Maybe others will relate? I'm not a headphone person but always have music playing in the background on speakers — often at a fairly low volume so it is easily ignored, talked over.
I find without the presence of external music I will have a song playing in my head instead. And generally the same song for hours (!). So I suppose the external click-track freezes up my mind somehow.
In case anyone cares, my "playlist" is local music I've purchased over the decades — maybe 4 or 5 days long? In my "lab" (man-cave, I suppose) I have a shorter, streamed playlist on the stereo that is looping over new music that I am currently "auditioning". The songs that make the cut are purchased and added eventually to the local playlist that plays elsewhere.
In the past few years, getting songs stuck in my head (earworms) has become so easy I pretty much don’t listen to music with vocals anymore. Only ambient, techno and psytrance for me. (Pop I imagine would be the absolute worst, lab engineered to be memorable)
I’m certain the DSM-5 might list that as a symptom of going crazy or whatever, but I don’t care to know, I guess it’s a new quirk of mine. That said, I truly dislike having neighbours practicing an instrument, which means having to suffer the same tune for far too long, and it getting stuck in my head for 2 more days.
I have music stuck in my head more or less constantly. It's never bothered, and I'm kind of surprised to find all the remedies suggested here. For me, instrumental music is no different from vocal music. It can be a riff from a solo, a chord change, an interesting timbre, or pretty much any sound. Sometimes I think they're not from songs that have yet been recorded. Just the imagination of sounds that turn over and over. I've always kind of liked it. I'm a musician myself, and I think it helps me think of old music in new ways.
Glad to find a musician here with this problem, as I suspect there are many. The moment I wake up, a song starts playing. When I practice violin, it gets pretty bad.
> In the past few years, getting songs stuck in my head (earworms) has become so easy I pretty much don’t listen to music with vocals anymore. Only ambient, techno and psytrance for me. (Pop I imagine would be the absolute worst, lab engineered to be memorable)
Same. This is partly why SomaFM (esp. Space Station Soma, Drone Zone, and Mission Control) and soundtracks are my jam.
I think it's also partly why I can't stand Vivaldi or Hiromi. Vivaldi writes classical pop -- so heavy on melody that it may as well be choral. It's easy to sing, and sounds like song, so it gets stuck in the ear. Hiromi, in turn, plays the piano quite literally like she's singing (honestly, I think she's a musical acrobat with no feel for the piano as an instrument), which results in ear worms for the same reason.
Bill Evans, by contrast, is so chock full of harmonic complexity and color that it's physically impossible to sing along with him. I never tire of him. Same for Wayne Shorter and Bach, though for different reasons.
And I just realized that this is probably partly why I hate musical theater so fervently.
> In the past few years, getting songs stuck in my head (earworms) has become so easy I pretty much don’t listen to music with vocals anymore.
Ditto the sibling comment about this happening to me for instrumental music. I have thousands of hooks floating around my head. I whistle and sing when I walk around if nobody is within earshot. 90% of the time I wake up with a melody in my head that won't go away. I kind of like it because it's developed my musical ability in a passive, cumulative way.
I know many people who say they can't live without music, cannot work or just be around home without listening to something. I understand their experience but I can't relate at all. It's not that I don't like music or that I'm particularly sensitive to noise but I practically never listen to music I put myself. I feel like I could just live without it completely.
Since I have children I almost never listen to music. The kids are such a sensory overload that, when I get a moment of silence alone, I don't want to ruin it with sound.
Depending on the age of your children, you should play music to introduce them to it. Some of my best memories from when my kids were young is of them dancing around uncontrollably to In The Hall of the Mountain King and Hergest Ridge (a particular section). They loved it. It activates something.
They need to know there's more out there than The Wiggles.
SO I worked as a professional musician for over a decade before a career change to software development... and since that change, the act of _listening_ to music has completely disappeared from my life. I cannot work or study with music on, I do not put music on when I'm home alone, I do not listen to music when driving... And for many years I gave up completely playing music even as a hobby. So although for most of my life I would have been shocked that someone could entertain the idea of living without music, I am actually now more shocked that people can do things like study or program with music on at all. In all that time though I was always impressed and surprised by what people would consider music :D
To a further extent, I know people who can't meditate or just stare at a wall for a few minutes, they must always be working or consuming or engaged in something
There’s a neuro-linguistic programming technique you can try to get rid of an earworm.
Picture a radio playing the song and imagine yourself slowly turning down the volume and the song getting quieter until it has gone.
This used to work for me but over time I’ve had to extend it with imagining switching the radio off at the end, unplugging it, and chucking it out the window so it smashes on the ground so no chance of it turning back on!
I'm glad you shared your experience because I've dealt with this for decades. It's usually a small snippet, 15 seconds or less, of a song that just loops over and over for me.
What I do to combat this, and other "brain noise", is also to listen to music but I use headphones with high volume. I also listen to the same playlist repeatedly so it's not distracting and instead quiets that loud part of my brain to allow me to focus.
I'm relieved to know from reading this thread I'm not completely crazy. I have the same thing, a very, very short snippet just repeatedly "playing". I become very conscious of it at various moments and try to "change the track" to some other repeated snippet. I've yet to find a pattern to which track is next.
It doesn’t really bother me, though sometimes I’ll think “ok, it’s time for a different earworm”. But sometimes even listening to other music will not work, and I’m still thinking about the same song.
But I generally have some song playing in my head — vocal, instrumental, doesn’t matter — constantly.
Again, doesn’t really bother me. In fact, I guess I enjoy it at some level.
But I don’t really go out of my way to not have music in my head or change the song (that I’ve been hearing for the past 10 days). It’s pretty much always songs I enjoy.
Basically, the same. I still purchase music. My collection goes back to done stuff I bought on CD in 1991 and ripped around 98. My wife finds music on YouTube, I browser RYM and then auditing stuff on YT. If it sticks, I but it.
I find it hard to manage several decades worth of playlists though. I wish music apps treated them with the same respect that albums get. Give them their own metadata like date created, owner, rating, moods etc.
>>I'm not a headphone person but always have music playing in the background on speakers — often at a fairly low volume so it is easily ignored...<<
Given the number of self-exonerating qualifications in that statement, I think that deep down you know that people who play their music aloud in the office should be shot.
