Listening to music with intent

I use Spotify. It has a large collection spanning all genres, including anime and video game music!

Like you I have a big collection of liked songs, but Spotify also lets me make playlists. And those don't have to be made from your liked songs, so you can have playlists that suit a specific mood that includes songs you might not want to listen to all the time.

It recently added an AI DJ that mixes up what you're listening to every few songs, occasionally pulling old songs you've enjoyed heavily in the past, but also adding in new or trending music that it thinks you might like.

I get flak about using Spotify because they don't reimburse artists enough... but it's introduced me to multiple artists I'd never have found without it's algorithm. And I try to support the bands I really like that it introduces me to - it lets me know when bands are touring in my area!

I find myself going through phases of wanting to listen to albums and wanting to listen to shuffle. I'd say don't force it - it is a state of mind that you can't always be in. There's a thrill to discovering 'start-to-finish' albums for the first time that I think leads people to thinking it's the only right way to hear 'real' music. There's a lot of music where that might be true, but there's no right way to make or listen to music.

I do think getting into the habit of listening to new albums is a good practice, and makes up probably the majority of my 'album experience' listening. It's not always going to be music you love but most albums have a song or two worth adding to a playlist, I find. Usually this gets me more in the spirit of listening to albums front-to-back, and often hearing something will remind me of an old album I haven't heard in a while, or a classic I'd love to hear again.

I have my MusicBee set up so the album artwork is really big when browsing music, it kind of gives that feel of flicking through a vinyl collection. I also make sure to limit my collection to what I really enjoy. I used to horde digital albums, but I think I generally have about 300 albums I can really care about at any one time. I'll often go through the process of adding and deleting albums, making sure I have a really browseable collection of albums I love. Maybe have two separate collections? It's an idea I've always toyed with. And make sure the 'loved' collection is very well tagged.

Walks are still a great way to hear music, especially genres with those smaller moments you don't want to miss. And I find so much of the vinyl experience is being in that space and having decent speakers and somewhere comfy to sit - it becomes about the event, not so much the format. I loaded my old iPod classic with albums and played from that instead - no unwanted distractions - and it's a very similar experience.

I can get hung on music being something I hear when I work, that I forget how nice it is to make listening to music something to do when work is over.

How about just listening to full albums?

Many bands present albums as a solid work to be consumed as a whole.

Shuffling, I have found, tends to pick and favor many of the same songs every time leaving many out entirely.

Being mindful of music you listen to is probably less about the specific practicalities of music listening, and more about the mindset you adopt in service of this goal. Why do you want to be more mindful of music?

I might get some flak for this opinion, but I think the fact that so many people only ever listen to music in a shuffled playlist is a small, indirect symptom of our dopamine-addicted consumer culture. This habit fosters some pretty salient flaws - impatience, lack of self-control, low attention span, responsibility avoidance, etc. Obviously I don't want to take a totalistic stance on this; everyone has their vices and ultimately, one's music listening habits are not that important. But I do think that trying to listen to music more intentionally is a nice, small improvement a person can make to their life.

Personally, I only ever listen to whole albums. The idea of listening to an album and not finishing it (or listening to just a couple of songs out of order) has the same feel as not finishing a book or reading a few chapters out of order - not that this is absolutely forbidden, but it clearly shouldn't be the primary way of engaging with the item in question. Like most authors, I'm sure the vast majority of musicians would prefer that you hear the whole album they recorded, at least once. I find that most albums have a coherent sense of a 'journey' to them, even those without lyrics. This can be a magical thing to experience, but of course listening to an album requires effort.

First you need to choose an album that seems worth all this effort. Then you need to commit usually around 30-60 minutes of time. You need to sit and pay attention. You may need to weather songs or sections that are less engaging, though they may be more meaningful in retrospect. And at the end, it may be a good idea for sit for 15 minutes and digest what you've just heard.

It's pretty obvious why some people don't do this. If you're pathologically averse to choice, even the idea of deciding on an album is a monumental task. Ditto if you're simply used to having an algorithm decide what you ought to listen to, watch, or read. And then, to commit time to a task entails the possibility of wasting time, if the task turns out to be boring. Yet there is a paradox here - it seems like you can avoid wasting time by skipping ahead to the next thing, but platforms built on this prevent you from ever engaging deeply with anything, by rewarding your intolerance of even the tiniest amount of boredom. If you do not exercise the muscle of your attention span, it will atrophy.

