music appreciation & auditory processing

[kaberett]

It 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.

Comments

[kaberett]

(it has been my very great privilege to page-turn for one of the best organists of my generation on several occasions, and also I know Multiple early music ensembles, so yes I promise it's not just that I Haven't Met The Right X Yet!)

[alexseanchai]

the post makes much sense (also: woe)

I know exactly why this postscript and I hate that why

[ewt]

...whereas I have difficulty listening to a lot of modern pop music for the same reason, I think? If I don't already know the words or have them written out to hand, I usually can't follow them, and I don't always have the patience to listen the number of times it would take me to learn them. Instrumental music is much easier -- but I don't listen to a lot of music recreationally, anyway. (Leonard Cohen is a notable exception, but I was exposed to a *lot* of LC by my stepmother, which led to a belief that it would be worth it.)

I'm definitely a choral musician and I don't even *try* to follow the words of choral music unless I have them in front of me in print (which is what programme notes and subtitles are for) or I know them pretty well already from having sung them (...evening canticles, psalms, Masses. But words for all these are also usually provided.)

No music teacher I have ever had has noticed this, because they've largely been concerned with teaching me to make sounds rather than with how to hear them. I do pick up harmony and melody very very quickly, and "but I can't follow the words" was never seen as important.

[madgastronomer]

Yes, like this. I get a new album and I have to put it on repeat until I can start to sing along without noticing before I can pay attention to every song and start to figure out which ones I like. Which is why I pick up so few new albums these days. And I do like modern music (mostly folk-y stuff).

[kaberett]

oh I almost always, the first Several times I am listening to modern pop music, do so with the lyrics booklet to hand.

And that is a useful observation, thank you, yes -- that I can pick out A Line, or the notes-from-a-chord exercise just... isn't a problem for me (& I keep being a little baffled that it does get used as an exercise!), it's just that I really struggle with understanding the context.

[jesse_the_k]

Damn. Better to know, I guess?

Brains are so amazing, and it's so hard to communicate clearly about our experience.


<mildy related whine>
I grew up in a musical family, taught myself to play dulcimer and guitar, was in several bands. I had very good, if not perfect pitch -- I could approximate A440 within a few semitones. When I got sick I lost the ability to identify intervals, or reproduce them.</mildy related whine>

[ewt]

Oh, that sounds really hard and disappointing. I don't have perfect pitch but I have really excellent relative pitch and I do just take it for granted in all kinds of ways.

[kaberett]

Oh ooof, that sounds really rough. I'm sorry. <3

[vass]

That's shitty and I'm sorry.

Out of curiosity, not troubleshooting: does that date from the illness itself, or from the meds, do you know? Asking because I do know someone else who lost his perfect pitch (but not relative pitch) while he was on a particular medication (I can't remember which one.) It came back after he switched to a different med.

[mdlbear]

This makes a lot of sense. I'm much the same. It's probably the main reason I prefer folk (and filk) to most other vocal music -- I can hear the lyrics! I can barely sing along with a harmony line, let alone sing one. Or write one. (I've done that. Once. It was worth it, but very difficult.)

[madgastronomer]

Also this! So many kinds of music I can't even make out the lyrics, so I can't start to learn them, so I can't pay attention.

[kaberett]

Ha, in terms of singing along with harmony, it is probably very helpful that I spent a nontrivial amount of time both as an alto and as a second violin in formal contexts during my youth...

[recessional]

.....I am mostly bemused to realize I have zero auditory processing issues with music....UNLESS someone is expecting me to parse and talk to them at the same time.

[ewt]

I will usually lose the conversation before the music in such situations unless I make a conscious effort otherwise, which makes the "background music in public spaces" thing pretty terrible.

[ironed_orchid]

Oh, hi. Yes.

I often need people to understand that if I go to see a gig with them, I can only hold conversations between the sets. It took me way to long to realise this was a thing, and even longer to be able to assert it as a need.

[kaberett]

*snort* yeah, no, unless it is super familiar "background" music and the conversation is approximately entirely pleasantries with people I don't need to mask around, I Just Can't have conversations while music is happening. Pretty much the fastest way to get all my verbal wossname entirely seized up in mute distress is to ask me to make a decision while there's music going.