When a music gets stuck in my head, somehow listening to it a few times makes it go away, as if I was craving it and listening to it would fill that hole.
I have a carefully-curated Spotify playlist -- "FLOWSTATE: Repeatable FTW"[1] -- that I specifically optimized for "flowstate" (/Cal Newport "deep work" sessions). The tracks span various moods or vibes, but all are strictly instrumental, w/ limited dynamic range or significant musical variation, and a steady, energizing beat -- ie they're each deliberately repetitive and work well set on repeat. Airpods in, pick a track that resonates w my mood, set it on repeat, set my Pomodoro timer (to remind me to stand and move instead of hyperfocus for hours straight), and I can reliably enter flowstate almost right away.
Wow that was interesting. Every track I listened to had this beat that was way too fast and heavy for me, at least it's not something I could listen to when working - it would send my blood pressure skyrocketing and make me want to go party or something. I guess this sort of thing is highly individual.
Well, it's almost 13h of varied tracks. Most do have a beat but it's much closer to chillout / downtempo than dance music. But yes, ofc, it's highly subjective.
Aye, bandcamp is the go-to. It's funny that the further production gets from someones bedroom the less likely you are to be able to buy a lossless version. All that production for a 192kbps MP3...
In my country the availability is very poor for CDs, unless I wanna spend loads of time hunting for used ones maybe. But that's far more time than I'm willing to spend when I can just pirate it.
I'll gladly give them my money, I'll pay 20€ for a flac album. I do it often enough on bandcamp. But big companies just don't care to cater to me, so they don't get my money.
On behalf of everyone else in the world, please invest in headphones.
Broadcasting in this way is boorish and the kind of thing emotionally stunted people do to inflict their will upon others. I'm not saying you're necessarily like that, but you're 'wearing their uniform' so to speak.
I used to live near a nice downtown with a riverwalk. I liked to take my guitar and go play under the bridge at night. The bridge was concrete and the reverb was crazy good.
(Does that make me a troll? A troll posting on the internet??)
I found it terribly soothing. Sometimes I'd bring a friend with and we'd play together.
I assume you listened for kids walking over the bridge and then jumped up "Who is trip tropping over my bridge". One of my favorite actives, and done right the kids laugh (don't get too close or do anything else that would make the kids scared!)
The study also explains that one feels less lonely when listening to their favourite music, which is kinda new to me. I mean, feeling better makes sense and is quite obvious, as you sarcastically say, but I wouldn't think that listening to music makes one feel less alone.
I wouldn't assume that sad songs make you more lonely. For someone dealing with grief, it may act as drug-free therapy. Perhaps deepened sorrow at first, but when one deals with grief, mental state and behavior can improve.
I think it's the opposite. Those songs are good because you find someone can relate to you and therefore you would feel less lonely. Maybe not less sad, but more connected.
When I work from home, I usually listen to Sade, Brandy, Monica, Faith Evans, and similar music. Although the music is often about heartbreak, it doesn't make me sad. I find it calming.
Through evolution we have been programmed to associate music with security of the group being nearby. Now we can listen to music even though the group is very distant in time and space. Maybe it's not a complete reality mismatch because in a sense we are still close to the group through the Internet.
However the positive feelings are over exaggerated given the limited modern benefits.
That’s a fascinating take. Music until very recently was indeed an incredibly social activity bound with layers of talent, leisure (purpose/meaning/security), belonging, etc.
As people have been chatting about the Metaverse or AR I often quip that we’ve already had AR for awhile: headphones.
The ubiquitous of AirPods, even amongst employees on the clock in recent years, has only reinforced my belief that we are already deep down the AR rabbit hole and seeing both the positive and negative effects. Augmented reality is great, but we still need to be grounded and able to act within reality. It’s the reality that must be our base, not the augmented part. The augmented should serve to improve reality, not replace.
One of the most enjoyable musical experiences I had recently was on a choir exchange in Europe. We were at a concert afterparty with choirs from two other countries, exchanging drunken folk songs. Were we pleasant to listen to? Probably not. It was raucous and out of tune, but it was a bunch of people sharing something we loved.
Singing in adult choirs has been one of my most spiritually and socially rewarding activities. You really feel a brother in arms with your fellow singers. Perhaps it is because singing is such an embarrassing activity in isolation, but then the sheer force of all the voices come together to make something of such power and beauty that you are incapable of replicating yourself. I’ll never forget the tenors I sang Faures Requiem or Beethoven 9th with.
i had a similar experience in scouting. german scouting has a strong singing tradition to the point that there are regular competitions that attract groups from all over europe. also camps where multiple groups meet. imagine your after party experience every night for multiple days, maybe even a week or two.
We created office jobs that required sustained individual focus.
The traditional (high-walled) cube farm may be ugly, but it's also one where an employee could often work at their desk with relatively few distractions. If you're not going to build private offices, they're not that awful of a compromise for enabling focus.
Then in the past decade or two, we had the open-office trend, and changed the office to one full of endless visual and auditory distractions making focus difficult.
Employees wearing headphones at work is an obvious attempt by many to reduce the distractions that bad office design has created.
To be honest, I dont have a lot of time for complaints from such people. Maybe I am one, but the solution is to go live in a cabin and bake your own bread, not sit at the table looking for sympathy.
That wasn't my reading. It was the bread or death part that did for me.
To me it seemed like melodramatic self pity, like the person complain that they had no other choice but go to the party but be alone. If someone hates company, they should go be a hermit, not show up and tell everyone about it.
It's okay to be a loner or a hermit. If you're not doing it, then either you are choosing the trade offs or you don't actually want it.
People should own their choices. Self pity and denial of agency are two of the most self destructive cognitive phenomenon.
