Monday, December 04, 2006

Music

While the peace and quite is nice, I think too sedating. I rarely work with music on since I can't help but process the lyrics, in fact I think with the whole can't get the music out of my head thing lately, I just can't help but (overly) process the entire audio. I've NEVER been someone who is good at tuning out acoustic stimuli. So I need to have acoustic stimuli I at least LIKE. My favorite ambient acoustic stimuli include (but aren't limited to) sounds from the street heard on waking in a friend's attic bedroom on an early June morning junior year of high school, island (numerous tracks), carnival just after a short rain storm around dusk, wind over late july trees, theater just before the curtain goes up, distant church bells (although any bell tower works church bells have the potency of at least someone's belief other than my own), small waves against the side of a wooden boat, and percolating coffee.

Most of those are calming sounds. Right now I need more stim - hence music.

As soon as this song with the er, sorta screechy kid and frenetic acoustic passes, maybe there'll be something fun to listen to.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hah! Finally an advantage of having virtually zero musical ability! I don't have the expertise to automatically process that kind of acoustic signal, so it doesn't interfere so much with my attention. I don't Stroop for music!
I actually usually put on music to up the ambient sound level so I don't notice and get distracted by little noises that I might otherwise orient on. Go cognitive geek-itude!
-Vengicar

PFG said...

I think I can safely say I have zero genuine music ability too. My singing voice is just slightly less horrible than vogon poetry. As for how I torture instruments, I took piano lessons for a while as a child, then discarded them for the fun to be had creating sound effects with the piano. E.g. if you push the pedals and knock, scratch, and tap the body of the piano you can make spooky noises which are nicely accompanied by off kilter and staggered tuneless key-hitting (it was sort of like spooky movie incidental music). This plus my ability to spontaneously make up fake lyrics to fit nearly any song, count as the sum total of my "musical ability".