[conuly]

I am somewhat peevish that neither this nor the proprioceptive issues ever got identified

That would require people to pay attention and think the correct answer is not "I'm sure you're fine, just try harder". (Sorry, that's my own peevishness talking.)

[vass]

Much sympathy. And yep, yep, auditory processing.

Some related issues I have are:
- my brain tends to foreground music, so I can't cope with it as background and therefore listen to less music overall unless I have the energy to pay real attention. This used to be can't cope with it as background at all, at best it made me low-grade irritable like surrounded by buzzing bees, but it's gotten a bit better with time, in that now I can focus on some other things in the foreground somewhat while backgrounding some kinds of music sometimes.
- I am bad at learning music by ear. So bad. And yeah, that's probably an auditory processing thing.
- the music I can background a bit... is mostly electronic ambient or dance of a sort engineered not to make any emotional appeals, including being "soothing". It doesn't try to make me feel things. So it can be an aural stim without using up that emotional processing energy.

I can't spot the jokes and keep the train of thought and remember what's happening and how it all relates unless

Okay, I was about to say "but, but..." and then an entirely new "but, but" dropped on me from a height while I was articulating the first one.

1. Most casual fans of classical music don't or can't do that. With the spotting the jokes or keeping the train of thought or the remembering what's happening and how it all relates. They don't care. Their appreciation/engagement is at a "the sounds are pretty" or "a wash of strong emotions" level... and that's okay.

They can turn on the radio in the car and tune into the middle of a movement of a piece they don't know by a composer they can't identify for certain, carry on a conversation over the top of it, get out of the car before the same movement is over, and feel like the music has added something pleasant to their trip, rather than like they were listening to an audiobook in a language they're not fluent in and missing half the words from talking at the same time.

(I said most. Most, like, 80-90%, not most like 99.5%.)

1a. The part of what you're saying that strikes me as a very autistic thing is the inability to engage casually with the music, like, listen to it without paying attention. (Me too, btw, except that I'm more in the feelings than in the language, tbh - I don't have the working memory for keeping up with four movements' worth of train of thought. But the tone still demands more of my attention than background will satisfy.)

2. Most people don't like classical music. Like, on a population level, it is a minority taste. And maybe that's why. For those who put in a higher than casual level of engagement/attention over a longer sitting, it rewards that engagement/attention (I don't mean that in a "classical music is Better/More Complex" way, but rather in a "there's a larger body of work in surviving/current repertoire classical traditions (both Western and non-Western) of long-form pieces, like, greater than 15 minutes at a time" way.)

And all that requires time to learn, time to train one's attention, and enough rest/lack of cognitive stress to have enough attention to spend on the thing. Most people like music, but most people are fitting it around a lot of other demands in their lives. It's no wonder ~music appreciation~, as distinct from simply liking music, is so much of a rich people's game. Not that non-rich people can't, just that the means to do the thing are far more available if one is.

So, the more widely popular forms right now are ones with a lower startup cost in terms of engagement and attention and time. Ones where you're not missing out so much if you're 'a casual'. (cf also Real Gamers(tm).)

2a. Side rant about that Tumblr post about the virtuoso violin who made "only" $32 busking at peak hour in Central Station with his $3.5m violin and his most difficult rep. Many people talked about how at Central station people are in a hurry to get somewhere else and can't afford to stop, they have commitments, and a former busker commented on that that their whole day's take for busking was often less than $32, and someone else mentioned that $32 is three times the US minimum wage (omfg) but I don't think anyone mentioned the acoustics of a railway station at rush hour, and how the subtleties of the differences in acoustic qualities between a $350 violin and a $3.5m one are not something you can hear except in a quiet (preferably silent) room with reasonable acoustics (and besides, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is saying something in my memory like Child: "I just heard a violin. It was soft and mellow and sweet." Adult: "I don't know what you mean." Child: "It cost $3.5 million dollars." Adult: "Oh, what a beautiful violin.")

