Musical multitasking: how music in the background improves life [Перевод]

Save and read later –

To fully immerse yourself in music, you need to get distracted from everything else and just listen. This statement is one of the prevailing trends in the world of connoisseurs of quality sound. I disagree with him.

This approach is especially common among those who consider themselves sophisticated music lovers and judge others for their way of listening to music. According to them, everyone who listens to music without being distracted by anything, focusing only on listening, listens to it more correctly than those who do not. Because it is impossible to be a true fan of music and do something else while listening to it.

Complete nonsense. Worse, it’s just offensive. And that’s why.

The main idea is this: to fully enjoy the music, you don’t need to do anything else, just listen. And the one who condescends to extraneous parallel affairs will somehow defile and outrage the sacred process. Oh, horror, if someone dares to do daily affairs with music “in the background”, not listening, not evaluating.

For instance:

“When someone is listening to music in the background, focusing on something else, he is not listening, he is just hearing it.” “I am convinced that music deserves to be listened to. It is wrong to buy a book, read its summary, and say you like it. It is also wrong to review a film after watching only the trailer, ”writes Jesse Marino in his article“ Nobody Listens to Music Anymore ”.

Or here’s another from our old man Steve Guttenberg:

“Music surrounds us everywhere, but only a few people really listen to it. I’m sure you have music playing in your car, on your player or computer, but is music just an accompaniment to other activities? If the music, in portions, from time to time cannot hold your attention, you are definitely not a music lover. Moreover, you have a lot to lose ”(excerpt from the article“ Does anyone else really listen to music? ”).

But who said that we do not listen to and evaluate music if it plays “in the background”? Who said that we are not music lovers?

I resolutely and proudly place myself in the opposite camp, not inactive listeners. I don’t understand people who don’t listen to music all the time. I listen to it while working and turn it on in the car. I listen to music on the way to the store or while walking in an unfamiliar city. Music gives new impetus to almost everything I do and improves my life. If you’re going to a party, is a good song going to get in the way? And if your heart is broken, don’t you want to relieve the pain with the right music (aggressive or melancholic, that’s up to you)?

What is music if not a soundtrack to our life? Music can inspire, soothe the soul, support and relax, exacerbate and enhance the experienced moments.

Probably only smells can evoke memories more strongly. How often, while listening to a song, have you been transported back to the moment when you first heard it, or not, even better – to the moment when this song ideally suited the event?

It is absurd to think that we are less imbued with music, simply because we are doing something else. As a musician, I can say that we do much more than just listen. Listening, of course, plays a key role, but it is also the process of playing, understanding music, this is when you try to remember what is going on next, you look at other musicians in search of visual cues, etc.

Even a solo performer at the moment of perfection, at the peak of inspiration is not just listened to, he is felt.

It seems to me that here it is – the point of contact. Emotions. In my opinion, we listen to music in order to feel the emotions that a particular song evokes. Someone may need a dark room, flickering lamps and nothing but music around to achieve the full effect.

While other people can experience equally strong emotions when listening to music in other conditions. In any conditions, all the time. Music overwhelms me with emotions much more often when it coincides with some event in my life, and not when listening to motionless in the room.

I do not judge anyone, making judgments annoys me the most. In my opinion, the purpose of listening to music is to get as much pleasure as possible. And the contemptuous judgment that “some people” enjoy music less because they enjoy it in a different way does not just deprive the idea of ​​the main thing, but leads to a sad and unjust split. A split in which one of the parties is necessarily wrong.

Music should be something that brings us together, not splits us.