So the practice of listening to whole albums is about more than just having a transcendental experience or a deep connection the music, though these are both great things you can get out of it. It's also about developing the ability to pay attention, to apply effort to something even if you're unsure it will pay off, and to put up with a judicious quantity of boredom. It reminds me of that David Foster Wallace line, from 'The Pale King': "If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."

Exactly how to put these virtues into practice is not set in stone. There are probably dozens of ways to get in the habit of listening to albums - perhaps some of the value in the habit is the effort you put into figuring out what works for you. Maybe the best way is to wean yourself off playlists with shorter albums by artists you're already familiar with. Maybe you stumble upon a music blog which caters to your taste and follow their suggestions religiously. Maybe you make a physical ritual out of lighting a candle, brewing some tea, and listening to albums on vinyl. Maybe you jump in the deep end with extremely challenging, obscure music. If you wanted to try this last option on for size, I think Bell Witch's 'Mirror Reaper' is pretty much the 'Infinite Jest' of music - an 83 minute long album consisting of a single song, of crushingly slow, minimalist doom metal.

I personally find that picking an album that matches my mood and listening to it completely gets me pretty focused due to the cohesiveness. Having the lyrics on hand can help, too.

I just commit 30-60 minutes to listen to an album. People put too much stock in format and procurement, especially since most music is recorded digitally these days, and re-releases were probably digitized.

If you want to hone in on an album put it on your phone, get a decent pair of headphones and sit down to listen to it. I'll sit at my computer, usually, because that's where my best headphones are, but I also have some decent earbuds that I'll use for a walk (rarely) to listen to an album I feel needs my attention.

Shuffle and Albums are two completely separate ways of listening for me and that is reflected in almost every aspect: equipment it is played on, time of day, activities I am doing while listening, etc.

For shuffle I have an extensive, but curated collection of digital songs that slows grows years by year. I play this when I am working, doing chores, etc. I know these songs so well that they can become a white noise that helps me focus. But at the same time, whenever I drop out of focus, instead of getting distracted I can immediately get invested in whatever song is playing and from there right back into the work.

For albums I have a living room stereo setup of high quality, IMHO, and a collection of vinyl, cd's and even cassette tapes that is not connected to the internet. I get drawn to sit there at times when I am awake, but tired of looking at screens or actively doing something. Then I am in the right state of mind to start an album and just let it play. Because there is no quick "way out", the music and the sound quality often have time to win me over and to stay and listen until the end. And even put on another album.

I don't think it is necessary to spend a lot of money to get more of the ritual of listening. The fun thing about rituals is that the actions they consist of can be completely pointless and without any relation to the subject of the ritual. So if buying vinyl is too expensive or takes up too much space, you should just invent your own ritual. Create some artificial scarcity, like buying some of the cheapest USB-sticks you can find and save exactly one album on each of them. Buy an old MP3-player and limit yourself to 10 playlists. Things like that.

I really like live music and one of the things I do is to rip a concert from YouTube and record that on a cassette tape. That is definitely not good for the quality of the sound, but there is a world of difference between watching/listening it on my laptop, or deliberately playing it on my living room stereo.

Sorry if this is off topic but this post is interesting to me because I'm curious about how other people consume music. Not the technical aspects, but the reasons and motivations, the ways it makes people feel. I have certain genres of music that I love as background music. But then I have other genres or works that I listen to for more specific reasons-- I have a vivid imagination and music that appeals to me can get my imagination firing and puts me in a certain headspace. Sometimes I "see" things in my mind that are seemingly generated by the piece of music I'm listening to. Music is also essential to my meditation practices and spiritual beliefs. I believe there's a certain level of "magic" in music that can be utilized.

Having said that, when not playing background music, I will go "full cocoon" as I call it and sit somewhere with headphones on, tuning out the whole world and letting the music weave its way through my mind and imagination. And I kind of end up "going away". I will meditate, focusing on healing, relaxing or understanding. I enjoy dancing, which is good exercise but I also use it in tandem with a piece of music that appeals to me as a spiritual tool.

