Would sure be nice if potential psychological harm from listening to recorded music was the most pressing problem facing humanity. Or was even in the top five!
Okay like...I actually think you're on to something, but I want to literally fight you for suggesting people are not responsible enough to listen to music or get their pictures taken, omfg. People get to ruin themselves (or heal themselves) however they choose.
Haha fair enough, although I don't think I ever really put it as people weren't responsible enough to listen to music or do photography. I think we probably aren't far apart here, I tend to toward libertarianism on things like drugs or anything sex-related - go crazy as long as you aren't hurting anyone. But does that mean heroin should be legal? I don't know but I lean towards no. I guess i think it would be an overall positive if we treated photos/music something more like alcohol - drink as much as you want but let's also make sure that everyone is aware of the risks. We aren't even close to that paradigm for photo/video/music - no one thinks there is a risk to indiscriminate usage - but maybe there are subtle ways in which we can make (young) people more aware of the associated risks. It's a thorny issue and I certainly don't want to ban or restrict these things (even if we could) but there might be some way we could do a better job.
"I don't think I ever really put it as people weren't responsible enough to go to whatever websites they want to on the internet. I tend toward libertarianism on things like having opinions about what words to use and what words to consume--go crazy as long as you aren't hurting anyone. But does that mean hate speech should be legal? I don't know but I lean towards no. I guess I think it would be an overall positive if we treated words/images something more like alcohol - drink as much as you want but let's also make sure that everyone is aware of the risks. We aren't even close to that paradigm for photo/video/music - no one thinks there is a risk to indiscriminate usage - but maybe there are subtle ways in which we can make (young) people more aware of the associated risks. It's a thorny issue and I certainly don't want to ban or restrict these things (even if we could) but there might be some way we could do a better job."
This is a thinly veiled argument for censorship. Try again.
lol ok I think this discussion is going nowhere if you are going to try to awkwardly twist what I said into some point (not really sure what) instead of using your own words to actually say what you mean. How is this an argument for censorship? If anything, it's the opposite, but please enlighten me.
Okay...apologies, I'm still learning how to have strong feelings and be articulate at the same time. To be fair, your hot take at the beginning about how music causes great harm seems designed specifically to get a reaction out of your readers. The rest of the post saying "fuck you too" to the rude dissenters also sets a clear tone, so it's hard for me not to match that energy as someone who disagrees with at least part of your premise.
I think the point you are trying to make is that [recorded] music is more powerful than it's given credit for. But you make that point by speculating on the HARM it does to people (without any specific examples) and completely ignore the EXPANSION it enables in us. This is like the argument people use for censorship. They say unrestricted speech does non-specific-but-great harm, while ignoring all the ways it expands us and brings us together. You say [recorded] music does non-specific-but-great harm, while ignoring the ways it expands us and brings us together.
To be fair, you already said this post is mostly thoughts and not fleshed out. I do agree with your premise that music is sacred and far more powerful than people realize. But I do not agree that it causes harm in any way. And I DO think that music censorship or censorship of any kind DOES cause harm.
I would also argue that the solution you (maybe) actually want is not educating people about the dangers of music, but educating them about the dangers of their own psyche in response to certain stimuli (which could be music, or drugs, or notifications, or whatever). This is something that I agree with and could get behind (not that you care about convincing me of anything).
Thanks for this, yea I like I thought we aren't really that far apart, and I think some of the issue is the lack of development on my part and some of the sarcasm not being as apparent as I'd hoped (the fuck yous are in jest, I don't actually care if people, especially one who calls themself Dadlord lol, make snippy comments about an out of context quote of mine).
I'll touch on the more positive side of the power of music in part 2 but the specific examples of negative effects are obsessive fans who sometimes have lost themselves in an artist or kind of music to a degree that is probably a net negative on their life and society as a whole (especially in the rare cases where an obsessive fan actually commits a crime). Not that the music is necessarily the root cause or that just telling them "hey, be careful music is powerful stuff, maybe more powerful than you might realize" would actually help, but a different level of cultural awareness around music and its powers might make a difference on the margins.