[momijizukamori]

Yeah, seconding a lot of this. As someone who has... probably more musical training than many Americans, but is not a trained musician, really (I played flute from ages 10 to 16 or so, including in my middle school and high school bands), I'm going 'okay I'm not surprised that there are jokes/themes in classical pieces, but I was 100% not aware of any of them', but also, this is probably why I have no interest in listening to classical music for it's own sake. It's just a background stim for me, and I would get bored and fidgety in about two minutes trying to just listen to it.

For whatever reason I background music pretty well - I think even vocal stuff is typically different enough from talking that my brain doesn't try to latch onto it as something I need to parse? Talking, either in person or recorded, on the other hand - n o p e.

[recessional]

Also a lot of these, yes: and now I am also having various unfocused/clarified thoughts about how a difference, as well, isn't so much that I was classically trained as I basically lived the first fifteen years of my life constantly and continually surrounded by classical music in all contexts. I can tune in to the point of paying that close attention, and certain pieces (the Mozart Kyrie, for example) will do the equivalent of tapping me on the shoulder and going HI PAY 'TENTION and I'll get crabby at people trying to talk to me, but I can also tune back out to that casual "oh it is pleasant background noise", and how that may relate to the part where it wasn't just that I was Formally Trained, it's that this was the background (continual) music of our house, I lived in constant series' and cycles of rehearsals/group singing/dad's rehearsals/"hey there's six Temples here let's sing stuff" (much of which I learned by ear) where I actually spent quite a bit of time not-actually-singing/playing but still needing-to-be-there, etc.

Which may actually be in significant CONTRAST to someone who Trained In Classical Music With Scores From The Start, in that it means one either has to develop a facility for shifting thru the various levels of possible listening-auditory-engagement OR . . . I would have been identified as ASD a lot earlier for the sheer NUMBER of meltdowns it would have caused.

Obv, I did the first.



Re that stupid fucking article: I mean you are correct! This is totally true! But also the other parts are even more true! 32$ in A FUCKING HOUR is like the equivalent of twenty standing ovations and a huge bouquet of flowers for busking in terms of sheer demonstration of appreciation. Like I really really feel the need to underscore and circle and draw huge stars around that. ESPECIALLY at rush hour (you're actually much more likely to make decent money in the hour before and after rush hour - ie, still enough traffic to have people going thru, but all those who are Really Busy/Pressed for Time have already gone by, so you have a way better chance of actually having people slow down or stop, listen for a few seconds, go "wow this guy totally deserves my pocket change" and dump some in.

But 32$/hr BUSKING is like. That is the kind of shit that in your Urban Fantasy you have your magic-bard charm out of a crowd and feel slightly guilty about later. :P That rush hour crowd fucking LOVED him.

[alexseanchai]

US federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr. (Seattle's is $16/hr; dunno about NYC.) How long was this guy busking? One hour? Less?

Like, virtuoso dude, the point you proved here is a lot less "people don't appreciate good art" and more "people really appreciate good art, you just started this experiment with a lot of wrong assumptions"!

[kaberett]

thank for this big chewy comment <3

my brain tends to foreground music, so I can't cope with it as background and therefore listen to less music overall unless I have the energy to pay real attention. This used to be can't cope with it as background at all, at best it made me low-grade irritable like surrounded by buzzing bees, but it's gotten a bit better with time, in that now I can focus on some other things in the foreground somewhat while backgrounding some kinds of music sometimes.

Hahaha yeah. My order of preference is: No Background Noise (Silence Thanks), White Noise (to drown out other shit), Extremely Familiar Noise (if the white noise isn't cutting it).

me_and, however, is a defaults-to-background-music human, and I try to, like, actually manage to be aware of how much he's just... quietly adapting himself to my needs-wants-desires in terms of Can It Be Quieter Though. (On the one hand I'm trying to persuade him that it is in fact okay for him to sometimes have music that he likes that I'm not already very familiar with on, and on the other most times he tries it I end up hiding in a different room or completely unable to interact, so I am.... marking that down as "mixed results".)

I am bad at learning music by ear. So bad. And yeah, that's probably an auditory processing thing.

