Thread of People Who Don't Get Instrumental Music

Not me, obv., but I've always wondered…

y u no like the absent sound of the human voice when it's not there?

if this is aimed at me, I don't mind instrumental music sometimes!

I've been meaning to start this thread for a while, but my aim was also to draw you out of your semi-lurkerdom.

What instrumental music do you find acceptable?

middle eights

80% of my listening is instrumental music

and 10% of the remaining 20% is usually in a language I do not speak or understand

idg people who need a human voice in order to connect to a piece of music. for me it's almost always the opposite

i like vocals in metal. if i'm listening to prog rock I usually view a voice as an unwanted intrusion

Spotify and having big headphones on at work in "open concept" environments has really changed by listening, skewed it much more towards instrumental. also went through a big phase where i listened to so much fahey, american primitive derived stuff

listening to madlib's shades of blue right now

who among us has not succumbed to the siren song of chill lo-fi beats to study to

on an aesthetic level i only notice/care about lyrics if they are really good. more focused on delivery/texture/whatever

i write for work so i am incapable of noticing lyrics for much of my day

All music is instrumental. Tomato is a fruit

Metal is the only genre where I skip instrumental releases altogether, maybe because monster vox are likelier to be treated as just another instrument – when they're dropped it feels like the key is missing.

80% of my listening is instrumental music

and 10% of the remaining 20% is usually in a language I do not speak or understand

idg people who need a human voice in order to connect to a piece of music. for me it's almost always the opposite

― Paul Ponzi, Wednesday, September 2, 2020 9:15 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm with you on this.

anybody who doesn't like instrumental music doesn't really like music. you will not change my mind on this.

I don't dislike instrumental music at all, but I do find it easier to get *hooked* by something with vocals. But I also love vocals in languages I don't understand (sometimes more so than in English). So I think I might be searching for an immediate human connection but bypassing the corniness that can come with knowing the lyrics.

(I'll reiterate that this obviously doesn't hold for a whole lot of the music that I listen to, but I think it points toward a general trend in my listening approach.)

as i get older, i've gotten kinda picky about vocalists — there are just a lot of singers where I hear them for the first time and I think: "Nope."

Voices in music are what happens when supervisors mistake work time for leisure time. However some supervision is necessary to prevent drowning and other mishaps. Credit where credit is due, many are continuing to see life on land due to the hard work of Cardi B and associates

I don't know that I prefer instrumental music but I think a good 70% of my listening is instrumental. That's a lot to do with finding it impossible to focus on work when listening to lyrics and sometimes simply not wanting or being able to handle a voice/lyrics.

Absolutely agree that metal is the one genre where a vocalist is essential. I don't think I've ever considered why before now.

I think of the setting of text to music as a fairly different craft from the composition or improvisation of wordless music so it's not especially surprising to me that someone could appreciate one thing and not the other.

I suspect it's more about how you want to listen and what you latch onto - there are a large number of people who know all the words to, say, Groove Is In The Heart but couldn't tell you how the bassline goes, despite it being one of the main hooks in the song. I've met enough people who pretty much ONLY listen to the vocals, so once you take them away it's a case of 'well what's the point of this then?'

the voice is just another instrument to me, for the most part, and even in vocal music i often find myself drawn to the instrumental hook more.

I think of the setting of text to music as a fairly different craft from the composition or improvisation of wordless music so it's not especially surprising to me that someone could appreciate one thing and not the other.

I agree with this - also, if you listen mainly to genres that typically include vocals (which includes most "popular" music), it's not surprising that you wouldn't necessarily have much of an ear for purely instrumental music.

(I think I actually just rephrased what Sund4r said, only less elegantly)

what i really don't understand is people who like song-like instrumental music but don't like vocals added to song-like instrumental music, like just out of hand. i.e. dance music fans who get turned off by vocals. i think it's a either a front or a fault tbrrwu. it's also usually kinda gendered. a 'serious music dude' ism.

a voice and lyrics are considered catnip for the dumb music fans but, at least as far as song-like music goes, it's hard for the form to achieve its highest levels without them imo.