That's the comparison to drugs I'm trying to make. Alcohol is IMO a net positive for society (although that is debatable) and the vast majority of people enjoy it unproblematically, but that's because we have a healthy fear of it. I'm not sure we have that healthy fear of the power of music but it would probably ameliorate the negative effects and further bring out the positive effects if we did. As a further example, we only allow shitty music to be pumped into every public space because we just feel like it doesn't really matter (I live in NYC where every restaurant/store feels the need to blast generic EDM so I'm particularly sensitive to this); IMO, this cheapens music and harms our ability to bring out its sacred quality when it could be used to great positive effect.
Wow. In a lot of ways I agree with you about music. I have been thinking much of the same thing lately about narrative. What I mean is that narrative concentrates, for example, all of the interesting parts of life into say 30 minutes. And I think that parts of our humanity, I won't pretend to know which ones, may be getting overloaded by this. They sort of can't fully digest all of the story that we are putting into them. It would have been different when the story had to be a live performance, because obviously the consumption would have been much more limited.
Have you ever noticed how sometimes when reading a book after a particularly eventful sequence you might feel emotionally exhausted, and how movies used to affect us in the same way, and how we are getting numb to all of that? Like music, narrative is a more powerful drug than we suspect. Maybe our ancestors limited it not because they couldn't make it as available as we do but because they chose to?
As an aside, to bring up the Galli and the religious significance of genital mutilation is a brave choice. I hope that you haven't unintentionally summoned up a storm.
Yea I think that's a good call on narrative have a similar power and potentially having similar issues. I've touched on this theme before in case you haven't seen these posts:
I wonder how much you're saying is actually a consequence of the dominance of certain simplified and dopamine-inducing narratives over more complex ones. Mainstream media esp. anything on-screen (movies, shows, cartoons, video games…) has become very much formulaic over the years (but also say, the popularity of R&B songs with sex-related content; and some say all techno sounds alike), which is why my friends and I would much prefer indie content/producers. There is so much to what you call "the interesting parts of life", and to different kinds of lives, but popular art usually only captures a small slice of that, and the rest goes amiss under recommender algorithms and such. It could really get tiring.
At least to me, the popular content is usually dopamine-inducing which would make it addictive, and my ADHD (suspect/self-diagnosed) doesn't make it better :( ; this mental reward exists on a spectrum. I would not compare it to drugs, but more like different degrees of sweetness and the potential for addiction of sugary foods (https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-816918-6.00009-3).
"[The galli] generally wore women's clothing (often yellow), and a turban, pendants, and earrings. They bleached their hair and wore it long, and they wore heavy makeup."
So like… trans girls, you mean?
Kinda neat.
The psychological harm thing is still pure speculation, though. Where did go all your natural science background? I honestly expected some links to papers.
I would also like to echo to the potential of music being used to, not say control people to any granularity, but at least reinforce many already problematic cultural norms and values here in the U.S., e.g. heteronormativity, sexualization of women, and the capitalist standard of success (except there are also alternative content by creators from more diverse backgrounds, just fewer). This is kind of true in China too, but it follows more from the censorship of alternative content rather than the natural popularity of the above topics themselves, plus additionally the ministry of education does try to instill patriotic (read: nationalistic) values by promoting certain songs from maybe 50 years ago (ugh). The first verse of PRC's national anthem basically goes "rise up, people who don't want to be slaves", whereas China is literally one of the top economic powers in the world and secretly doing all that neocolonialism shit. The cultural ambience is also generally getting more conservative, both in the US and in China, and I don't know why. I'm sorry this has turned into a rant.
I generally don't listen to songs with lyrics because I almost always would be listening to songs under a work context. Game soundtracks / neoclassical / lo-fi hip-hop are great; I used to love EDM / glitch-hop / future/kawaii-bass but they're a bit too intense and repetitive and can ruin my focus sometimes. I also can't listen to anything when I read.
Same here with listening to music while working, though I could do it more at your age but now I find I have no chance of focusing even if its instrumental. Thanks for the rant, interesting to hear and I'm with you. And yeah most people don't realize that the trans phenomenon has a deep and widespread historical basis.