Sure seemed melodramatic to me. care to explain the choice between bread and an empty belly in a way that isn't intended to garner sympathy? It is a pretty loaded metaphor.
the problem is in your apparent conclusion that "people without a tribe" are only in that state because they hate company. which doesn't make sense. if they indeed hated company they would not do what you say is bothering you. the reason they come to the party alone and tell you about it is because they do want company but have difficulty finding that company. being a loner most often is not a choice. it is something that we force onto others because we don't accept them the way they are. those who are loners by choice are not the kind of people who go to parties.
what agency is it that i should have that would allow me to make friends with people? i can't use my agency to change the behavior of others. you are right of course that self pity and denial of agency don't help. but the comments you are responding to don't talk about that at all. they are not suggesting that people without a tribe wallow in self pity and denial of agency. you brought that up.
i am the kind of person that has difficulty finding a tribe. (my tribe is here on HN and in the FOSS community to an extent. but those people are all distant and hard to meet. btw, you are one of the few names on HN that i recognize because of interesting discussions we had already). except i don't show up at parties where i am not welcome and don't talk to people that don't want to listen to me. but that's why i used my agency to leave my home country and travel the world to find communities that accept others without judging them and without expecting them to change just for the sake of being accepted.
My rant was specifically about people who embed themselves in a group, but resent the group and their situation. Thats how I interpreted "[Their] choice is not between bread and cake, but between bread and an empty belly."
If this is not the case, then the rant doesn't apply.
The the fine article is about listening to music alone fostering a sense of well being.
The comment to which I responded was about how degraded that experience is relative to music in social settings.
When a person does not have access to those social settings they are not better for that person…and as your comments suggest, often worse than nothing. On the other hand headphones are better than nothing.
The bread and cake are an historical reference.
HN guidelines are to make the charitable readings of other people’s comments. They are linked at the bottom of the page.
There are a lot of things that I find wrong with Spotify, but one of the features it does have that I have found helpful is a feature where you can listen along using what Spotify calls a Jam:
> Friends who join a Jam can listen and add songs to the queue together, whether in-person or virtually.
> Note: Premium is needed to start and host a Jam. Free users can join and add songs to a Jam hosted by a Premium user, allowing for in-person Jams. This feature works also with smart speakers and most Bluetooth speakers.
I've used this with online friends, and it's really good. If you use a voice chat app (we usually use Mumble) you can even talk while the music plays.
i thought it is comparable to talking to my friends online instead of in person. in my case those friends are on a different continent. i do have local fiends too, but talking to my online friends is what keeps me connected to my the place where i grew up. (even though these friends are not from that time)
interestingly, as someone who plays an instrument, i don't enjoy just listening to music as much because i'd rather play with friends
SOMAFM's SF police radio with ambient music is surprisingly good for concentration, I have this on an alias in my box : mpv https://somafm.com/sf1033.pls
SomaFM is some of the best of the internet. There's no ads and you don't need to sign in. You can just stream it without faff.
Try opening your browser's console, network inspector, etc. and see what happens when you try to play. There will almost certainly be enough hints in there to diagnose the issue.
Yeah but having a CHOICE in the music typically plays an important role! I mean in jail the only free option Tarrant County offered was Christian music (rap and contemporary) and that stuff was actually irritating to me. I wasn’t actively accessing it - I couldn’t NOT hear it coming through the ventilation system.
I wrote about how it’s a form of indoctrination to exploit people’s desire for something that they love yet only present a brainwashing oriented selection:
"This study was funded in part by the International Coalition of Headphone Manufactures."
But seriously, "Music as a social surrogate"? How is this good? What we need is to fix the social structure, not find out ways to compensate for the miserable state we are in.
"In terms of social needs, we have a social fuel tank. This tank helps us understand if we are able to get to our destination—the destination being positive mental health outcomes, like feeling satisfied with our lives, having positive self-image, and feeling accepted by others. The problem is that past measures used in psychology research only tell us how much fuel is in the tank—not what types of fuel are in the tank, or how much of each type of fuel is in there.
In this study, the measure that I created helps researchers understand what types of fuel are in the tank, and how much of each type of fuel is in the tank, that is leading to those outcomes. It gives us a better idea of what is going on to help people get those positive outcomes."
I dunno, man, just from personal experience... I never went to raves back in the day, and only occasionally to clubs. With one exception I found the mobs of sweaty drunken (or otherwise intoxicated) people borderline intolerable. But sitting in my room with headphones on, blasting trance or other EDM... I feel swept up and part of something. It's also the best way for me to bro out lots of code, with that stuff pumping. It's like the rhythm provides guide-rails for my brain to keep it going a certain direction.
The one exception? I once saw Armin Van Buuren do one of his legendary hours-long sets. That man is like the Pied Piper. Whatever energy the floor had before he came on was amplified a hundredfold and I just danced and danced, people be damned.
I wonder if it's a similar case with having tv shows running in the background? Music is often too stimulating for me but I like having the TV running in the background cycling through tv shows.
if one's childhood had many instances of tv playing in the background, then I suspect it's their nervous system marking that environment as their most safe/comfortable environment and that revisiting it can have a soothing effect on them?
Many years ago, I always used to have TV on whilst I did (composed) music.
With YouTube (and others) nowadays, I still found myself doomscrolling, so I bought a digital TV tuner and have that in a window.
Productivity up.
My birds are much happier when music is playing. And they seem to have preferences over time. Like there are no predators around when the environment around them is noisy.
Though I found they like having control over whether the music is playing more... to my chagrin. I tried to keep my parrot from being too noisy through the day by setting up a microphone in his room, and having it turn off the radio for 30 seconds every time he was louder than a threshold amount.
Day one -> he triggered the shut down ~10 times.
Day two -> easily 50.
Day three -> you can see where this is going
Dude freaking LOVED being able to turn on and off the radio. It almost beat out being able to flap his wings and make the curtains move as one of his favourite hobbies.
you thought you were punishing him by taking away the music if he makes to much noise and you give him a tool that gives him control over his environment. seems that backfired because it looks like the parrot is less interested in the music itself but in this new ability to control the radio.
I can't argue that I really enjoy music as my working background noise. Something else unique is I enjoy listening to TV shows, or more, "noise". I usually put on a simple TV show I've seen before that doesn't need a lot of attention (Friends, the Office, New Girl, Big Bang Theory), that creates that background noise. It's like white noise to me :)
Fascinating research showing music's powerful social effects. Would be interesting to see if the results hold up across different demographics and cultures. Also curious about the neurological mechanisms at play - perhaps solo music activates brain regions involved in empathy and social bonding? Exciting implications for music therapy applications.
