Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It's normal to play the same song over and over again (2016)

kqed.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 191 posts

Re: It's normal to play the same song over and over again (2016)

#161

Post by wizofaus »

kazinator wrote: post #147
wizofaus wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baroque music is often highly repetitive (even fugues are a form of material repetition!) - I would think there was a distinct trend from the 1600s to the mid 1900s where classical music became more and more through composed, until minimalism became suddenly popular.

I think, you cannot have unity in a musical work if there is something new at every turn which does not reappear in any shape or form. In the best music from the Baroque era, there is new material throughout a piece. Many passages introduce motifs that do not make a reappearance. Or make a disguised reappearance just once. I think, you will be hard-pressed to find two identical bars in a Bach fugue, where all the voi…

I'd agree it's rare to have exact repetition of a whole measure across all staves in a fugue, but you can certainly write a fugue using an initial theme and nothing but copy & paste with pitch shifting. Which you couldn't do for, say, a typical solo piano work by Scriabin or Messiaen...

Re: It's normal to play the same song over and over again (2016)

#162

Post by spiffytech »

FumblingBear wrote: post #158

I'm curious about other people's experiences with how they choose what music to listen to. Many of my friends carefully curate playlists on Spotify, or listen to the playlists they make for you. Others listen to the radio and just enjoy whatever comes on. On the other hand, I have a large library of music (~13k songs) and just kind of decide what I'm in the mood for on a whim. No playlists, just a large collection of…

Back before I switched to streaming, I did the same thing. I had ~5k songs and zero playlists. I just dumped albums into the play queue (whatever I felt like in the moment) and shuffled them. I always knew what song was playing.

It gave me a level of familiarity and appreciation for my collection that I miss with streaming.

I eventually switched to streaming for a couple of reasons. One is that managing many tens of GB of FLAC files and syncing them between devices is a big pain. It was especially bad when I made the switch about 5 years ago, when 64GB storage was a lot for a phone.

The other reason is my musical tastes shifted away from stuff that's readily available on CD or download. Most of the artists I listen to now only publish to streaming, and the streaming apps just aren't so good at the ad-hoc play queue workflow.

One day I'd like to use the Spotify SDK and recreate the Amarok 1.4 interface with Spotify's library.

Re: It's normal to play the same song over and over again (2016)

#163

Post by picodguyo »

joebob42 wrote: post #48

I'm terrified of this. I've no idea why, but if I hear a song too many times in a couple day period I have a night of fever dreaming where I wake up over and over again to the song in my head. It's like my brain has over conditioned the pathway for that song and as soon as it starts trying to dream it falls into it and the dream breaks and I wake up. It happens to me a couple times a year and when I hear any of the s…

Wow, surprised to hear this happens to other people! When I discover a new song I love, I'll nearly always have a night where I wake up with the song blaring in my head. Even if I don't know the song that well, my mind somehow reproduces intricate detail and fills in instrumental or lyrical gaps. In my teens and 20s I had really severe ear worms, some lasting for days or weeks. Fortunately that has lessened with age, but the nighttime concerts are still a regular occurrence.

Re: It's normal to play the same song over and over again (2016)

#164

Post by dehrmann »

Buttons840 wrote: post #12
pseudoramble wrote: post #6

I appreciate this. I’ve had days where at work I’ve played a new song I’ve gotten into at least 30 times, sometimes with a few songs to break it up, often not though. I’ve always assumed it was slightly strange, but also probably not that strange. I also relate to the authors explanation. I’ll get tired of a song eventually, for a while, but one day come back to it and get into another usually less intense loop. I do…

Once you sleep on the song once or twice the enjoyment fades. Like that favorite song from the radio, you listen 4 or 5 times over several days and the excitement is gone. So you mine as well enjoy it 40 times in a row on day one.

And then it's time to find your next fix.

In a year or two, that song might be able to bring you back to that point in time. I've started building playlists by the year I discovered the song. It's a trip.

Re: It's normal to play the same song over and over again (2016)

#165

Post by FumblingBear »

spiffytech wrote: post #162
FumblingBear wrote: post #158

I'm curious about other people's experiences with how they choose what music to listen to. Many of my friends carefully curate playlists on Spotify, or listen to the playlists they make for you. Others listen to the radio and just enjoy whatever comes on. On the other hand, I have a large library of music (~13k songs) and just kind of decide what I'm in the mood for on a whim. No playlists, just a large collection of…

Back before I switched to streaming, I did the same thing. I had ~5k songs and zero playlists. I just dumped albums into the play queue (whatever I felt like in the moment) and shuffled them. I always knew what song was playing. It gave me a level of familiarity and appreciation for my collection that I miss with streaming. I eventually switched to streaming for a couple of reasons. One is that managing many tens of…

Thanks for sharing!

I feel you on curating and self-managing FLAC files. At the end of the day, it just wasn't worth the effort I used to spend managing them all.

I'm not sure what streaming app you use, but to accomplish your old method of listening on Apple Music at least, you could just go to each album you wanted to enjoy and add it to the Up Next queue a full album at a time. From there just set the queue to shuffle and it sounds like that would do what you're missing!

Maybe you've already tried that and ran into issues that I can't think of, but I've done something similar in the past and it was pretty capable at handling an ad-hoc workflow.

That Amarok 1.4 interface project sounds fun! Best of luck on it if you decide to tackle it!

Re: It's normal to play the same song over and over again (2016)

#166

Post by FumblingBear »

nvllsvm wrote: post #160
FumblingBear wrote: post #158

I'm curious about other people's experiences with how they choose what music to listen to. Many of my friends carefully curate playlists on Spotify, or listen to the playlists they make for you. Others listen to the radio and just enjoy whatever comes on. On the other hand, I have a large library of music (~13k songs) and just kind of decide what I'm in the mood for on a whim. No playlists, just a large collection of…

Similar situation here: ~23k songs, meticulously tagged, no playlists. However, I'm a little different in that I end up listening to the same handful of artist/albums/songs for a period days or weeks, then move on to something else.

Thanks for sharing!

I definitely get in moods where I listen to a particular album a lot in a short period of time too. I try to vary my listening but sometimes there's just an album that feels right for the moment.

Re: It's normal to play the same song over and over again (2016)

#169

Post by philipov »

Transfinity wrote: post #17

Semi professional musician here. Repetition goes way beyond what the author mentions: - Most music is highly repetitive, often recycling 2 or 3 short segments (chorus, verse) with minor variations to fill out a whole song. Coltrane is known for his avant-garde composition, and even he repeats (often on a much smaller scale than a pop tune). - The work of being a musician is repetitive. Learning (memorizing) songs tak…

You know that feeling when you wake up in the morning, and the first thought in your head is the sound of the song that's been there for 3 days already? You must have been dreaming the song before you woke up!

Re: It's normal to play the same song over and over again (2016)

#170

Post by cropcirclbureau »

molbioguy wrote: post #150

Somewhat the opposite, but are there tips/tricks to get a song stuck in head -- sort of in a controllable manner? I enjoy having songs stuck in my head, but usually it's not the song I want!

It's my personal experience that songs that I haven't played to the end get are more likely to get stuck. What's more, it's usually the span around the point at which I stopped the playback that keeps echoing on andon andonandon. Same thing with any other media. I remember books I've left midway with incredible detail. Books I've finished, I find hard to remember titles let alone the name of the main character. I believe it's called the Ovsiankina Effect[0]. And as someone who's had a relatively bad memory, it freaks me out.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovsiankina_effect

Post reply on HN