<Personal Blog> Music

So! Enough about stories. Time for me to be a person and express myself a bit.

I'd like to ask those willing to answer a question: how do you guys listen to music?

I don't mean like "with headphones, on speakers", etc, but moreso do you just stick your music player/radio on shuffle, or do you gravitate to songs or playlists with certain moods? Maybe you just wait for people to tell you stuff to check out and then you binge an entire artist/group/etc? I'm curious to know, because everyone's different.

Wouldn't be proper if I didn't tell you guys what I do though, would it? Well, here goes:

I pick 1-3 songs every couple months. Usually I just stumble on them, but sometimes I find it while stumbling across Youtube or the likes. Maybe scrolling through Apple Music or a friend. Anyway, I pick those songs, and I listen to them. Then again. And again.

Up to hundreds of times.

No, I'm not kidding. I often rotate between the same 3 songs endlessly. I do this because as a budding music theorist, I listen to the music and experience it in every way possible. The first listen is the most normal, but from there, I do stuff like "hm, what if I focus on the bass line", "can I hear any unusual chord substitutions?", "okay this time let's see if we can catch any common-practice rules broken for musicality's sake", "now let's just enjoy the pure tones behind the timbre of the music itself", etc etc etc. It's worth mentioning that I displayed significant-enough traits of hyperfocus as a child to be shoved into the "ADHD/Asperger's" box, though as I've grown older I'm not so sure this was ever an official diagnosis. I won't deny to following some traits of these categories, but if just fitting a couple was grounds for diagnosis, then I'd be afraid I had cancer, much like the hypochondriac on WebMD.

Anyway. Point being I either multi-task a ton of things at once, or focus on one for as long as I need. The latter is what I do when listening to music. It has its ups and downs. The ups are that I enjoy the given song on every given level and often still get excited, sad, relieved, or chills at the proper climaxes and etc. It takes a while to get old. The downsides are that the songs do eventually get tiring to listen to and are discarded, sometimes for years before I pick them up yet again. Also that when friends keep wanting to show me music, I'm not interested because it's not in my current rotation, lol. It began as convenience but has since morphed into this...weird music-listening, theory-analyzing ritual.

Is this too weird? I know it's weird, but I wanna know just how weird it is.

Anyway, figured I'd also share the frontmost song in my rotation, and what has been for a few weeks:

Jacob Collier is nothing short of a music theory wizard. The harmonies in this piece are wonderful, inspired, and each new one leaves you wondering what's next. If that isn't enough, he begins the piece in F major, steps down to E major...before, for the finale, shifting to G half-sharp major. Yes, G half-sharp. He sings microtonally, in a microtonal key. Perhaps that's why I'm still listening to this song weeks later - that tonal shift, despite being expected by now, is like drifting to another world of musical tone, floating on a cloud that while still a cloud, suddenly feels a bit more transparent.

I'm aware his newer stuff does this sort of thing more often, but this particular song just hits ALL the right buttons for me. Let me know what you guys think, if you want! It's a capella, so I realize it's not everyone's jam, but nonetheless it is definitely an interesting listen.

Anyway, that's all. Story stuff's still going, just figured I wanted to maybe connect a little bit!