Can You Force Yourself To Like A Record Through Blunt-Force Repetition?

("not to have to explain the appeal of Interpol to male-fanciers, *to* males of the species" is more what I meant there. Good god my brain is addled.)

One if my lecturers told a story about buying a new age type CD that was just field recordings of a forest, and listening to it often enough that he began to recognise passages of rustling leaves. Said when he then went for an actual walk in a forest it was like free jazz cos he couldn't recognise any patterns.

yeah repetition absolutely creates patterns in seemingly patternless stuff, noise, field recordings, etc

i think this pattern "recognition" is a different thing to the learning-to-love posited in the original question here tho

Pattern recognition and formation and how it works with forming music and not-music is such an interesting question, though.

I know, from when I was a songwriter, that the principle way I would write songs was just through having random phrases or bits of words stick in my head and repeat, over and over again until they became musical. (There was a song I contributed to an ILX comp a while back, which, I swear to god, there was a child sat behind me on the bus who said "oranges, apples, she doesn't like bananas and she doesn't like pears" and over the course of the bus ride, that looped in my head, over and over like a thoughtworm, until by the time I got home, it was a complete song with arrangement and everything, just from this jangling, repeating looped nonsense phrase.) Anything repeated becomes musical; my former housemate and I used to sing along with car alarms back in New York, because everyone on our block had the same looped alarm pattern. (I can still sing it, too. EH! EH! EH! EH! EH! EH!)

(This has always made me wonder about the link between thoughtworms/OCD and creativity, especially musical expression, because any medication I've ever taken that was powerful enough to stop my OCD urges also killed my creativity stone dead. Because I think it is that ritualistic, looping quality which actually generates music from random sound and random speech.)

Yeah, that's not the same as forcing yourself to love a piece of music through sheer familiarity. But what that article posted above suggests (the Aeon one, not the fingerbanging one) is that sheer familiarity can drive aesthetic attractiveness. We may come to prefer things *because* they are familiar, and therefore safe.

Science says yes - http://www.joshuakennon.com/mental-model-mere-exposure-effect-or-the-familiarity-principle/

I know someone who just moves to the choruses of songs on Spotify, listens to those, and then moves on.

Daniel Kessler: That's really grinding to me. I feel like they're losing out. But that speaks to a greater thing about the ADD society we live in. I'm sure I don't listen to music as much as I used to, or if I do, I'll think "Oh, I'm going to do a 45-minute walk, I'll put on this record I'm religious about now." But I probably don't listen to records as much as I used to at home. And that's a shame. And even the patience to buy a record, at first, you don't really like it, or you're not sure about it. And four or five listens later, you're like, "This is my favourite record right now. Record of the year."

Those moments, I don't think people give that much of an opportunity without albums. If they don't like it, they flip through. And I feel like that's a shame. You can watch a film on a first viewing and say you didn't love it. But if you didn't get it at first doesn't mean you might not love it later. I can't tell you how many people said that about Turn On The Bright Lights when it came out. And I feel like if it came out five years or even three years later during the social media age, it would have been a different story. I know a lot of people who say, "I quite liked that record, But I didn't quite get it at first. And then later on I really, really liked it." But I don't think people would give it that opportunity now.

(Now really hoping Kessler didn't overhear me, talking about and having to explain this whole project at the aftershow. At least I didn't mention the fingerbanging. I swear to god I didn't mention the fingerbanging! Just Kanye.)

I hear music in two different contexts: individual tracks, and mixes

An individual piece I usually know in 5-10 seconds if i like it, music is mostly about sound and vibe for me - so its kind of like a photograph, if there isnt instant transportation, then i tend to pass, there are so many other records out there

But then mixes are different, a good dj makes records sound different, I can like records in a mix probably wouldnt have done otherwise because of the way they are mixed - hear them with different ears - and different tracks might reappear in other mixes so theyre not restricted to just the one static container with fixed order, but unexpected and fluid..so for me tracks can live as individual beings but also parts of many unknown fluid albums, perhaps a different life each time, repeated but different

The other thing ive ended up feeling is that listening to a new record because of the name on the sleeve (even/especially one i have other records by and like) is the feeling of a duty listen, or that i arrive with preconceptions and opinions before ive heard it - or the feeling of having to have an opinion. Ive been feeling the idea of letting things come to me more...organically? rather than me going to them

I'm interested in this actually. I might join in. I've been pretty vociferous in my hatred for certain songs and albums so may try those, or just go for something I purely don't understand - last year's LP by The Knife for example. But do I have time to listen to that 22 times in a week?

Listening to a *double* album 22 times in a week might be a bit much of an ask. Maybe if you did it with the single-disc version?

i've done this several (more) times btw
― this harmless group of nerds and the women that love them (forksclovetofu), Monday, January 27, 2014

I haven't read the thread but I'd say most bands that enter the public consciousness are generally competent and I can usually see the selling point. It's more the abundance of riches that allows me to be as selective as I want, while listening to as much music as I can, which automatically pushes out the rest.

