Music and Attention Span

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I no longer have the patience to listen to albums - I can only listen to songs. Now it's gotten worse: I can't listen to full songs anymore, just song fragments - the chorus of a song, a really cool cadence, or maybe just a cool intro or transition. Sometimes it's just five seconds of an interesting sound or a new instrument that's introduced into the song, or the exact moment when a song modulates to a different key. Or the way that the singer says "uh huh", or something silly like that. It's all I can listen to anymore - I'll just repeat-listen to that bit over and over. I'll listen to a full song and rapidly lose interest halfway through, no matter how godlike or catchy the song is. What is wrong with me?! Have similar things happened to you? Am I a mentalist? I wasn't always like this.

― geeta, Wednesday, 8 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

[new no-attention answers]

― geeta, Wednesday, 8 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Long time no see, woman.......I went through the same thing for a few months when I got into Napster, I went crazy with the Winamp tracker......still happens sometimes......the opening kicks to SFA's "Juxtaposed With U" and the background guy yelling as the verse builds and plateaus in Kurupt's "Trylogy" tend to imprint the two little backward arrows into my thumb lately......also see the "covert rewind" comments in my ILE car jam post.....the best cure is to play music with friends.....you'll get snuffed in the mouth if you monkey wrench songs like that, erect homosapiens dont play that shit......videocassettistically speaking, I used to catch jeers for rewinding over and over again the part in Scarface where Manny calls the bitch a lesbian after she slaps him. And on the topic of attention spans, I find that mine decreases when I read ILM.....when did all these horrible new jacks slime their way in......I am bothering to read about 10% of these cookiecutter threads, shit is stale.

― Ramosi, Wednesday, 8 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Try Mr Bungle, John Zorn, other stuff where the artist had no attention span either. At least you won't have to keep getting up to change the music

― dave q, Wednesday, 8 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

It's listening fatigue! Or maybe songs are just too long these days. Try listening to By Coastal Cafe, there songs are nice and short.

― jel --, Wednesday, 8 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The moment where Micky Dolenz exhales after the second (I think) chorus in I'm A Believer is all I can listen to nowadays.

― Martin Skidmore, Wednesday, 8 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

attention spans i imagine average around some multiple of the normal bar length of yr typical song of the day, which in 1, 1, 1, 1 .. music of today terms maybe just the sorry multiple of 1 -- music has thus developed (??) into a stupider less articulate less reliablely honest and genuine medium for communicating ideas which are inconsistent with the standard average musical attention span -- that's my theory -- we're all in a hurry to read our one line text messages and then switch to something else in cool 21st century multi- tasking (cf:schizoid) person way

― George Gosset, Wednesday, 8 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

pft you dunno from bar length pal lemme tell ya

― Josh, Wednesday, 8 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I don't listen to music to have ideas communicated to me; I get enough of that in lectures and news broadcasts.

― Clarke B., Wednesday, 8 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Ob I-was-going-to-post-something-about-this-topic-but-I-lost-track-of- what-I-was-going-to-say joke.

― Sean Carruthers, Wednesday, 8 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Geeta, this happened to me. I solved it by cutting down on my music consumption, ie, listening to just one CD thoroughly many times over for a while (a week or so), like I used to when I was li'l had a more narrow range of musical scope. It works. You just have to unconscious retrain yourself to listen to works instead of ideas. Trust me, I know how much it sucks, and I promise this works.

― matthew m., Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

+ and; + ly.

― matthew m., Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Mp3's are a big factor in this for me. I start downloading songs just to judge them in their first 5 seconds and move on to the next.

I did have a friend who pulled that "let's just listen to this part" shit over and over again. He should have been saying "let's take the best part of the song and run it into the ground." It was possilby the worst thing ever.

― bnw, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Listen to Squarepusher. Esp 'Go! Plastic'. Jumps around so fucking much that you'll never get bored.

― Andrew, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Listen to this :

http://216.36.193.92/cgi-bin/beatblog.pl

Start your own.

We need a new genre of music down at the 30 - 90 seconds.

― phil, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

i expect ideas about music when i'm here in ILM and i expect music to always give me something to think about on some level as i want to experience it as music. and what does pft mean ?

― George Gosset, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

pft = sound made when someone goes 'pft'

there are ideas aplenty to be had in any music, sez I

― Josh, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Josh, I don't disagree with you there, I just don't like the idea of "communication" - I think it's cooler if the ideas arise in a more unforced manner.

― Clarke B., Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

George's ideas about ideas are a "radical alternative" i think, josh

― mark s, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

oh no!! a one-liner!! OH NO!!

― mark s, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

oh no!! one-second culture!! OH NO!!

― mark s, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

PFT

― Josh, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

(did you see what I did there?!?)

― Josh, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

alternative thesis: THERE ARE TOO MANY IDEAS IN MUSIC, DOWN WITH IDEAS

― Josh, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

the only question is, how to get rid of them?

― Josh, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

suspect mark is on the right track by not listening to records

― Josh, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I think you are under the influence.

― bnw (har har), Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

:-O

― Josh, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

"I go from girl after girl, night after night, date after date, but it just don't seem right; your eyes keep haunting me, your lips keep taunting me ..." (Troy Shondell.) Are you experiencing promiscuity ennui? Maybe there's one true song you want to go back to! Are you denying your own true loves?

― rachel, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

and what does pft mean ?
of course it takes too long so we are probably already fastforwarding to next sound after p

― nathalie, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

the more unforced the more sublime, and vica versa

― George Gosset, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

What was the question again?

― Andrew L, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

pffft (more F's this time)

― Alex in SF, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I'm similar to you geeta (though I draw the line at only listening to a fragment of a song) I only listen all the way through new albums if I'm in unfamiliar surroundings. Generally though, I'm happy being a song person. Though it involves a lot of getting up and changing the CD.

I know I miss out on the charms of most things discussed on this forum because of this problem, but never mind.

― N., Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

George is talking about my farts again

― Tracer hand, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

trivial

― George Gosset, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

depth makes you stupid

― mark s, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

so depth isn't rock ? (leaving aside other thoughts)

― George Gosset, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

if rock isn't "stupid" is this communication stupidly pointless ? (sigh)

or should this communication just rock beyond categorisation ?

― George Gosset, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

it only counts as a communication if a degree of comprehension is achieved, probably

― mark s, Friday, 10 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

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