If you want to know if this is for you, but you don't want to spend a lot of money, start with iems. It's quite the hobby, as well as education. It's very cheap and accessible to start off, while getting the full hi-fi music feeling. Of course, if you stick with it, it can get very expensive.
For a while I switched to mee6 pro's with some squishy foam cushions, they were around £30 and had a surprisingly flat response. Of course, that will sound bad to a typical listener until you realize the v curve you are used to has been hiding details in the midrange
Just from personal experience, listening to music in the morning while I make my coffee is an essential part of my morning routing, to the point that I will be upset if I can't do it.
Not sure if your response was deliberately obtuse or not, but in case it was accidental I wanted to point out that you may have missed a key word - "social" well-being.
It's one thing if listening to music makes you feel good, but another completely if listening makes you more capable of socialising. This may be more important for others than it is for you.
You are reading into something that isn't there. The study doesn't have to do with music making you more capable of socializing.
The hypothesis being tested is that in the absence of social interaction, people will turn to surrogates in order to make up for the perceived lack. Specifically, they test if music can be such a surrogate. They do some surveys and a kind of silly experiment to provide evidence that yes- it can.
The reason it is rightly called pointless is that it brings nothing actionable to the table.
You cannot extract advice from showing evidence for a common-sense observation: If you feel a certain lack, activities you find pleasurable can diminish that lack.
And look at the experimental setup: They make people play an online game with others where certain people are excluded from playing. It turns out that people who are hyped from listening to their favorite song found this less jarring, hence showing that music can be a "social buffer", i.e. make up for a perceived social exclusion.
Let everyone individually conclude how insightful this experiment is.
EDIT: Misunderstood the nature of the "Cyberball" experiment, fixed
Until it doesn't. It is an obvious fact that a heavy rock will fall faster than a light rock. Only because you have been taught otherwise for all your life do you realize it isn't a fact even though it is obvious.
Depends on whether you are talking about an abstract physics model or actually existing rocks on earth. (And actually gravitational force is proportional to both masses.)
This is a cynical take, but I’m increasingly becoming tired of studies like this. Is this is where our science funding is going? It’s clever, trite, and probably meaningless. I keep reading about the publish/perish problem in academia and how it encourages research that safe, slightly interesting, but not too interesting, and doesn’t move anything forward. This study seems to fit that criteria.
And since it’s behind a paywall, I can’t really determine the how the study was designed, how well powered it is, how they defined statistical significance, and exactly how they justify their conclusion. But it got clicks and comments, so I guess it served its purpose, only to be quickly forgotten in endless churn of popular science news.
I’m sad to say, I’m beginning to think that a lot of current science is bullshit. As a very pro-science person, this is very depressing.
Everybody here is missing the point of this article which is actually about the increasing need for "Social Surrogates" in our current times. Music is just one of them.
Wonderful! I am increasingly drowning in debt, my career is a dead end thanks to AI, and my landlord is making my daily life a stressful misery, but I can listen to music on my headphones. Thanks science!
Maybe others will relate? I'm not a headphone person but always have music playing in the background on speakers — often at a fairly low volume so it is easily ignored, talked over.
I find without the presence of external music I will have a song playing in my head instead. And generally the same song for hours (!). So I suppose the external click-track freezes up my mind somehow.
In case anyone cares, my "playlist" is local music I've purchased over the decades — maybe 4 or 5 days long? In my "lab" (man-cave, I suppose) I have a shorter, streamed playlist on the stereo that is looping over new music that I am currently "auditioning". The songs that make the cut are purchased and added eventually to the local playlist that plays elsewhere.
In the past few years, getting songs stuck in my head (earworms) has become so easy I pretty much don’t listen to music with vocals anymore. Only ambient, techno and psytrance for me. (Pop I imagine would be the absolute worst, lab engineered to be memorable)
I’m certain the DSM-5 might list that as a symptom of going crazy or whatever, but I don’t care to know, I guess it’s a new quirk of mine. That said, I truly dislike having neighbours practicing an instrument, which means having to suffer the same tune for far too long, and it getting stuck in my head for 2 more days.
I have music stuck in my head more or less constantly. It's never bothered, and I'm kind of surprised to find all the remedies suggested here. For me, instrumental music is no different from vocal music. It can be a riff from a solo, a chord change, an interesting timbre, or pretty much any sound. Sometimes I think they're not from songs that have yet been recorded. Just the imagination of sounds that turn over and over. I've always kind of liked it. I'm a musician myself, and I think it helps me think of old music in new ways.
Glad to find a musician here with this problem, as I suspect there are many. The moment I wake up, a song starts playing. When I practice violin, it gets pretty bad.
I may be the only one who doesn't think of it as a problem and doesn't call it bad.
> In the past few years, getting songs stuck in my head (earworms) has become so easy I pretty much don’t listen to music with vocals anymore. Only ambient, techno and psytrance for me. (Pop I imagine would be the absolute worst, lab engineered to be memorable)
Same. This is partly why SomaFM (esp. Space Station Soma, Drone Zone, and Mission Control) and soundtracks are my jam.
I think it's also partly why I can't stand Vivaldi or Hiromi. Vivaldi writes classical pop -- so heavy on melody that it may as well be choral. It's easy to sing, and sounds like song, so it gets stuck in the ear. Hiromi, in turn, plays the piano quite literally like she's singing (honestly, I think she's a musical acrobat with no feel for the piano as an instrument), which results in ear worms for the same reason.
Bill Evans, by contrast, is so chock full of harmonic complexity and color that it's physically impossible to sing along with him. I never tire of him. Same for Wayne Shorter and Bach, though for different reasons.
And I just realized that this is probably partly why I hate musical theater so fervently.
Nobody cares that you can't enjoy things.
I disagree. Everybody cares about what I like and dislike, and everybody needs to know it.
> In the past few years, getting songs stuck in my head (earworms) has become so easy I pretty much don’t listen to music with vocals anymore.
