THE BENEFITS OF LISTENING TO LESS MUSIC

Having personally spent outrageous amounts of time engaging with music, I have come to a somewhat interesting realization within my own listening habits. The more I restrict my listening, the more I find myself enjoying music. Although it does not seem altogether intuitive, I am convinced that listening to less music has made me a deeper and more engaged listener.

Here is the issue: When music is always playing it just becomes background noise, you skip along from track to track, splattering across album after album, and not really spending time with any one piece of music at a time. Then, for the sake of some kind of healthy distance, not disinterest, just caring about the limitation when you can finally realign yourself and hear music again. A lyric might hopefully hit you differently, a nuance of vocal inflection might linger longer, or a melody might take some intention and occupy your head, rather than a catchy hook; you have allowed it the time to inhabit.

There is even some science being demonstrated and revealed here. Based on something called hedonic adaptation, human beings quickly get used to the things that keep them happy, to their detriment. Somethings definitely should become less pleasurable and more and more irritable when we continuously repeat the listening experiences. It is hard to track how many dopamine hits we have allowed to go stale in the process. So, if it is the fewer "artificially induced" opportunities you are exposed to, the more you can listen intentionally, and the less you are just listening to music for the sake of.

How delightfully, limiting music to less also helps you listen more intentionally. When you listen to music limited by a musical constraint, you engage on your own terms. In gaming and medically/psychologically spheres, this phenomenon is situationally named cognitive scarcity theory; when things are less accessible, they are worth more. Engaging intentionally through a cognitively valuable approach is not just letting go of the noise, and instead represents a significant shift in focus, in meaning. It is seemingly about zoning out vs. zoning in.

I have noticed this transitional experience for myself most acutely when I am at an engagement with music after some intentional time apart. There is a lot more sampling of whole albums again (whole bodies of work vs. mixes & playlists), reading song lyrics as I go, and taking the time to honor each song with its outbreath. The presence then is what gets created, and presence leads to connection.

Connecting then is experienced at a different depth, not being overwhelmed by. I start to extract the overall narrative and detail of a particular artist more, and I become increasingly a meaningful spender of time with not just the quantity of audio I am consuming, but a mindful usage of time with the quality of what I am experiencing.

Sometimes, it can feel cataclysmically unconsumeristic to slow down. Each day feels like it is going further and further from the world of all things, but sometimes the best way to step in is to step back. I’m certainly not distancing myself from music; if anything, I have brought myself closer to it.