How I Listen to Music

Table of Contents

A local friend of mine bought vinyl player and discs recently. Well, it’s been happening for over a year, as far as I know. So not too recently.

You know the vinyl people, right? If you know, you know then. If not, well, it’s really difficult to explain.

Another old friend of mine, he built a special app — roundnsquare.club — for approaching the storaging of his collection of discs digitally. Check it out, it’s really cool!

I myself am not a fan of physical discs, so I have no plans to become a vinyl person. But I respect this approach of enjoying the music. Of taking your time, for you and music.

This inspired me to reflect on my relationships with music.

Childhood
#

The foster family I’ve been with in my childhood, they had grammophone and some discs. I remember me listening to some tunes. I will never recall what that was and I have nobody to ask. Something. I don’t think that affected me in any way, it was not too often. They had no practice of enjoying the music. Of relaxing and deliberate listening of that music, and doing nothing else.

Players
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When my first computer arrived to my home, I was in my mid-teens, I started listening to some music at home. It was Winamp on Windows 98, it played some mp3s.

Speaking of which, did you know mp3 is now free? Nobody cares these days, I know. Me too.

It’s a separate story, but I want to mention that Winamp had so many skins, an infinite amount. If you’re old and nostalgic, go visit Winamp Skin Museum.

Winamp was an audio player, and for me it was like something default. The early days of computing, most of the citizens of the internet simply shared mp3 files with each other. That’s how you’d get any music, not even thinking of whether it’s legal or not.

Computer disks weren’t big those days, my first HDD had 80 GB of space.

The iPhones are bigger than that since, I don’t know, sixth? It’s 2014, more than 10 years ago. Recently, I’ve bought a 64 GB microSD for my Orange Pi micro-computer, paid €3.2.

The disk had operating system (Windows), Adobe Photoshop, and other software, including some games. And music.

Later, in 5 years or so, I think I had another disk, of 120 or even 200 GB. These days, I own like, idk, maybe 30 TB worth of disks. Which won’t be considered a huge amount by many.

That time, I had a huge collection of music. Different music. We had last.fm integrations in our music players. I remember at that time I used foobar2000 on Windows and Amarok on Linux.

This days, I don’t use Windows, but I use foobar2000 on my now-obsolete iPod Touch. It handles playing the local music while running with Nike+ Running Club. On Linux, I use either cmus or MPD.

For normies, I’d recommend Amberol, it’s a visual delight to use. Bravo, Emmanuele Bassi, great work!

Streaming
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Streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music effectively killed that, listening to local music. I know mostly nobody who listens to local music, me included. It’s just so much easier to explore the new tracks, especially when the system recommends you what you might like.

However, since the early days of my music experience, I had issues with understanding how much this music actually distracts me from whatever I’ve been doing. I wasn’t aware that listening to music is a separate activity you have to perform.

Since some moment of my career — as I’ve been listening the music mostly while working with my computers — I realised the music distracts me, and a lot. I stopped listening to music with words, and turned out, it made a huge difference to me and my persception of the world.

With streaming services, and I’ve been one of the early adopters of Spotify, and I enjoy it ever since. Yet, what I don’t like with the streaming services is that they take this control from me. They want me to play music all the time. I don’t need that, actually.

Transport
#

I have been visiting my local office this Friday, and I wasn’t prepared for it, like at all. Usually, I’d get prepared, because for me the office visit these days, isn’t something regular. Usually I work either from home, or more often from my city farm office.

Early morning I realised I’m free (from kids) to spend the day however I like, till 5 pm when I have to take my son from his kindergarten. So I ventured to go to the office. Grabbed my MacBook, as I need nothing more, and here I was, outside, heading to the office. On the street, I realised that for public transport, I usually take my Kindle (I have two now). I had it in my hands, but was thinking ‘nah, there’s nowhere I’d have time reading a book today.’ I forgot about public transport, as most times I’m on my bike. However, it’s winter now, and the weather was far from friendly, so I got lazy and mercied the bike.

I decided I don’t want to go public transport, but I’d rather walk through the city centre, which I love doing.

I panicked for a moment! I. Forgot. My. Headphones! I have 6 pairs (don’t ask) of bluetooth headphones now, and none of them are in my current backpack.

The issue is, I have a backpack for each of my typical activities. More on that. It’s super useful, but sometimes I can forget things that go to different backpacks, like my Kindle or headphones. Especially when in hurry.

It was weird. I haven’t been listening to music on the go for, well, maybe a year now. Since I’ve got these Beats bluetooth headphones I wanted to test, and they were too good to not test them with music (with beats). Why panic?!

It’s some very old habit of mine, the one that came from my life experience in Minsk, Belarus and Moscow, Russia. I wanted to distance from the real world so much, that my headphones were like a life-jacket. I would drown otherwise! However, I needn’t them, the headphones, for any other location I visited since then.