Ditto the sibling comment about this happening to me for instrumental music. I have thousands of hooks floating around my head. I whistle and sing when I walk around if nobody is within earshot. 90% of the time I wake up with a melody in my head that won't go away. I kind of like it because it's developed my musical ability in a passive, cumulative way.
This can be associated with ADHD. Guess how I know.
I know many people who say they can't live without music, cannot work or just be around home without listening to something. I understand their experience but I can't relate at all. It's not that I don't like music or that I'm particularly sensitive to noise but I practically never listen to music I put myself. I feel like I could just live without it completely.
Since I have children I almost never listen to music. The kids are such a sensory overload that, when I get a moment of silence alone, I don't want to ruin it with sound.
Depending on the age of your children, you should play music to introduce them to it. Some of my best memories from when my kids were young is of them dancing around uncontrollably to In The Hall of the Mountain King and Hergest Ridge (a particular section). They loved it. It activates something.
They need to know there's more out there than The Wiggles.
I have kids. When I get a moment alone, I find that's a perfect opportunity to do some high quality listening without interruption.
SO I worked as a professional musician for over a decade before a career change to software development... and since that change, the act of _listening_ to music has completely disappeared from my life. I cannot work or study with music on, I do not put music on when I'm home alone, I do not listen to music when driving... And for many years I gave up completely playing music even as a hobby. So although for most of my life I would have been shocked that someone could entertain the idea of living without music, I am actually now more shocked that people can do things like study or program with music on at all. In all that time though I was always impressed and surprised by what people would consider music :D
To a further extent, I know people who can't meditate or just stare at a wall for a few minutes, they must always be working or consuming or engaged in something
For me it depends on my mood. Sometimes I like to have background music going, sometimes I enjoy silence.
I'm like this but replace music with audiobooks/podcasts..
There’s a neuro-linguistic programming technique you can try to get rid of an earworm.
Picture a radio playing the song and imagine yourself slowly turning down the volume and the song getting quieter until it has gone.
This used to work for me but over time I’ve had to extend it with imagining switching the radio off at the end, unplugging it, and chucking it out the window so it smashes on the ground so no chance of it turning back on!
I'm glad you shared your experience because I've dealt with this for decades. It's usually a small snippet, 15 seconds or less, of a song that just loops over and over for me.
What I do to combat this, and other "brain noise", is also to listen to music but I use headphones with high volume. I also listen to the same playlist repeatedly so it's not distracting and instead quiets that loud part of my brain to allow me to focus.
Strong recommendation to use noise-cancelling instead of high volume. Hearing loss sucks! Protect your ears!
Same, but instead of the same playlist I'll put the same song on repeat while working. It really does quiet the mind and lets me focus.
Same. I posted upthread about my flowstate playlist, optimized for tracks to put on repeat for focus.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43585365
I'm relieved to know from reading this thread I'm not completely crazy. I have the same thing, a very, very short snippet just repeatedly "playing". I become very conscious of it at various moments and try to "change the track" to some other repeated snippet. I've yet to find a pattern to which track is next.
Same. It’s five seconds of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” looping over and over and makes me want to crawl inside a blaring tuba to drown it out.
When people mention “intrusive thoughts” this is what comes to my mind.
> And generally the same song for hours (!).
Hours? Try days!
It doesn’t really bother me, though sometimes I’ll think “ok, it’s time for a different earworm”. But sometimes even listening to other music will not work, and I’m still thinking about the same song.
But I generally have some song playing in my head — vocal, instrumental, doesn’t matter — constantly.
Again, doesn’t really bother me. In fact, I guess I enjoy it at some level.
But I don’t really go out of my way to not have music in my head or change the song (that I’ve been hearing for the past 10 days). It’s pretty much always songs I enjoy.
> I find without the presence of external music I will have a song playing in my head instead. And generally the same song for hours (!).
I have this, but then for days. It's not fun. Sleeping a lot helps, to an extent.
Basically, the same. I still purchase music. My collection goes back to done stuff I bought on CD in 1991 and ripped around 98. My wife finds music on YouTube, I browser RYM and then auditing stuff on YT. If it sticks, I but it.
I find it hard to manage several decades worth of playlists though. I wish music apps treated them with the same respect that albums get. Give them their own metadata like date created, owner, rating, moods etc.
>>I'm not a headphone person but always have music playing in the background on speakers — often at a fairly low volume so it is easily ignored...<<
Given the number of self-exonerating qualifications in that statement, I think that deep down you know that people who play their music aloud in the office should be shot.
You might enjoy Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. You're not alone in your experience.
When a music gets stuck in my head, somehow listening to it a few times makes it go away, as if I was craving it and listening to it would fill that hole.
I have a carefully-curated Spotify playlist -- "FLOWSTATE: Repeatable FTW"[1] -- that I specifically optimized for "flowstate" (/Cal Newport "deep work" sessions). The tracks span various moods or vibes, but all are strictly instrumental, w/ limited dynamic range or significant musical variation, and a steady, energizing beat -- ie they're each deliberately repetitive and work well set on repeat. Airpods in, pick a track that resonates w my mood, set it on repeat, set my Pomodoro timer (to remind me to stand and move instead of hyperfocus for hours straight), and I can reliably enter flowstate almost right away.
1. Here's the playlist if anyone's interested:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...
Wow that was interesting. Every track I listened to had this beat that was way too fast and heavy for me, at least it's not something I could listen to when working - it would send my blood pressure skyrocketing and make me want to go party or something. I guess this sort of thing is highly individual.
Well, it's almost 13h of varied tracks. Most do have a beat but it's much closer to chillout / downtempo than dance music. But yes, ofc, it's highly subjective.
As another music-purchaser, it's annoying how difficult it is to buy FLAC releases of bigger artists.
You can try qobuz and 7digital.
For big artists, I tend to just go to my local record store, pick up a CD, and rip it when I get home.
For albums, I recommend supraphonline.cz: https://www.supraphonline.cz/vyhledavani/alba/maingenre.1-ve...
Yeah, since I prefer Bandcamp and, as you say, the bigger artists are not there, I end up buying shitty MP3s from Amazon for their songs.
So I end up with real high quality Japanese Breakfast and MP3-quality Pixies.
