Listening to music all the time

The greatest gift an older person can give a younger one is an account of their experience. And if the older person can transmit the right aspects of their experience, the younger person can then take the learnings and skip all the pain. Thus I bid you learn from what I have written here.

Anyone can learn from another’s experience if they are directed to the right pictures, and made to hear the intended tonalities. You do that by testing and comparing. You know something feels or sounds good because you have something else to compare it with. 

But what to do when you’ve explored and discussed music so much that you know “all the right sounds”? When the music you determined was great is all you listen to, and you do so all of the time, how do you continue to derive value from it?

We assign value in consideration of a possible transaction within a certain context. And the context of finding and enjoying great music comes from going from a state of inexperience to experience. Or from any experience to a better one. Or to a different one. 

As you experience more and more albums without pause, without anything much for them to shine against, you end up with an incredibly diminished value of what once was. You can reduce value even faster if your mind is particularly good at abstracting patterns. 

Schizophrenic listening habits

We begin an unrelenting search for new patterns we can make sense of but haven’t seen before. The reason we keep looking for more and more bands and albums to listen to is that we feel the need for a “different” experience. You’ll find yourself jumping between albums, bands, and music genres.

Flooding the mind with so much information is enabled today by technology. And technology has made it so that we have access to all of the art we desire all of the time. So long as we’ve got a digital representation of it, it’s ours to do as we want within the confines of our minds. And at this point in time, most existing masterpieces in any art and genre have found their way into digital form and are placed within your reach.

Having every possible work at our disposal, we must choose. And very quickly the game is up. Very soon, we have blasted through all recommendations, all of our favorite ones. We look for newer albums to add to our list of favorite ones or exceptions to the rule.

And as you do this with an eye for perfect forms, everything is quickly classified and boxed into categories we made up. Very soon, you find yourself being able to tell differences and similarities between any two music pieces on command, reducing everything to formulas from what you have already come across. Nothing under the sun can be new anymore, because your mind always compares it to something else.

Since nothing seems completely satisfactory, since your soul does not seem to settle on your breast, you continue to attack the albums lists. You hold each promising release in a clenched fist, in an effort to extract from it anything that can make you feel hope again. Hope is given when finding new land. Everything is possible here. There are no rules, or the rules are different, or so we tell ourselves.

Foundation and branching out

We know that the best music has the greatest repeatability. At least on a conscious level. There are more details and relations for us to puzzle out and consciously absorb. Below that level of awareness, it’s mostly what we relate those things to that cause deeper effects. 

The ripples you feel from a masterpiece move the dials of pleasure and learning. But there is only so much one can learn from any piece of codified knowledge. The deeper the fountain of knowledge, the more we can come back to it. The clearer our minds and input systems (the senses), the better we can process and appreciate what is laid out before us, what floods us and makes us tremble.

The profound and astounding sensorial experience that art in general puts us through is a kind of education. It brings into our awareness things we would not have otherwise thought of or felt. We enter places that our physical bodies have never been to, and could never go to. 

Eliciting the sensorial journey is the privilege of any art. But art merely elicits. It is the listener, the beholder, the experiencer, who brings creations into this world and lives with them. The difference between what we may choose to put on a pedestal or ignore is really the content. 

You listen to a great death or black metal album. You find yourself transported to an elating environment. An atmosphere equal parts terror and ecstasy covers you like a blanket. And now the lessons begin. Lessons that can only ever reveal structure, since anything that can be revealed is structure. All else is echo. Anything you can discover and make sense of is limited to what’s inside you and which may or may not come to the surface as you move on.

So, after you’ve been given this structure while in a dreamlike state, what do you do with it? The structures are the sensorial predispositions that allow us to further parse input from the world around us and put it into chunks of knowledge. Art was made not to condense knowledge itself, but to give us the tools to make sense of the world. 

You can only make sense of the world with the pattern-recognition strategies that great art has handed to you, if you spend more time in the world, drinking the world, and harmonizing with the world. And you can best do this by keeping your senses unencumbered and your mind on your immediate surroundings.

Silence and appreciation

If you continue to flood your senses with music and film all of the time, you are essentially inhabiting another world. A world that affords our mind the pleasures it lives off. Pleasures triggered by disruptive events. And as the excitement of these events piles up, you forget.

You forget what art was supposed to do. You forget the true purpose of creatures being able to feel pleasure and pain. You forget the pleasure that art gives us is the vehicle to install new software into your whole being. And as you forget, you keep pushing that lever, like a captive pigeon incapable of flying off into the sky.

In the end, you discover that for the purposes of sensory excitation noise is as good as organized music. Silence is even better when you realize that the world is always full of sound. When you realize that the most silent place you might visit on the planet still vibrates enough for you to hear something. And if you can hear something, you can pattern it, you can extend the realm of your experience even more.

The world itself will provide you with raw materials to parse. With new parsings that come out of the structures given you by great art. It is only after you’ve so applied yourself to the world in the absence of artificial input (a.k.a. ART) that you are justified in returning to it. Returning to great art after a spell of silence is a re-learning, but also a deepening. The structures are made more vivid, and our reception of the pleasurable effects more potent than ever before.

Longer and longer spells of silence will afford you greater and greater pleasures and insights from the music you most love. You’ll develop a quicker sense, as well. And whatever new piece of music comes your way, you will listen to it unencumbered by fatigue or duty. It will merely be an experience, judged by its primary effects first and foremost. Learned from and visited as it affords greater adaptability in the world. Such is the cleansing power of silence.