![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
music appreciation & auditory processing
Jan. 14th, 2020 09:34 pmIt has been belatedly dawning on me, over the last few months, that this thing I have always found at least faintly distressing -- the bit where I'm a classically-trained musician who, by and large, just cannot with listening to classical music unless (1) it's a technical exercise or (2) I've listened through along with the score a bunch -- is... it's auditory processing, isn't it.
I can't spot the jokes and keep the train of thought and remember what's happening and how it all relates unless I have it written down in front of me or am otherwise intimately familiar with it or am deliberately consciously breaking it down into its constituent parts... because of auditory processing issues.
Which is also, right, almost certainly why I like listening to Modern Music that consists of a single (approximately) vocal line, that's essentially an excuse to set poetry to music (hi, Leonard Cohen), because it signposts things clearly for me...
... and is also why I mostly don't like listening to choral works, because "human vocal sounds" parse to me as "verbal information that I'm failing to distinguish", which is a deeply stressful experience...
... and might also be why I've always Just Not Liked the particular characteristic quality shared by recorders and pipe organs.
I'm turning thirty in just over four months, and I had individual music lessons from the age of about five to the age of about 18 (and then kept playing in orchestras), and I am somewhat peevish that neither this nor the proprioceptive issues ever got identified. But it is still nice to have an explanation, or something like one.
I can't spot the jokes and keep the train of thought and remember what's happening and how it all relates unless I have it written down in front of me or am otherwise intimately familiar with it or am deliberately consciously breaking it down into its constituent parts... because of auditory processing issues.
Which is also, right, almost certainly why I like listening to Modern Music that consists of a single (approximately) vocal line, that's essentially an excuse to set poetry to music (hi, Leonard Cohen), because it signposts things clearly for me...
... and is also why I mostly don't like listening to choral works, because "human vocal sounds" parse to me as "verbal information that I'm failing to distinguish", which is a deeply stressful experience...
... and might also be why I've always Just Not Liked the particular characteristic quality shared by recorders and pipe organs.
I'm turning thirty in just over four months, and I had individual music lessons from the age of about five to the age of about 18 (and then kept playing in orchestras), and I am somewhat peevish that neither this nor the proprioceptive issues ever got identified. But it is still nice to have an explanation, or something like one.