Aye, bandcamp is the go-to. It's funny that the further production gets from someones bedroom the less likely you are to be able to buy a lossless version. All that production for a 192kbps MP3...
And buying the CD and ripping it?
In my country the availability is very poor for CDs, unless I wanna spend loads of time hunting for used ones maybe. But that's far more time than I'm willing to spend when I can just pirate it.
I'll gladly give them my money, I'll pay 20€ for a flac album. I do it often enough on bandcamp. But big companies just don't care to cater to me, so they don't get my money.
hdtracks.com has a pretty big catalog, but is sometimes a bit expensive.
Same for me; I can get songs stuck in my head too easily.
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I'm exactly like this.
I have a OneWheel that I use to get around, and a JBL speaker. I legit listen to music in Publix isles, dancing, vibing, all day, every day.
I'm known around my neighborhood as "the speaker guy".
If I don't have music playing, I'm usually finger drumming/tapping/bobbing my head anyway.
> JBL speaker
On behalf of everyone else in the world, please invest in headphones.
Broadcasting in this way is boorish and the kind of thing emotionally stunted people do to inflict their will upon others. I'm not saying you're necessarily like that, but you're 'wearing their uniform' so to speak.
Being known as "the speaker guy" isn't a compliment.
Also, do a kickflip.
Please stop forcing your music on everyone around you. Get headphones.
Study finds you enjoy doing things you like. If there's something you particularly like, you seem to enjoy it even more.
If you are missing on some form of pleasure in your life, substituting it for another pleasure can help alleviate the pain.
Woah.
I used to live near a nice downtown with a riverwalk. I liked to take my guitar and go play under the bridge at night. The bridge was concrete and the reverb was crazy good. (Does that make me a troll? A troll posting on the internet??)
I found it terribly soothing. Sometimes I'd bring a friend with and we'd play together.
You just reminded me of one of my favorite Tony Joe White songs, so thanks!
Tony Joe White - Even Trolls Love Rock and Roll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fJMNJTEhuw
I assume you listened for kids walking over the bridge and then jumped up "Who is trip tropping over my bridge". One of my favorite actives, and done right the kids laugh (don't get too close or do anything else that would make the kids scared!)
This was Naperville, IL. So that kind of behavior is very risky.
You could get sued for 10 million dollars. Or these days, deported to Aurora.
The study also explains that one feels less lonely when listening to their favourite music, which is kinda new to me. I mean, feeling better makes sense and is quite obvious, as you sarcastically say, but I wouldn't think that listening to music makes one feel less alone.
Depends, if you listen to Emo/sad/heartbreak songs you will probably feel much more lonely.
I wouldn't assume that sad songs make you more lonely. For someone dealing with grief, it may act as drug-free therapy. Perhaps deepened sorrow at first, but when one deals with grief, mental state and behavior can improve.
Unstructured therapy is exactly as effective as it sounds. You're just as likely to process the emotion as you are to enable and reinforce it.
Taken too far, wallowing in the pain becomes a perverse pleasure in itself, a bit like cutting or other self harm.
I think it's the opposite. Those songs are good because you find someone can relate to you and therefore you would feel less lonely. Maybe not less sad, but more connected.
When I work from home, I usually listen to Sade, Brandy, Monica, Faith Evans, and similar music. Although the music is often about heartbreak, it doesn't make me sad. I find it calming.
The cause or the effect? I would actually guess no for the effect, since music preferences are associated with community membership.
I listen to sad songs with great regularity and jam the hell out to the sheer musicianship within, actually.
I wonder if it may be beneficial even if you're not naturally willing to do it, similar to how introverts feel better after acting extroverted [0] [1]
[0] https://archive.is/Ipdxc
[1] https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/7/1/29931/119109...
:) pleasure is the gateway experience into enjoying yourself
This is one of the cases I call reality mismatch:
Through evolution we have been programmed to associate music with security of the group being nearby. Now we can listen to music even though the group is very distant in time and space. Maybe it's not a complete reality mismatch because in a sense we are still close to the group through the Internet.
However the positive feelings are over exaggerated given the limited modern benefits.
That’s a fascinating take. Music until very recently was indeed an incredibly social activity bound with layers of talent, leisure (purpose/meaning/security), belonging, etc.
As people have been chatting about the Metaverse or AR I often quip that we’ve already had AR for awhile: headphones.
The ubiquitous of AirPods, even amongst employees on the clock in recent years, has only reinforced my belief that we are already deep down the AR rabbit hole and seeing both the positive and negative effects. Augmented reality is great, but we still need to be grounded and able to act within reality. It’s the reality that must be our base, not the augmented part. The augmented should serve to improve reality, not replace.
One of the most enjoyable musical experiences I had recently was on a choir exchange in Europe. We were at a concert afterparty with choirs from two other countries, exchanging drunken folk songs. Were we pleasant to listen to? Probably not. It was raucous and out of tune, but it was a bunch of people sharing something we loved.
Singing in adult choirs has been one of my most spiritually and socially rewarding activities. You really feel a brother in arms with your fellow singers. Perhaps it is because singing is such an embarrassing activity in isolation, but then the sheer force of all the voices come together to make something of such power and beauty that you are incapable of replicating yourself. I’ll never forget the tenors I sang Faures Requiem or Beethoven 9th with.
i had a similar experience in scouting. german scouting has a strong singing tradition to the point that there are regular competitions that attract groups from all over europe. also camps where multiple groups meet. imagine your after party experience every night for multiple days, maybe even a week or two.
That sounds beautiful.
We created office jobs that required sustained individual focus.
The traditional (high-walled) cube farm may be ugly, but it's also one where an employee could often work at their desk with relatively few distractions. If you're not going to build private offices, they're not that awful of a compromise for enabling focus.
Then in the past decade or two, we had the open-office trend, and changed the office to one full of endless visual and auditory distractions making focus difficult.
Employees wearing headphones at work is an obvious attempt by many to reduce the distractions that bad office design has created.
What’s the middle ground good design here?
Some people don’t have strong bonds with groups and some people don’t have experiences where identifiable groups were a source of security.
This is the experience of outsiders. People without tribe. There choice is not between bread and cake, but between bread and an empty belly.