If you scrap from existence everything I've ever liked, given enough time I am sure I can reconstruct a new taste. And so on and I am not sure if there is a parallel universe where the general quality of music is too low that I'd rather be horse-riding. At least, it's not easy to say if the bar is Chvrches, the yearly RYM top 10, 1000 GIECS, but I suppose there's one.

Warming up to a song happens plenty of times, but it's pretty clear it's not automatic. This would be disconcerting. The ability to say no, even if it's a vanilla "not for me" and you have no intense dislikes, is pretty fundamental to taste. Even if you factor in influences from friends, society, or the 70-year conspiracy from the industry to make us like things we don't really like.

I used to do this a lot in my late teens and 20's and while it works what you end up with is more a respectful admiration than full blown love, and that was fine when I wanted to become a music critic but in my 30's I'm too old for that shit.

Forks, which ones have worked for you? I haven't attempted this after my Animal Collective experiment.

I don't think this is the same necessarily, as it's an entire genre rather than "a record," but my first radio DJ job was a small town, very stodgy, easy listening format. At 19 I would have rather been rockin', but as my playlist ranged from Robert Goulet to The Carpenters I made the best of it and gradually began to appreciate much of it through repetition. I'm still not much for male crooners like Jerry Vale, but the instrumentals like The The Three Suns, and even the orchestral Percy Faith/101 Strings stuff I genuinely love. Turns out I was into the whole EZ revival decades ahead of the curve.

funny Animal Collective is the one band where this actually worked for me. they're one of my favorites now. didn't help that I started with all the wrong records though.

lately I've been pounding the two Black Country New Road albums trying to figure out why the hell RYM loves them so much but not really getting it. I think Daniel's point is a good one, once you reach a certain age you kinda run out of time for this. maybe fits into a broader discussion of how many albums one person really needs in their life.

There are albums I didn't like on first listen that I eventually grew to like, but that had little to do with listening to them over and over and more to do with me being older or otherwise changing tastes/listening habits. Of those records, though, I'm trying to think if there are any albums I hated that I grew to *love,* that I listen to a lot, and I'm not sure. There are some albums I've grown to like when they're playing but still don't love enough to play much.

Per Daniel_Rf this was definitely a part of my life up through my mid 20s, when i couldnt afford much music but it was still common for me to buy CDs and tapes without having heard them, and even if i didnt like them sheer inertia would mean that they would still spend months floating around inside my car, and when all the other CDs and tapes felt played-to-death i would put the duds on for variety's sake, and lo and behold i would often come to enjoy them through sheer familiarity & repetition. Nowadays though: lifes too short, fuck that.

I don’t think I’ve ever done this, really. Obviously, when I bought music as a kid if it wasn’t close to my taste I’d spend time with it to see if there was value - maybe 5-8 plays - but usually in those cases it wasn’t gonna happen and the tape or CD was just sold back to the store or given to a friend. And here I’m thinking about the ages of 12-22, that timeframe.

Today, I often know in less than a full play if a thing isn’t for me.

There’s also a middle ground where something has promise but (at the moment) I’m not interested enough to pursue it further, because of an assignment or other distraction. That stuff sometimes falls through the cracks.

I think we need to distinguish between giving something a chance and trying to force yourself to like something. Lots and lots of things that sounded kind of nothing special on first listen later revealed themselves to be full of unsuspected depths and became favorites, as much or more so than other things that appealed immediately. On the other hand, once you've given something a fair chance with enough listens, at different times of day, in different moods, etc, and it's still not clicking, I remain skeptical that you can really grow to love it. The one exception to that may be that you will sometimes grow to enjoy something because it reminds you of a certain time in your life when you heard it a lot, but I would maintain that the feeling of nostalgia is distinguishable from loving the music for its own sake.

There's a slightly different but related phenomenon, where there is something that you force yourself to *not* like because you think it's cheesy or too popular or dumb or whatever, but then after some period of time, usually after you've forgotten about it and then hear it again out of the blue after the passage of some time, maybe you stop fighting it and admit that you like it.

Forks, which ones have worked for you?

I think if I listen to anything long enough I will eventually love it or hate it (more often the latter). I don't really force myself to listen to stuff I don't like or am indifferent to, but this has happened a bunch with stuff friends or people I lived with listened to a lot.

Listening to Spotify with ads, still waiting on appreciating the vocal-fried "So you're listening to Spotify..." female announcer after a few hundred listens.

But that's just it: if you're going to derive any entertainment value out of an ad, it's almost certainly the first time you hear it. With movies or tv shows, the first viewing is almost always going to be most impactful.

But music works differently on the brain. There are definitely records where I know on first listen that I'm going to love it, but those are the exception. The peak is more like 50 listens, and usually the appreciation steadily deepens over that time. Granted, these have to be paced out, or I can easily burn out on it. So if this blunt force idea is possible, I think there's a window for it, and if it doesn't happen within that window, the record would just grow more and more annoying.

If you scrap from existence everything I've ever liked, given enough time I am sure I can reconstruct a new taste. And so on and I am not sure if there is a parallel universe where the general quality of music is too low that I'd rather be horse-riding.