I guess the chief problem is that there is so damn much music and it's all at your fingertips without spending a cent. It's become this digital commodity with an infinite supply, so much supply in fact that one can't listen to all of this year's music if one takes every second of this year to do it.

That means the 'attentive' listening activity slows me down too much. Why would I want to listen to a specific album again for the tenth time when I have about seven hundred artists to get familiar with and fifty to a hundred more coming in every single week? We're just plain over-supplied and the tools to help narrow down what we want are not up to the task. Algorithms will continue to be useless to help with this problem in perpetuity - at least until someone invents an algorithm that has its own emotional context from which to appreciate music. I've adjusted my listening to keep up with the tsunami. I use a three-pass system, and only the albums that make it to stage three get a full attentive spin from me.

The first pass is me listening to a song but skipping ahead the instant is starts to bore me. I can spin through an entire album this way in five to fifteen minutes - and I will often do dozens of albums in a single day. Sometimes the backlog pisses me off, so I annihilate it when it gets too big. All I'm looking for here is basic musicianship. Are the lyrics good? Is the music complex or repetitive? Am I getting any kind of a feeling from the music? If the answer is yes - and I'm fairly generous at this stage - then the album gets filed into a playlist for more serious listening later and it's made it to phase two. If I get that vibe on track two I won't even bother moving on to track three - into the stage two playlist it goes, and on to the next album. I follow the artist on the spot, on the basis that even if I don't end up caring that much about this album I expect they'll improve in the future and I'd like to be notified of the new releases.

Listening this way is rather draining - it's a slog, and I'd bet less than 10% of the stuff I skim makes it to phase two. That's alright, though, because phase two makes up for it. Now I have this nice big setlist of albums that I know I am interested in checking out, but haven't listened to yet. By the time I get to them, I've already forgotten whatever snippets I heard earlier. I'll toss these on in the car or while I'm working and let them spin uninterrupted. I wouldn't call it 'attentive' listening exactly, but the way I see it, the music should be good enough to draw my attention away from whatever else it is that I am doing. The ones that manage to do that end up at stage three.

That's where they get the full spin (or several) and my full attention. Feet up, good headphones, comfy chair, no other distractions except possibly some liquor and various smokeables. Anything that can pass a full spin and leave me feeling like I want to hear it again gets the purchase and possibly future concert ticket sales. It ends up on my bestof lists. I split them up at least a bit by the mood, since by this point I know what I am in the mood for and which of the albums on the list are likely to match it.

I'm sure I miss a few here and there, but I more than make up for it in the sheer volume of music I get through this way. I no longer believe in the myth of the 'album that only reveals itself after multiple spins' - that's a sentiment common among the people new to music who haven't grown their ears yet at best, and marketing malarkey at worst. More likely that album will 'reveal itself' after you listen to a few hundred artists from dozens of diverse genres and your tastes mature... not after some arbitrary number of plays.

Oddly enough, I don't ever do 'shuffle' at all, not even once. I have lists, I'm curating them, I'm adding and deleting constantly. Shuffling just confuses the whole process. I'm exclusively linear. The closest I get to a shuffle is when I build my mixtapes, and that's just while I derive the proper order for the tracks, which I will never deviate from with a shuffle once completed. I like the tracks on my lists to kick off of each other, and that does not happen on random.

How the music is obtained doesn't really factor into it for me. I spent a long time gathering shit at concerts, getting stuff like cassettes and CD's of bands that don't exist today and never were on any platforms. Sometimes the high seas is the only option, and in order to be a more active listener I figured I'd do best ignoring this aspect of it. I'm in it to hear the music, I won't allow it to be more complicated than that.

So what I do, is schedule the time and ensure listening to the music is the only thing I am doing. For example, once a week I will pick out an album and listen to it. This is usually on a saturday or a sunday, and typically is about an hour just because most of the albums are about an hour long. For that hour, the phone is set to silent, browser is closed, and I am not working on any of my hobbies. I sit in the chair/on the couch and just focus on different parts of the music. If I'm having trouble I just pick an instrument and follow it until my mind calms down a little. Or sometimes I'll tell my dog what I think about it. She likes being talked at, it works out.

