drugs you know they’ll wear off. Oh shit, song’s over.
If anyone is listening on laptop speakers, odds are you won’t hear anything under 200 hz. That’s really bad for modern recorded music. Tablets and phones are substantially worse. That’s the just basic stuff like being able to produce the important frequencies at all.
If the song has like four English words in it can I still submit it? Will it be low because of that?
That’s fine. I updated the categories.
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Cool. On my desktop which has basically no speakers I couldn’t hear 300. On a new MacBook, which I had noticed has awesome sound for a laptop I can hear 75 clearly and maybe a touch of sound at 50.
Can confirm my new MacBook is light-years better than my 2015 MacBook.
Well none of this should be happening really, but when I say music as meditation, you’ve interpreted it as “put on some music and try to meditate,” which is not what I mean at all. Definitely don’t do that. Forget meditation because you seem to have some weird affect with it. The way you become not distracted is by being fully distracted by the music, which is to say there are no phones, computer screens, TVs that can interfere. You are escaping to a world that has no sight and only sound and just listening to the music for pure pleasure, and the rest falls into place. You don’t have to “do” anything.
That is certainly better than most laptops yet still very far from optimal for serious music listening.
Trying to focus on one thing like music is like meditation for me. That was the point I was making. My mind will immediately wander and I’ll forget I’m listening to music. Maybe that’s ok.
Which activities do not cause your mind to wander?
Scuba diving, super hard exercise or exercising while listening to an audio book (unless that’s technically wandering), seeing a really good movie, being immersed in programming.
That’s about all I can think of.
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So you’ve never put on an album you like and listened to it all the way through without doing anything else? Because to me, that’s like watching a good movie with my ears and a great way to escape / relax. Composing / performing music necessarily requires 100% of my attention but it’s not really relaxing in the sense that I can turn off my brain.
I haven’t listened to an album all the way through since the mid-90s.
Loooool fucking hell
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Well that’s not 100% accurate. I’ve put CDs on in my car a few times. I just don’t listen to music that way around the house. And in my car I usually have a big ipod playlist on random shuffle.
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The album is one of the major casualties of the streaming era, so actually wouldn’t surprise me if not too many people haven’t listened to an album proper in years. It’s an unfortunate outcome because I maintain that the album is–or can be–an art form unto itself, and I don’t think it would be at all controversial to claim that there are albums where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts (although the opposite can also be true).
Of course it is. A lot of time and effort is put into choosing and even sequencing the tracks. It’s akin to an art exhibition where the whole usually aims to achieve an effect greater than the sum.
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