... it had not occurred to me that that was also A Related Phenomenon, so, thank you!

the music I can background a bit... is mostly electronic ambient or dance of a sort engineered not to make any emotional appeals, including being "soothing". It doesn't try to make me feel things. So it can be an aural stim without using up that emotional processing energy.

WRONG KIND OF AUTISTIC KLAXON :-p Beepy shit just... completely hijacks my brain and takes everything else offline. I'm still not entirely sure why? Some combination of "intrusive" and "unpredictable" and "sounds like an alarm" but basically put bleepy music on around me and I pretty rapidly end up catatonic.

(Sometimes "inducing altered state of consciousness" is a desired outcome, like, a good way to reboot my brain if I am just Completely Fucked is to lie me down in a dark room and play a Pink Floyd album and then give me fifteen minutes after it's done to stop twitching.)


I am enjoying your ... BUTs, thank you. :D


1. *chinhands* I... knew my family was unusual but didn't think it was that unusual, huh. For context: both sets of grandparents had pianos and used them regularly. My mother was in the NYO and spent a year studying the violin with Wolfgang Schneiderhan. This is one of my cousins. Throughout the majority of my childhood, during term times I had at least one school orchestra and one school choir (but often two of each), plus a quartet for most of secondary school; there were two (... three? three) different sets of youth orchestra I routinely played with during school holidays. At university I played regularly in two orchestras every week, and got fixed for a bunch more gigs on an intermittent basis. I know a significant number of people with music degrees, a couple of well-regarded composers, and A Lot of people who Enjoy analysing classical music. So I absolutely grew up with "people are paying attention to themes and trains of thought and have emotional responses to music that I just... don't seem to, by and large", and it was just Yet Another thing I felt inadequate about, a lot of the time. The perspective on What's Normal and What Most People Are Doing is... useful. I will attempt to assimilate it.

2. Ditto *chinhands* for the perspective. Thank you. <3

[indywind]

I just wish someone knowledgeable about vocal music--which I am not-- would tell me what is the name for that quality that distinguishes operatic style (and some classical/religious choral maybe?)from everything else, but especially showtunes and gospel choir which would seem to be similar in function though distinct in style.

And then tell me why I loathe it.

[recessional]

1. There isn't actually a single word.

1a. I'm gonna bet money you mean operatic female voices (probably sopranos) and mayyybe tenors, specifically while singing songs at the top of both volume and range.

1b. It is different because showtunes and gospel are literally harder on the voice (and actually potentially cause damage - I mean they actually abrade and put more pressure on the mucous membrane that makes up the "voice") in a more limited range of pitches and movements; what is generally known as "the Italian Classical Style" (ie "opera" although it covers a lot more) is quite literally designed to allow incredible physical feats of voice without causing damage to the voice, which is why Pavorati could sing like that until he keeled over and died but Broadway stars have a very definite retirement age.

1bi. This is because of specific physical realities of resonance, vibration, sound production and the physical nature of the human voice; I can get into this more deeply if you like! But quite literally, it's a matter of the pressure of the air on the glottis and the tension of the muscle under the mucous membrane and where you manage through many tiny adjustments to aim the resonance of the sound in your sinuses and how. The things that specifically European solo performative vocal music developed to want to do over the course of several hundred years increasingly demanded a style and technique that made a specific set of uses of the above because you literally can't sing the Queen of the Night Aria or manage to do a week run of Turandot if you don't do all of those things precisely correctly.

1bii. This does not mean that school of music is "better" than any other, just that this is a weird artifact of how that developed and why: at the same time we were increasingly developing ballet into something that looks amazing and requires incredible physical feats and progressively destroys the bodies of those who do it! It just so happens that what was WANTED for voices to do in that style happened to DEMAND a particular set of techniques that, as it turns out, are also the ones that will allow you to KEEP doing those things for your entire life and not damage your voice. (If you do them right.)


