How Music Hijacks Our Perception of Time | Hacker News Reader

How Music Hijacks Our Perception of Time

nautil.us

116 pointsjerryhuang10030 comments

Give me back my vertical screen real estate!

(inspect element... untick position: fixed... done)

Oh! There was an article down there! I'm embarrassed to say that I genuinely didn't notice it. I just closed the tab in disappointment.

Also, the scrolling is broken. You press "Page Down", and you miss some of the text that scrolls by. This is suboptimal.

I don't recall having hit the site before. But I've got a Stylebot CSS that fixes just that issue.

I have a dotjs extension (firefox) which sole purpose is to prevent those pesky huged fixed headers.

Can you provide a link? This is probably my hugest pet peeve when it comes to browsing the internet. I have no idea how fixed headers became so trendy and I find them absurdly painful. I tend to read at the top of the page and scroll down to keep my current line near the top, and (large) fixed headers really mess with that. Small ones can still be annoying, but some like Facebook's aren't that bad.

I even asked a question on the superuser stack exchange about blocking them, but it never got very useful results.

I don't tend to read right at the top of the page, but I do scroll with the spacebar. It's infuriating when what's supposed to be a one-page scroll skips over three lines because they're blocked by navigation I'll never use.

Here is the link to the extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dotjs/

And here is the code for `~/.js/_kill-position-fixed`:

    $('div,a').css('position',
      function (index, value) {
        if (value == 'fixed')
          return 'static'
        }
    )

Then I just link the domain name of the offending website to that file:

    ~/.js $ ls -l
    _kill-position-fixed
    polygon.com.js    -> _kill-position-fixed
    techcrunch.com.js -> _kill-position-fixed

I don't remember where or from who I copied this though.

I'm not on my main box, so I can't give you links, but there are extensions for both Chrome and Firefox to add a "remove this element" entry in the right click menu.

Sometimes, it takes a bit of perseverance to get rid of nested elements; sometimes you accidentally nuke the <body>...

Most of the time it works fine.

The Element Inspector (in Chrome) and Firebug (in Firefox) will let you interactively modify the DOM.

If you want to make changes permanent, Stylebot or Stylish are useful. Stylebot is Chrome-only, Stylish exists for both browsers.

I just kill them one-at-a-time via Stylebot myself. If I don't feel like fixing a site, I'll just close the tab or hit it in Readability.

Totally agree with you, however.

Edit: I expected an analysis of the neurological effects of music, but was not disappointed to find a critique of a String Quintet instead.

In 2004, the Royal Automobile Club Foundation for Motoring deemed Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyrie the most dangerous music to listen to while driving.

Clearly they've never experienced dubstep.

I highly recommend reading 'This is your brain on music' by Daniel J. Levitin if you're interested in learning more about the neuroscience side of music.

Also Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.

Nothing scares me more than someone speeding past me on the highway blaring dubstep or some other genre with that much bass.

It can be startling to be passed unexpectedly, but if you can hear the other car's music at standard highway traffic speeds, I find the probable hearing damage to the driver and passengers much more worrying.

Mainstream music is impoverished by its adhesion to danceable tempos and rhythms. With classical the music 'breathes' more.

Listening to the top charts on Spotify, the defining trend of today's pop music seems to be a driving bass drum through all 4 beats of the bar, and getting louder for the chorus.

It's not impoverished, it just has a different function. You could equally say "classical music is impoverished by its dismissal of danceability" (and you'd be equally wrong)

> It's not impoverished, it just has a different function.

Its primary function is to make money. Compare that with the primary function of dance music from twenty years ago, which was to blow the speakers and give the listeners heart attacks.

But there is lots of danceable classical music. My point is that mainstream music rigidly adheres to steady tempo and rhythm. If you only listen to mainstream music (like most people) then you don't hear much exploration of that entire 'dimension' of music.

I think that you and I have very different feelings about what is "danceable".

I don't have much time to listen to a lot of different types of music these days.

The page ends for me after the byline. I just don’t see any content. Same effect in Chrome and Firefox.

Edit: Ghostery was overzealous in blocking DISQUS.

Had the same issue but it was Soundcloud that was being blocked by Ghostery that prevented content from showing.

This agrees with my own experience: I've found that I can type around 10-20% faster when I'm listening to fast music, and oddly enough make less errors in the process (this might be a different effect, however.)

I was going to ask what music slows the perception of time, then after checking his soundcloud under related sounds I came across [Orchestral Crunkwave](https://soundcloud.com/tags/orchestralcrunkwave).

It's odd that the author does not specify what string quartet he is referring to, just calling it "The String Quartet"- Schubert had 15 of them.

In fact, it is a quintet, not a quartet, that the author was referring to. And it was the one in C major, as made clear in the beginning.

Interesting that I repeatedly saw quartet and not quintet- probably because the assumption is so strong. He only wrote one of them, so the piece clarification was unnecessary.

That blog has a really pretty font. :)

This is the font they are using: https://philsfonts.com/index.php/fonts/overview/GF060022X1

I agree! Nice post!

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