Lyrics

All my life, I've been the worst at discerning the lyrics of songs.  For whatever reason, the second someone starts singing, my ability to process what it is that they're saying drops. I don't know why, but I think it has shaped the type of music that I listen to. I mostly go for music that I think has an interesting texture to the sound, and less music where the lyrics are emotionally resonant. I also don't really sing along to songs ever, largely because I just don't know the words (and to spare the ears of those around me). I think that this habit of mine has led to some interesting music, but I also worry about what music I'm missing out on just because the lyrics don't click the first time I hear them. I think about the Qur'an recitation in Indonesia, and how the recitation brings about a direct connection with the divinity involved in the text, and I'm a little jealous of the auditory experience that both the reciters and listeners must be having.
Music, for me, is never about saying exactly what you want to convey. Music that instead enriches the atmosphere, adds texture to the world, and lets the listener determine for themselves the internal meaning is almost always more appealing to me. Almost all art that attempts to say that there is only one correct way of interpreting it is off-putting to me, I like to know that my associations and experiences with a piece of art are in some way unique. The "cultural aesthetic" of ramai, or constant background noise, is so interesting to me because it seems like a mirror to the kind of music that I have the hardest time understanding. Individual songs with deeply impactful, specific lyrics and relatively clean or inert instrumentation is about as far away from constant, cacophonous sound in everyday life as you can possibly get. Ramai may seem totally alien to our culture at first, but "noise" is a surprisingly popular genre of music here. Assuming that there is something inherent in which soundscapes are pleasing and which ones aren't underestimates the huge variability of the human experience with sound.

Also, I can't think of a reasonable way to tie it into this blogpost, but I just made a piece of audio-visualization hardware called an oscilloscope out of an old portable CRT and I need more places to show it off so I'm shoehorning it into the end of this blogpost, enjoy. (credits to Jerobeam Fenderson for the visuals and music, I can't upload a video of the oscilloscope in action because blogger doesn't like large file sizes.)