To be honest, I dont have a lot of time for complaints from such people. Maybe I am one, but the solution is to go live in a cabin and bake your own bread, not sit at the table looking for sympathy.
That seems to be an extreme reaction?
They were just stating the reality of some people that don't necessarily chose to feel how they feel...
That wasn't my reading. It was the bread or death part that did for me.
To me it seemed like melodramatic self pity, like the person complain that they had no other choice but go to the party but be alone. If someone hates company, they should go be a hermit, not show up and tell everyone about it.
It's okay to be a loner or a hermit. If you're not doing it, then either you are choosing the trade offs or you don't actually want it.
People should own their choices. Self pity and denial of agency are two of the most self destructive cognitive phenomenon.
That wasn't my reading
Indeed, it was your misreading.
Sure seemed melodramatic to me. care to explain the choice between bread and an empty belly in a way that isn't intended to garner sympathy? It is a pretty loaded metaphor.
the problem is in your apparent conclusion that "people without a tribe" are only in that state because they hate company. which doesn't make sense. if they indeed hated company they would not do what you say is bothering you. the reason they come to the party alone and tell you about it is because they do want company but have difficulty finding that company. being a loner most often is not a choice. it is something that we force onto others because we don't accept them the way they are. those who are loners by choice are not the kind of people who go to parties.
what agency is it that i should have that would allow me to make friends with people? i can't use my agency to change the behavior of others. you are right of course that self pity and denial of agency don't help. but the comments you are responding to don't talk about that at all. they are not suggesting that people without a tribe wallow in self pity and denial of agency. you brought that up.
i am the kind of person that has difficulty finding a tribe. (my tribe is here on HN and in the FOSS community to an extent. but those people are all distant and hard to meet. btw, you are one of the few names on HN that i recognize because of interesting discussions we had already). except i don't show up at parties where i am not welcome and don't talk to people that don't want to listen to me. but that's why i used my agency to leave my home country and travel the world to find communities that accept others without judging them and without expecting them to change just for the sake of being accepted.
My rant was specifically about people who embed themselves in a group, but resent the group and their situation. Thats how I interpreted "[Their] choice is not between bread and cake, but between bread and an empty belly."
If this is not the case, then the rant doesn't apply.
The the fine article is about listening to music alone fostering a sense of well being.
The comment to which I responded was about how degraded that experience is relative to music in social settings.
When a person does not have access to those social settings they are not better for that person…and as your comments suggest, often worse than nothing. On the other hand headphones are better than nothing.
The bread and cake are an historical reference.
HN guidelines are to make the charitable readings of other people’s comments. They are linked at the bottom of the page.
>The comment to which I responded was about how degraded that experience is relative to music in social settings.
I don't know how you can read the parent post and get that. I think it was speculation on The evolutionary basis for why music is soothing.
I don't know…
Agreed.
There are a lot of things that I find wrong with Spotify, but one of the features it does have that I have found helpful is a feature where you can listen along using what Spotify calls a Jam:
> Friends who join a Jam can listen and add songs to the queue together, whether in-person or virtually.
> Note: Premium is needed to start and host a Jam. Free users can join and add songs to a Jam hosted by a Premium user, allowing for in-person Jams. This feature works also with smart speakers and most Bluetooth speakers.
I've used this with online friends, and it's really good. If you use a voice chat app (we usually use Mumble) you can even talk while the music plays.
i thought it is comparable to talking to my friends online instead of in person. in my case those friends are on a different continent. i do have local fiends too, but talking to my online friends is what keeps me connected to my the place where i grew up. (even though these friends are not from that time)
interestingly, as someone who plays an instrument, i don't enjoy just listening to music as much because i'd rather play with friends
Did you mean to say "performance" instead of "music"?
Either way, this sounds like vague popsci reasoning.
https://somafm.com/player/#/now-playing/groovesalad is my well-being
SOMAFM's SF police radio with ambient music is surprisingly good for concentration, I have this on an alias in my box : mpv https://somafm.com/sf1033.pls
Does nothing for me ("Play" does nothing) with uBO enabled in FF.
Works fine for me in Firefox for Android with uBO.
The music is quite sparsely melodic though and easy to miss
Maybe because I'm not signed in? I disabled uBO and it still doesn't play. Hmm.
SomaFM is some of the best of the internet. There's no ads and you don't need to sign in. You can just stream it without faff.
Try opening your browser's console, network inspector, etc. and see what happens when you try to play. There will almost certainly be enough hints in there to diagnose the issue.
Yeah but having a CHOICE in the music typically plays an important role! I mean in jail the only free option Tarrant County offered was Christian music (rap and contemporary) and that stuff was actually irritating to me. I wasn’t actively accessing it - I couldn’t NOT hear it coming through the ventilation system.
I wrote about how it’s a form of indoctrination to exploit people’s desire for something that they love yet only present a brainwashing oriented selection:
https://samhenrycliff.medium.com/tarrant-county-sheriff-bill...
well in that situation you are not listening in isolation.
"This study was funded in part by the International Coalition of Headphone Manufactures."
But seriously, "Music as a social surrogate"? How is this good? What we need is to fix the social structure, not find out ways to compensate for the miserable state we are in.
From https://www.utica.edu/college-community/utica-stories/fillin...
"In terms of social needs, we have a social fuel tank. This tank helps us understand if we are able to get to our destination—the destination being positive mental health outcomes, like feeling satisfied with our lives, having positive self-image, and feeling accepted by others. The problem is that past measures used in psychology research only tell us how much fuel is in the tank—not what types of fuel are in the tank, or how much of each type of fuel is in there.
In this study, the measure that I created helps researchers understand what types of fuel are in the tank, and how much of each type of fuel is in the tank, that is leading to those outcomes. It gives us a better idea of what is going on to help people get those positive outcomes."
I dunno, man, just from personal experience... I never went to raves back in the day, and only occasionally to clubs. With one exception I found the mobs of sweaty drunken (or otherwise intoxicated) people borderline intolerable. But sitting in my room with headphones on, blasting trance or other EDM... I feel swept up and part of something. It's also the best way for me to bro out lots of code, with that stuff pumping. It's like the rhythm provides guide-rails for my brain to keep it going a certain direction.