It depends on the type of vocals. Like, are we talking 90s helium, disco-style, vocoder, barely-there mumbling, John Lydon, etc.?

depends on the song!

Yeah, fair.

To add to the above, I think it's possible for instrumental music to play right to my aural pleasure-zones, so long as I can detect a narrative to the music, a shifting or a development that follows a perceptible journey. I once voted a 2-minute instrumental as my SOTY! Vocals are incidental to whether there's a musical narrative, but their presence maybe makes one easier to construct, or likelier to exist.

I too struggle w instrumental metal.

What exactly is 'narrative' in the context of (instrumental) music?

The primary joy of vocals in music for me lies in being able to sing along with them, especially if I'm able to do so reasonably in tune and within my range, perhaps hence the huge appeal of emo. It's not necessarily attached to lyrical content, but there's a significant emotional release that comes from singing along with something, to actively participate in the music (even just mumbled to a bedroom). This is the main way I like to engage with music. Instrumental music just requires a different mode of engagement.

I'd group metal in with instrumental music in that I can't sing to it anyway (I haven't tried) so I don't really mind if it has vocals or not, though ofc I can appreciate a great metal vocal performance like any other strong instrumental part.

I'd take 'narrative' to be another way of talking about songwriting I guess?

I understood it as meaning like, a linear narrative.

I assume so as well, I just find 'narrative' to be a treacherous metaphor when applied to music (among other art forms). 'Treacherous' doesn't mean irrelevant, however.

xp I hadn't thought about the sheer pleasure of singing along, tt, because I myself almost never do it on account of my inability to get the notes right, which makes me tremendously self-conscious even when no one is listening.

Yeah, narrative is just the tale told by the melodies, rhythms, dynamics etc. It isn't a word-narrative but a sound-narrative. Maybe you have to be synaesthetic to really know ;)

I think it's kind of a lazy and narcissistic way of engaging haha but I enjoy it. It's probably easier to hear and understand music when you're not always yelling over the top of it.

Probably most music (like art) has a narrative, unless it doesn't want to have one.

i like to sing along, but i almost always get the words wrong

a long time ago when i worked in a record store, a slightly strange man came in asking for instrumental rock music. i sold him a dirty three cd but suspect it wasn't what he was looking for -- i think he wanted like chili peppers or soundgarden but minus vocals

But why a 'tale'? I'm willing to allow it only if we conceive of the term as loosely and as, well, a-narratively and a-verbally as possible. Dunno, I think it affords too much of a privilege to literature (broadly defined).

xps

xp Liquid Tension Experiment

Which isn't to say that (instrumental) music lacks narrative, I just don't think that's always what's going on. Deliberate fragmentation is always a possibility (in literature too, incidentally), and it seems facile to fold that back into 'another kind of narrative' when the very negation thereof is actively sought.

xp

a long time ago when i worked in a record store, a slightly strange man came in asking for instrumental rock music. i sold him a dirty three cd but suspect it wasn't what he was looking for -- i think he wanted like chili peppers or soundgarden but minus vocals

He'd probably have liked those 'string quartet tributes to…', which have thankfully vanished (or so it seems to me) in the interim.

I tend to prefer music with vocals, apart from some genres where I am OK either way, like most dance music or krautrock stuff like Neu! or something. I don't necessarily miss lyrics, I listen to a lot of stuff with incomprehensible vocals or lyrics in languages I don't understand, so I think it's more a voice-as-instrument thing that's missing for me.

Is it that people don't get instrumental music, or that they don't notice it?

The human brain is just naturally more attuned to notes produced by a human voice than notes produced by a piano (but the closer to human vocal timbre, the more attention it draws). People are experiencing the "Groove Is In The Heart" bassline on a more subliminal level than the vocal hook.

I think it's just a lot easier for instrumental music to be wallpaper. Every time I try to appreciate classical music, I kind of forget it's on (sorry, pom)

That’s cool, it does encourage active listening more so than other, more popular genres.