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Comment by sizzle | Hacker News Reader

"To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening"

This is a phenomenon I constantly battle internally in my consciousness when assessing the various layers of musical composition.

So if we stop ourselves from thinking about music as we listen, the result would then consist of "experiencing/feeling" music?

The mechanics of it being a mindless, automatic response to the auditory stimulation. (neurotransmitter release/binding)

I don't know where I'm going with this, but how do you all listen to/analyze/experience particular music of your liking?

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I think that for many people music is deeply connected with ideas about identity, such as "this is the kind of music I like" and "I am the kind of person who likes this kind of music". This is very visible in popular music, where how the performers look and who they are is as important as the music itself.

Because of this, the satisfaction of listening to music isn't only auditory or aesthetic, but also an identity satisfaction, of feeling one's ideas about oneself confirmed.

It's probably true that humans inject identity ideas into everything, so this is nothing special to music. But it's a strange situation, since music per se is the most abstract of the arts and this extra layer we put on top of it is so obviously extrinsic.

Maybe it's precicely because of the abstract nature of music that people need to judge it based on something more concrete.

Could be, especially when you combine that with its immense emotional power.

I've got no trouble analysing the music I listen to. In a way, it increases my appreciation of it, sort of like watching a film and being able to enjoy how well a specific shot is put together without, well, losing the plot.

Then again, I listen to loads of ambient instrumental soundscapey stuff so it might be a genre that is given to analysis.

On the other hand, I get a similar problem every time I've tried to play a musical instrument. I try drumming and it initially sounds pleasing, at which point I think to myself "hey, I'm drumming!" and it all quickly goes to hell.

I become one with the vocalist, which is really fun with the varying amount of music I listen to. But, I also won't listen to music that I don't connect with, because music is such a personal thing for me.

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