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.
interestingly, as someone who plays an instrument, i don't enjoy just listening to music as much because i'd rather play with friends
This is the experience of outsiders. People without tribe. There choice is not between bread and cake, but between bread and an empty belly.
They were just stating the reality of some people that don't necessarily chose to feel how they feel...
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.
Indeed, it was your misreading.
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.
If this is not the case, then the rant doesn't apply.
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.
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.
Agreed.
> 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.
Either way, this sounds like vague popsci reasoning.
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.
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
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 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.
So I end up with real high quality Japanese Breakfast and MP3-quality Pixies.
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.
I have this, but then for days. It's not fun. Sleeping a lot helps, to an extent.
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’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.
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.
1. Here's the playlist if anyone's interested:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...
They need to know there's more out there than The Wiggles.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
The music is quite sparsely melodic though and easy to miss
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
tananan•10mo ago
If you are missing on some form of pleasure in your life, substituting it for another pleasure can help alleviate the pain.
Woah.
wobfan•10mo ago
jack_pp•10mo ago
odyssey7•10mo ago
clcaev•10mo ago
zdragnar•10mo ago
Taken too far, wallowing in the pain becomes a perverse pleasure in itself, a bit like cutting or other self harm.
basisword•10mo ago
InsideOutSanta•10mo ago
jjulius•10mo ago
metalman•10mo ago
neuroticnews25•10mo ago
[0] https://archive.is/Ipdxc
[1] https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/7/1/29931/119109...
RajT88•10mo ago
I found it terribly soothing. Sometimes I'd bring a friend with and we'd play together.
bluGill•10mo ago
RajT88•10mo ago
You could get sued for 10 million dollars. Or these days, deported to Aurora.
seplox•10mo ago
Tony Joe White - Even Trolls Love Rock and Roll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fJMNJTEhuw