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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
When people mention “intrusive thoughts” this is what comes to my mind.
I have this, but then for days. It's not fun. Sleeping a lot helps, to an extent.
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 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.
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.
1. Here's the playlist if anyone's interested:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...
So I end up with real high quality Japanese Breakfast and MP3-quality Pixies.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
Also, do a kickflip.
If you are missing on some form of pleasure in your life, substituting it for another pleasure can help alleviate the pain.
Woah.
I found it terribly soothing. Sometimes I'd bring a friend with and we'd play together.
Tony Joe White - Even Trolls Love Rock and Roll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fJMNJTEhuw
[0] https://archive.is/Ipdxc
[1] https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/7/1/29931/119109...
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.
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.
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.
This is the experience of outsiders. People without tribe. There choice is not between bread and cake, but between bread and an empty belly.
> 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.
interestingly, as someone who plays an instrument, i don't enjoy just listening to music as much because i'd rather play with friends
Either way, this sounds like vague popsci reasoning.
The music is quite sparsely melodic though and easy to miss
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...
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."
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.