Well I did say this was more of working notes post than anything super polished. And yeah it's definitely speculation, but so what? I'm sure there are some poorly controlled small N psychology papers I could look up but what's the point - they also can't really test for the kind of broader long-term negative effects I'm discussing (losing one's "soul" to an artist or musical lifestyle).
"Where did go all your natural science background? - eh kinda bored by science now and find it overrated, at least any kind that would bear on what I'm discussing here.
Uh… you're just using one abstract thing to mean another—I mean, another few.
Where you have mentioned "soul", with camera images, the real issue is digital privacy and image forgery.
With content producers on social media, e.g. Nicholas Perri, the problem is "social media addiction", which is a hot field of research despite controversy w.r.t. whether social media overuse can be called an "addiction" at all (oh well, but there is the Bergens Facebook Addiction Scale (Andreassen et al. 2012 10.2466/02.09.18.PR0.110.2.501-517), and a whole bunch of research using it). Balakrishnan & Griffiths (2017 doi:10.1556/2006.6.2017.058) using a BFAS-derivative found that Youtube addiction is more related to content creation than viewership. This could be related to Perri's case. I have been doing a school project with social media overuse and "addiction", so I know a bit more in this area than in the other ones.
Lastly, what you mentioned about "band cults" is more accurately encapsulated under parasocial behaviors, which basically means one-sided attachments.
Just know that although all of these cases give the feeling of "losing one's soul", this intuition is very vague and doesn't necessarily give rise to a precise understanding of the problem.
"you're just using one abstract thing to mean another—I mean, another few." - and you are doing the same - "social media addiction", "parasocial behaviors" etc. ...I'm well aware there are more scientific ways of framing these issues, but we seem to have very different ideas of how rigorous and useful all of this "precise" psychological science is...
"band cults" is more accurately encapsulated under parasocial behaviors, which basically means one-sided attachments." Nope it's not - this reads like someone who has no experience of going to concerts/following bands and seeing how people really act in the "wild" (which is the same limitation of psych/social science and the reason why it is useful to explore other ways of thinking about these problems, however abstract or metaphorical).
"… but we seem to have very different ideas of how rigorous and useful all of this "precise" psychological science is..." // Fair.
"Nope it's not - this reads like someone who has no experience…" // I apologize for summarizing "parasocial behaviors" in an over-abbreviated and imprecise way, but I only found this term when searching Google Scholar for "fan behavior"; this is the term they've been using recently, and if you search it up, you'll find the same things I've found.
I see that we might be referring to the same things, just differently; I apologize for trying to force an expression over another. But I'm confused as to why you seem to believe that certain experiences are better discussed without the constraints of science, or even entirely disjoint from it. Is it something that has to deal with the *current* extent of psychology, or do you think there is something fundamentally problematic when it comes to understanding human cognitive functions scientifically?
I enjoyed this Thank you. I share the fascination with musico-religious connections and pretty much any religio connection. I won’t call it good or bad but I will tell you how I’ve experienced several things like the mandala effect in the music of coil. Check Going Up or Fire Of The Mind (video shot in a morgue)… The front men have been dead for some time but the music continues to change on its own. They were early purveyors of musical talisman, remote viewing, circuit bending, subliminal and somnambulist work…Dada type expression and even probed into places like Crowley and McKenna and oh the live shows…you might never be the same! I continue to travel with them and others in the spiritual jazz realms on the mandala effect.❤️
Absolutely agree. As a hobby classical musician I keep my house free of recorded music of all kinds. No background music, no radio, nothing whatsoever. It's not allowed for kids either. We play musical instruments and sing instead.
Ted Gioia, on his substack (tedgioia.substack.com), is serializing his new book "Music to Raise the Dead" which deals with the connections of music and spirituality. Good stuff.
Would sure be nice if potential psychological harm from listening to recorded music was the most pressing problem facing humanity. Or was even in the top five!
Maybe it's six? ;)
What's your top five?
that's a good question, probably some of the standard answers and a few that aren't, will touch on these in upcoming posts...