The one exception? I once saw Armin Van Buuren do one of his legendary hours-long sets. That man is like the Pied Piper. Whatever energy the floor had before he came on was amplified a hundredfold and I just danced and danced, people be damned.
I wonder if the positive effect is also associated with a sense of autonomy and control of the environment.
Study shows people relying on studies for common sense found less adept at independent thinking
I wonder if it's a similar case with having tv shows running in the background? Music is often too stimulating for me but I like having the TV running in the background cycling through tv shows.
if one's childhood had many instances of tv playing in the background, then I suspect it's their nervous system marking that environment as their most safe/comfortable environment and that revisiting it can have a soothing effect on them?
Many years ago, I always used to have TV on whilst I did (composed) music. With YouTube (and others) nowadays, I still found myself doomscrolling, so I bought a digital TV tuner and have that in a window. Productivity up.
My birds are much happier when music is playing. And they seem to have preferences over time. Like there are no predators around when the environment around them is noisy.
Though I found they like having control over whether the music is playing more... to my chagrin. I tried to keep my parrot from being too noisy through the day by setting up a microphone in his room, and having it turn off the radio for 30 seconds every time he was louder than a threshold amount.
Day one -> he triggered the shut down ~10 times. Day two -> easily 50. Day three -> you can see where this is going
Dude freaking LOVED being able to turn on and off the radio. It almost beat out being able to flap his wings and make the curtains move as one of his favourite hobbies.
you thought you were punishing him by taking away the music if he makes to much noise and you give him a tool that gives him control over his environment. seems that backfired because it looks like the parrot is less interested in the music itself but in this new ability to control the radio.
I can't argue that I really enjoy music as my working background noise. Something else unique is I enjoy listening to TV shows, or more, "noise". I usually put on a simple TV show I've seen before that doesn't need a lot of attention (Friends, the Office, New Girl, Big Bang Theory), that creates that background noise. It's like white noise to me :)
Fascinating research showing music's powerful social effects. Would be interesting to see if the results hold up across different demographics and cultures. Also curious about the neurological mechanisms at play - perhaps solo music activates brain regions involved in empathy and social bonding? Exciting implications for music therapy applications.
Confusing title, I thought there was something special in solo music, e.g. pieces for one piano or a single classical guitar
If you want to know if this is for you, but you don't want to spend a lot of money, start with iems. It's quite the hobby, as well as education. It's very cheap and accessible to start off, while getting the full hi-fi music feeling. Of course, if you stick with it, it can get very expensive.
For a while I switched to mee6 pro's with some squishy foam cushions, they were around £30 and had a surprisingly flat response. Of course, that will sound bad to a typical listener until you realize the v curve you are used to has been hiding details in the midrange
Just from personal experience, listening to music in the morning while I make my coffee is an essential part of my morning routing, to the point that I will be upset if I can't do it.
Another study that states obvious facts. Of course listening to music boosts your well-being, heck, doing anything you enjoy doing tends to do so.
Not sure if your response was deliberately obtuse or not, but in case it was accidental I wanted to point out that you may have missed a key word - "social" well-being.
It's one thing if listening to music makes you feel good, but another completely if listening makes you more capable of socialising. This may be more important for others than it is for you.
You are reading into something that isn't there. The study doesn't have to do with music making you more capable of socializing.
The hypothesis being tested is that in the absence of social interaction, people will turn to surrogates in order to make up for the perceived lack. Specifically, they test if music can be such a surrogate. They do some surveys and a kind of silly experiment to provide evidence that yes- it can.
The reason it is rightly called pointless is that it brings nothing actionable to the table.
You cannot extract advice from showing evidence for a common-sense observation: If you feel a certain lack, activities you find pleasurable can diminish that lack.
And look at the experimental setup: They make people play an online game with others where certain people are excluded from playing. It turns out that people who are hyped from listening to their favorite song found this less jarring, hence showing that music can be a "social buffer", i.e. make up for a perceived social exclusion.
Let everyone individually conclude how insightful this experiment is.
EDIT: Misunderstood the nature of the "Cyberball" experiment, fixed
Until it doesn't. It is an obvious fact that a heavy rock will fall faster than a light rock. Only because you have been taught otherwise for all your life do you realize it isn't a fact even though it is obvious.
WHAT?! Given a lack of air resistance (i.e. ideal conditions in a vacuum), they should fall at the same rate
Depends on whether you are talking about an abstract physics model or actually existing rocks on earth. (And actually gravitational force is proportional to both masses.)
I really wanted to read the article and then comment "in mice!", but alas, they used humans.
This is a cynical take, but I’m increasingly becoming tired of studies like this. Is this is where our science funding is going? It’s clever, trite, and probably meaningless. I keep reading about the publish/perish problem in academia and how it encourages research that safe, slightly interesting, but not too interesting, and doesn’t move anything forward. This study seems to fit that criteria.
And since it’s behind a paywall, I can’t really determine the how the study was designed, how well powered it is, how they defined statistical significance, and exactly how they justify their conclusion. But it got clicks and comments, so I guess it served its purpose, only to be quickly forgotten in endless churn of popular science news.
I’m sad to say, I’m beginning to think that a lot of current science is bullshit. As a very pro-science person, this is very depressing.
Everybody here is missing the point of this article which is actually about the increasing need for "Social Surrogates" in our current times. Music is just one of them.
See Social Surrogates, Social Motivations, and Everyday Activities: The Case for a Strong, Subtle, and Sneaky Social Self - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00652...
The study found that for people who are lonely or sad, listening to music helped them.
Wow. How utterly expected.
Next, they will do studies and find that people who are lonely or sad, are helped when they attend a concert with their favorite band.
Or when they eat their favorite food.
"After two years of studies, we conclude that people who are feeling lonely or sad, eating their favorite food gives them a boost and feel better".
The metric that would be useful is "better" for how long?
is there any good app to know local music event?
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Wonderful! I am increasingly drowning in debt, my career is a dead end thanks to AI, and my landlord is making my daily life a stressful misery, but I can listen to music on my headphones. Thanks science!