Even overcrowded Hong Kong on the Chinese New Year, it was okay for me. More on that in its special story.

Just an old habit, from the before-times. It’s from at least 10 (if not 15, if not even 20) years ago!

So, I spent my walk exploring the city centre, watching at the people with their headphones, many of them.

Ambient
#

I don’t judge music. I can listen to (almost) any, unless it’s mediocre. And I believe the art of listening to music is in understanding what music is appropriate for the moment, and what is not.

At some point, I realised that most of the music I listen to is the background music.

For that, I enjoy some light jazz if it’s something that I cook on the kitchen,
Or some ambient music when I work with my computer.

While jazz has to have its separate story, or even a series (of series), the ambient music I can describe briefly, as I’m pretty much expreienced in it at this point in life.

Video Games
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Where they have a lot of money, so they could pay the composers to compose music? Right, entertainment. For me, it’s either video games or motion pictures (and TV series). They have stunning music you can listen to while you work.

I’d give video games music a bigger spotlight, due to that kind of music being designed to listening to for hours! My top pics are:

The Elder Scrolls series by Jeremy Soule
- Morrowind being my favourite, possibly because of me actually playing the game during my childhood (I haven’t play any other game of the series, yet).
World of Warcraft by Various Artists
- Same
Heroes of Might and Magic by Various Artists
- Same-same
Gothic, or the entire series
Final Fantasy series by Nobuo Uematsu

The list is huge, so I’d just keep revisiting and updating it.

Motion Pictures
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For motion pictures, it’s slightly different, yet not too much different. Here, I’d say, you have to follow people, not works. Possibly, you can explore movies by their genres and check their soundtracks.

But for me, visiting people is always a good shot.

I do the same for the books. There are authors, I won’t ever read them, whatever they write, I know they’re mediocre. Or vise-versa, there are authors, I’d read any book from them, as I know they produce a high-quality great work.

Most of the composers I enjoy are either German

or American.

Or northeners (most times scandinavians, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland). Possibly that’s the influence of my cousin, she was listening to a lot of celtic music during my childhood, and I enjoyed it too.

But not only northeners, I mean, great talent is everywhere!

I see all of them are men, but there were women in my library too, I remember I enjoyed Keiko Matsui at some point of my life. She’s just outside of this video games and motion pictures scope.

Hardware
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I didn’t cover the audiophile point of all this. When I was super young (circa ~16–17), I was working as a coder with some simple tasks (writing diplomas to university students), and my first money I spent on two hardware enhancements for my computer:

Logitech MX500 mouse, I still have it and it’s one of my favourite mice;
- but the left key is not working; I’d love to investigate and fix that one day.
some expensive over-year Sennheiser headphones.
- I won’t recall the model, it stopped working, someone fixed it for me, but since I’ve bought another pair of headphones by then, I gifted my childhood Sennheiser ones to my cousin.

These days, I have Beyerdynamics))) DT770 Pro headphones. They’re very good for their money. Also, I have some amplifier. I’m not too competent here, I’ll add the model later. Those headphones I have with my work computer.

Also, I have other means to make sound:

My Apple Cinema 27" Display, with some Harman&Kardon in-built speakers (they’re super good)
- Speakers: Built-in 2.1, 49 watts maximum
Harman & Kardon 2.1 speakers (I’ll find the model). They look ugly, but the sound quality is top-notch.
Edifier 2.1 system.
Marshall Major II headphones, for bike rides.
Apple AirPods (various models) for watching shitty movies with my wife, while kids are asleep.
- Note: You can listen to two pairs of Apple (or Beats, which is also Apple) bluetooth headphones simultaneously.
  - It’s very easy from a MacBook (seek Midi.app),
  - and from a Linux machine too (you need WirePlumber, I may write a guide about that one day).
  - however if you want to watch movies from an iPad (we use the Pro 12.9 model), the very first model (from 2015, I have two of them), it does not support two sets of headphones. You need at least second generation. Personally, I won’t use any smaller size for watching content.
Powerbeats³ Wireless for running.
some cheap-ass bluetooth headphones, a bunch of Chinese headphones + some Philips headphones, but their quality is even worse, would never recommend.
iPad Pro 12.9, its 4 stereo speakers are quite good! Sometimes I use it to listen to music at kitchen, while cooking.

It’s a solid, but not too expensive gear. It produces the avove average audio quality. I won’t say I notice any huge difference between any of these devices, they’re really good.

Apart from cheapo Chinese headphones. They’re really bad and low-quality (but also cheap). I use them only for listening to voices: lectures, monoolooogs, interviews, podcasts, news, audiobooks, etc.

Most often it’s when I work on the farm, or doing some other physical work. E.g. trimming the lawn.

However, coming from a very cheap Genius speakers to my first ever expensive headphones 20 years ago, I did felt the difference indeed!

I think I can distinguish the lossless vs lossy quality, but apart from that, I won’t say I’m too eager to move further.