Okay like...I actually think you're on to something, but I want to literally fight you for suggesting people are not responsible enough to listen to music or get their pictures taken, omfg. People get to ruin themselves (or heal themselves) however they choose.
Haha fair enough, although I don't think I ever really put it as people weren't responsible enough to listen to music or do photography. I think we probably aren't far apart here, I tend to toward libertarianism on things like drugs or anything sex-related - go crazy as long as you aren't hurting anyone. But does that mean heroin should be legal? I don't know but I lean towards no. I guess i think it would be an overall positive if we treated photos/music something more like alcohol - drink as much as you want but let's also make sure that everyone is aware of the risks. We aren't even close to that paradigm for photo/video/music - no one thinks there is a risk to indiscriminate usage - but maybe there are subtle ways in which we can make (young) people more aware of the associated risks. It's a thorny issue and I certainly don't want to ban or restrict these things (even if we could) but there might be some way we could do a better job.
"I don't think I ever really put it as people weren't responsible enough to go to whatever websites they want to on the internet. I tend toward libertarianism on things like having opinions about what words to use and what words to consume--go crazy as long as you aren't hurting anyone. But does that mean hate speech should be legal? I don't know but I lean towards no. I guess I think it would be an overall positive if we treated words/images something more like alcohol - drink as much as you want but let's also make sure that everyone is aware of the risks. We aren't even close to that paradigm for photo/video/music - no one thinks there is a risk to indiscriminate usage - but maybe there are subtle ways in which we can make (young) people more aware of the associated risks. It's a thorny issue and I certainly don't want to ban or restrict these things (even if we could) but there might be some way we could do a better job."
This is a thinly veiled argument for censorship. Try again.
lol ok I think this discussion is going nowhere if you are going to try to awkwardly twist what I said into some point (not really sure what) instead of using your own words to actually say what you mean. How is this an argument for censorship? If anything, it's the opposite, but please enlighten me.
Okay...apologies, I'm still learning how to have strong feelings and be articulate at the same time. To be fair, your hot take at the beginning about how music causes great harm seems designed specifically to get a reaction out of your readers. The rest of the post saying "fuck you too" to the rude dissenters also sets a clear tone, so it's hard for me not to match that energy as someone who disagrees with at least part of your premise.
I think the point you are trying to make is that [recorded] music is more powerful than it's given credit for. But you make that point by speculating on the HARM it does to people (without any specific examples) and completely ignore the EXPANSION it enables in us. This is like the argument people use for censorship. They say unrestricted speech does non-specific-but-great harm, while ignoring all the ways it expands us and brings us together. You say [recorded] music does non-specific-but-great harm, while ignoring the ways it expands us and brings us together.
To be fair, you already said this post is mostly thoughts and not fleshed out. I do agree with your premise that music is sacred and far more powerful than people realize. But I do not agree that it causes harm in any way. And I DO think that music censorship or censorship of any kind DOES cause harm.
I would also argue that the solution you (maybe) actually want is not educating people about the dangers of music, but educating them about the dangers of their own psyche in response to certain stimuli (which could be music, or drugs, or notifications, or whatever). This is something that I agree with and could get behind (not that you care about convincing me of anything).
Thanks for this, yea I like I thought we aren't really that far apart, and I think some of the issue is the lack of development on my part and some of the sarcasm not being as apparent as I'd hoped (the fuck yous are in jest, I don't actually care if people, especially one who calls themself Dadlord lol, make snippy comments about an out of context quote of mine).
I'll touch on the more positive side of the power of music in part 2 but the specific examples of negative effects are obsessive fans who sometimes have lost themselves in an artist or kind of music to a degree that is probably a net negative on their life and society as a whole (especially in the rare cases where an obsessive fan actually commits a crime). Not that the music is necessarily the root cause or that just telling them "hey, be careful music is powerful stuff, maybe more powerful than you might realize" would actually help, but a different level of cultural awareness around music and its powers might make a difference on the margins.