2. Loathing it: many possible reasons!

a. Your ear is not trained to appreciate it. This is not a snobbery thing: music is very literally an acquired taste. I was raised on classical music to a near perfect exclusion of all other forms, which meant that at eleven in order to vaguely salvage my chances of not living as a total and complete social outcast I had to literally train myself to listen to modern pop and rock. I was able to do this mostly because No Doubt put out "Don't Speak" which actually sounded like real music (it had a melody! she had an . . . acceptable . . . voice! At no point did it throw weird dissonances, screeches and so on at me! It didn't sound bubbly and Stupid!) and over the course of two years I was able to listen to the whole Tragic Kingdom album without wincing or feeling pained by it!

This is not because there's anything "wrong" with that music. In fact deeply ironically my favourite tracks on that album these days are the ones I hated most as an eleven year old ("Sixteen", which at eleven I found physically painful).

It's that music is literally just patterns of sound that we have learned to appreciate as systematic, meaningful and pleasant. Music is MASSIVELY CULTURALLY MEDIATED (no matter what snotty idiots tell you) and while there's a CERTAIN amount of overlap of the venn diagram (you can find some kind of song from just about every culture that other cultures will find acceptable/pretty to listen to, and these are the ones we tend to steal from each other and then reinterpret!) there's also huge swathes of circle that are just not going to work.

And as you have no doubt noticed, the actual resonant sound quality is actually as different from what ye average person sings under their breath in their meso-range as death-metal screaming is, just in different ways. So it's A BIG DIFFERENCE IN SOUND.


b. You just really don't like it.

I still don't like most screamy death-metal or many forms of metal guitar work. I know how to listen to them, I can even find specific rare examples that manage to put their music together in a way that I like, but mostly, no, I just don't find that enjoyable to listen to.

Likewise, I quite appreciate their music, but I can't actually listen to the dude from The Mountain Goats sing his own songs because his vocal style and quality aggravate the fuck out of me and I don't like them. Etc.

Similarly there are specific vocal stylists of the Italian School that I don't like either, even though I am Perfectly Qualified™ to appreciate their technique: I am very fond of Barbara Bonney and Rene Flemming, but there are a whole raft of operatic sopranos that I find technically brilliant but would never buy an album of theirs in my life.

(I didn't like Pavorati, for example! But quite enjoy Ben Hepner, and not just because we were born in the same town.)

By which my point is: if I do like this school, and exist as trained in this school, and have ALL OTHER reasons not to like it removed and I'm still going "eh, that's not to my taste, turn it off", when you put the rest of them in (which are all valid AS WELL, one does not have to JUSTIFY what music one likes or doesn't!) it's utterly unshocking that there might well be bits one doesn't like.


c. You have largely been exposed to a very particular set of performers in this style, prooobably usually in either an Improving Context, or with them presented as ~*the absolute best*~ (whether because they're singing at an Olympic opening ceremony or being inflicted on you as Pavorati Is Perfect, or whatever), which has the same dangers as someone presenting The Rolling Stones as the sole epitome of rock music, or Jay-Z as the one true hip hop artist or whatever.

ci. In this particular case there's an extra danger, which is that as a culture we both love to hold "operatic" singing up as this epitome of refinement and blah blah blah fishcakes, and at the same time dump on it as overblown garbage nobody could actually enjoy which means there's a very . . . particular style-set that tends to get pushed into common awareness, and it's sort of like the equivalent of the range of hip-hop that a white Boomer who doesn't like hip-hop ends up being aware exists.

Their observations/perception of the stuff they encounter might even be totally right! But it's also . . . a tiny fraction of what exists, while at the same time the dislike for it will actually tend to tint reaction to iterations that are different, because of association.



There are probably other reasons! But I kind of need to get ready for work now.

[silveradept]

Knowing is at least useful, even if it is frustrating.

[hilarita]

Sideways stoat here. I can technically read music - i.e. I can tell you what all the notes and twiddly bits are meant to mean. But I can't *play* that music well unless I've heard it.

I get on better with choral music than pop, because there are clearly things otter than the words that I'm meant to pay attention to. Pop I often can't make out the words, or I make out something completely different from what's being sung. But no-one expects me to be able to parse classical music, so I don't try to. (Or rather, I discovered that most of the ways I perceive music aren't very connected to Western music theory, so I stopped giving a shit.)

[kaberett]

This is an interesting & useful datapoint, thank you!