It's pretty simply said but hard to do, lots of stuff tries to interfere and not all of it is external. Sometimes I get a bothersome feeling, that I'm being unproductive, which I've over time learned to tell to fuck off. Other times it's more personal shit, which again I have learned to tell to fuck off. For this hour, only the music will matter. Most of the time, most days, I can take that hour without consequence, and I just need to remind myself how true that is.

bring back the "ritualistic" aspect of listening

I don't think it really matters how you listen to music. Anything can become a pilgrimage as it depends entirely on your state of mind. To create a ritual or to become a pilgrim you should follow this four step process:

1. Create space. This space can exist only temporally as a set time of day. You can't have a ritual without a narrow gate (constraints; I don't mean this in a biblical context but rather a "you have to walk a specific path to get to a specific place" type of thing). It doesn't matter exactly how much time you allocate but it is important that you design the target spatio-temporal area.

2. Set your intention. You should have a goal. What do you want to feel by this ritual? Maybe you want to feel relaxed. That is simple enough. Or perhaps you want to gain clarity about something that is happening in your life. It helps to have a theme that you would like to explore. This might involve creating a specific playlist for your music ritual.

3. Transition. You have your everyday life and you have your pilgrimage so if you want to feel different then you have to think about what you can do to separate the two. Light candles, burn incense, or create any atmosphere that feels sacred. This signals to your mind and body that something different and important is happening.

4. Give the music your full presence. Treat the music as you would a live performance. If you can't meditate, if you can't stop thinking, your mind won't stop racing, you can try counting backwards from 100 to 1. Or use listening time as an opportunity for reflection, or journaling. What feelings, memories, or ideas does the music bring up? Allow it to be a conduit for self-discovery.

I don't exactly do the above but I have enough music that I never have to listen to the same song twice so I try to listen to each song because I probably won't hear it ever again. I have my media player set up so that when I press next it will automatically delete the song. So there is an aspect of intentional curation:

path         count  duration                                 avg_duration       size    avg_size
---------  -------  ---------------------------------------  --------------  -------  ----------
Aggregate  3403918  66 years, 3 months, 6 days and 16 hours  10 minutes      21.2 TB      6.2 MB

I listen to playlists mostly when entertaining others. If I'm hosting people or driving people in my car I usually put on a folk, 60s/70s singer-songwriter, or chill EDM playlist. Everyone seems to enjoy it and it's music that makes me happy.

My personal listening is mostly album oriented. I pick artists and narrow it down to an album. When I really want to zone into an album I usually dose some THC and lay in bed with my eyes closed. It's hard for me to focus very well when I'm trying to multitask.

What a great thread. Couple of thoughts I didn’t see elsewhere:

I do nearly all my deep music listening in bed before falling asleep. It’s probably some kind of meditation. I definitely drift into it. Lights out, headphones on. Usually it’s a full album I put on but I don’t always make it through.

Knowing the context of the artist and album can add to my enjoyment. Reading up on the how, why, who, where and when of the record, the themes, etc can enrich the experience and deepen the relationship. I used to listen to those 2 old Chicago NPR guys that had their “desert island soundtrack” segment… their name eludes me. They always did a nice job of bringing appreciation for the artist and context.

Great topic. Personally I think it’s good for me to do this more again as I’m becoming increasingly aware of this dopamine addiction thing and that I sure seem to exhibit a lot of these ADHD symptoms Instagram is feeding me.

Rock on friends.

Sometimes I learn to sing along with songs, particularly in a language I don't know, since a song in a language I don't know sticks in my mind just fine. In the 1990s for me it was anime theme songs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlZiGylP1M8

lately it is the Super Furry Animals album Mwng

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mwng

which is in Welsh (I've talked about it elsewhere on Tildes) To be fair I like singing songs in English from the SFA and also groups like They Might Be Giants (I like how some of them require breath control) but Shonen Knife who sings in Japanese and English is one of my favorites. I find Japanese pretty easy because the sound space of Japanese is mostly contained in the sound space of English and a lot of Japanese music feels familiar to the westerner. I am sure I am screwing up Welsh and even though I am getting more interested in Chinese pop culture (Wolf Warrior 2, Three Kingdoms, Ne Zha, etc.) I haven't tried singing Chinese songs though I do have a few 5.1 mixes of Chinese music in my huge Sony CD changer which only holds DTS 5.1 music discs.