That's the comparison to drugs I'm trying to make. Alcohol is IMO a net positive for society (although that is debatable) and the vast majority of people enjoy it unproblematically, but that's because we have a healthy fear of it. I'm not sure we have that healthy fear of the power of music but it would probably ameliorate the negative effects and further bring out the positive effects if we did. As a further example, we only allow shitty music to be pumped into every public space because we just feel like it doesn't really matter (I live in NYC where every restaurant/store feels the need to blast generic EDM so I'm particularly sensitive to this); IMO, this cheapens music and harms our ability to bring out its sacred quality when it could be used to great positive effect.
hope this helps to clarify my thoughts.
Wow. In a lot of ways I agree with you about music. I have been thinking much of the same thing lately about narrative. What I mean is that narrative concentrates, for example, all of the interesting parts of life into say 30 minutes. And I think that parts of our humanity, I won't pretend to know which ones, may be getting overloaded by this. They sort of can't fully digest all of the story that we are putting into them. It would have been different when the story had to be a live performance, because obviously the consumption would have been much more limited.
Have you ever noticed how sometimes when reading a book after a particularly eventful sequence you might feel emotionally exhausted, and how movies used to affect us in the same way, and how we are getting numb to all of that? Like music, narrative is a more powerful drug than we suspect. Maybe our ancestors limited it not because they couldn't make it as available as we do but because they chose to?
As an aside, to bring up the Galli and the religious significance of genital mutilation is a brave choice. I hope that you haven't unintentionally summoned up a storm.
Yea I think that's a good call on narrative have a similar power and potentially having similar issues. I've touched on this theme before in case you haven't seen these posts:
https://www.secretorum.life/p/on-stories-and-histories-q-and-a
https://www.secretorum.life/p/stories-as-technology-past-present-fb0
I wonder how much you're saying is actually a consequence of the dominance of certain simplified and dopamine-inducing narratives over more complex ones. Mainstream media esp. anything on-screen (movies, shows, cartoons, video games…) has become very much formulaic over the years (but also say, the popularity of R&B songs with sex-related content; and some say all techno sounds alike), which is why my friends and I would much prefer indie content/producers. There is so much to what you call "the interesting parts of life", and to different kinds of lives, but popular art usually only captures a small slice of that, and the rest goes amiss under recommender algorithms and such. It could really get tiring.
At least to me, the popular content is usually dopamine-inducing which would make it addictive, and my ADHD (suspect/self-diagnosed) doesn't make it better :( ; this mental reward exists on a spectrum. I would not compare it to drugs, but more like different degrees of sweetness and the potential for addiction of sugary foods (https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-816918-6.00009-3).
"[The galli] generally wore women's clothing (often yellow), and a turban, pendants, and earrings. They bleached their hair and wore it long, and they wore heavy makeup."
So like… trans girls, you mean?
Kinda neat.
The psychological harm thing is still pure speculation, though. Where did go all your natural science background? I honestly expected some links to papers.
I would also like to echo to the potential of music being used to, not say control people to any granularity, but at least reinforce many already problematic cultural norms and values here in the U.S., e.g. heteronormativity, sexualization of women, and the capitalist standard of success (except there are also alternative content by creators from more diverse backgrounds, just fewer). This is kind of true in China too, but it follows more from the censorship of alternative content rather than the natural popularity of the above topics themselves, plus additionally the ministry of education does try to instill patriotic (read: nationalistic) values by promoting certain songs from maybe 50 years ago (ugh). The first verse of PRC's national anthem basically goes "rise up, people who don't want to be slaves", whereas China is literally one of the top economic powers in the world and secretly doing all that neocolonialism shit. The cultural ambience is also generally getting more conservative, both in the US and in China, and I don't know why. I'm sorry this has turned into a rant.
I generally don't listen to songs with lyrics because I almost always would be listening to songs under a work context. Game soundtracks / neoclassical / lo-fi hip-hop are great; I used to love EDM / glitch-hop / future/kawaii-bass but they're a bit too intense and repetitive and can ruin my focus sometimes. I also can't listen to anything when I read.
Same here with listening to music while working, though I could do it more at your age but now I find I have no chance of focusing even if its instrumental. Thanks for the rant, interesting to hear and I'm with you. And yeah most people don't realize that the trans phenomenon has a deep and widespread historical basis.
Well I did say this was more of working notes post than anything super polished. And yeah it's definitely speculation, but so what? I'm sure there are some poorly controlled small N psychology papers I could look up but what's the point - they also can't really test for the kind of broader long-term negative effects I'm discussing (losing one's "soul" to an artist or musical lifestyle).
"Where did go all your natural science background? - eh kinda bored by science now and find it overrated, at least any kind that would bear on what I'm discussing here.
For one, I don't quite get what you mean by "losing one's 'soul'".
it's metaphorical dude think about it
Uh… you're just using one abstract thing to mean another—I mean, another few.
Where you have mentioned "soul", with camera images, the real issue is digital privacy and image forgery.
With content producers on social media, e.g. Nicholas Perri, the problem is "social media addiction", which is a hot field of research despite controversy w.r.t. whether social media overuse can be called an "addiction" at all (oh well, but there is the Bergens Facebook Addiction Scale (Andreassen et al. 2012 10.2466/02.09.18.PR0.110.2.501-517), and a whole bunch of research using it). Balakrishnan & Griffiths (2017 doi:10.1556/2006.6.2017.058) using a BFAS-derivative found that Youtube addiction is more related to content creation than viewership. This could be related to Perri's case. I have been doing a school project with social media overuse and "addiction", so I know a bit more in this area than in the other ones.
Lastly, what you mentioned about "band cults" is more accurately encapsulated under parasocial behaviors, which basically means one-sided attachments.
Just know that although all of these cases give the feeling of "losing one's soul", this intuition is very vague and doesn't necessarily give rise to a precise understanding of the problem.
"you're just using one abstract thing to mean another—I mean, another few." - and you are doing the same - "social media addiction", "parasocial behaviors" etc. ...I'm well aware there are more scientific ways of framing these issues, but we seem to have very different ideas of how rigorous and useful all of this "precise" psychological science is...
"band cults" is more accurately encapsulated under parasocial behaviors, which basically means one-sided attachments." Nope it's not - this reads like someone who has no experience of going to concerts/following bands and seeing how people really act in the "wild" (which is the same limitation of psych/social science and the reason why it is useful to explore other ways of thinking about these problems, however abstract or metaphorical).
"… but we seem to have very different ideas of how rigorous and useful all of this "precise" psychological science is..." // Fair.
"Nope it's not - this reads like someone who has no experience…" // I apologize for summarizing "parasocial behaviors" in an over-abbreviated and imprecise way, but I only found this term when searching Google Scholar for "fan behavior"; this is the term they've been using recently, and if you search it up, you'll find the same things I've found.
I see that we might be referring to the same things, just differently; I apologize for trying to force an expression over another. But I'm confused as to why you seem to believe that certain experiences are better discussed without the constraints of science, or even entirely disjoint from it. Is it something that has to deal with the *current* extent of psychology, or do you think there is something fundamentally problematic when it comes to understanding human cognitive functions scientifically?
I enjoyed this Thank you. I share the fascination with musico-religious connections and pretty much any religio connection. I won’t call it good or bad but I will tell you how I’ve experienced several things like the mandala effect in the music of coil. Check Going Up or Fire Of The Mind (video shot in a morgue)… The front men have been dead for some time but the music continues to change on its own. They were early purveyors of musical talisman, remote viewing, circuit bending, subliminal and somnambulist work…Dada type expression and even probed into places like Crowley and McKenna and oh the live shows…you might never be the same! I continue to travel with them and others in the spiritual jazz realms on the mandala effect.❤️
Absolutely agree. As a hobby classical musician I keep my house free of recorded music of all kinds. No background music, no radio, nothing whatsoever. It's not allowed for kids either. We play musical instruments and sing instead.
Ted Gioia, on his substack (tedgioia.substack.com), is serializing his new book "Music to Raise the Dead" which deals with the connections of music and spirituality. Good stuff.
Yup, huge fan - I quote the book heavily in part 2 :)