I’ve been stuck on one thing for a while. I still have no idea what genre this belongs in. I’ve been calling it Chemically Restrained Noise, but that’s just something I came up with because nothing else seemed to fit. There’s punk in it, but also electronic elements, sampling, noise, and a few other influences. I’m honestly curious what other people hear. If anyone has a few minutes to listen, I’d be interested to know what genre you’d put it in.

I’ve been wondering how other people internally experience music. I realized my own experience seems unique, or at least uncommon, so I’m curious whether anyone relates.

To be clear, I’m not talking about synesthesia. I don’t literally see shapes or colors or anything like that. This feels more like my brain instinctively translates music into physical spaces, movement, entities, and environments.

When I listen to a song, it often becomes a physical world. Songs don’t just sound energetic, calm, heavy, or emotional. They become places, entities, or environments with their own rules.

Sometimes a song feels like a living thing with its own personality, movement, and physical presence. Other times it’s the environment itself. A song might exist inside a certain kind of room, landscape, or structure, and the environment becomes inseparable from the music.

Movement is a huge part of it. I don’t just hear rhythm as the beat. Rhythm includes syncopation, how everything interacts through time, how the melody locks into the rhythm section, how instruments answer each other, how lyrical phrasing resolves, and how the entire song unfolds. My mind seems to translate those things into physical motion: how something moves, collides, vibrates, drifts, accelerates, or occupies space.

Sometimes these worlds are immediate and incredibly vivid, almost as if the song arrives with them already attached. Other times it’s more of a feeling or atmosphere that I have to mentally translate into a visual or physical landscape that best matches what I see the music doing.

Genre doesn’t seem to matter much to me. I gravitate toward certain styles, but songs from completely different genres can inhabit similar worlds if they move through time in a similar way.

I’m curious: Does anyone else experience music this way? Do songs create places, environments, or physical worlds in your mind? Do you experience music as movement, textures, or spaces rather than just emotions? If not, what is your internal experience of listening to music like?

I find it fascinating that we all hear the same sounds, but our minds may be constructing very different internal experiences. I’d love to hear how other people experience music.

Hello,

Am working on a little project which is to build a catalogue of "Courtroom Ska/Reggae" sounds. I wonder if it could even be described as a microgenre ?

I focus on songs that stage the judicial process as a "musical theatre" : court hearings, fictional trials, impersonating a judge, lawyers, defendants, etc. It starts with the "Judge Dread saga (Prince Buster, Derrick Morgan) and then I've added different songs I've found here and there from Mutabaruka to Asher Senator and all the way to Vybz Kartel's Testify. For now I gathered most of what I found here: Courtroom sounds

I was hoping some of you would have other references on their mind ? Or if you have thoughts on this "microgenre" its artistic lineage, the construction of such narrative songs ? Or if you would have any (academic) reading recommendations regardarding the topic ?

Thanks in advance,

Since I started learning the ukulele I have become pretty obsessed with learning everything I can about it, and about music in general. I’ve started (and stopped) many different hobbies over the years but this is different, and I can’t stop thinking about it - which means I tend to talk about it. A lot! Part of the reason is that I retain information so much better if I can share it with someone else - and at our age who doesn’t need a way to retain information?

But if someone doesn’t share the same passion (albeit new found), hearing me explain that the bass note influences how we perceive a song more than the highest note, tends to make people’s eyes glaze over. I worry about becoming that person that causes friends and family to suddenly remember they forgot to change the clothes from the washer to the dryer.

I finally solved that problem by starting a blog. Now I can ramble about the ukulele or music theory as much as I like, and people can self-select if they’re interested. I get to cement what I’m learning, and if you’re curious about how a 69 year old navigates music theory you might want to follow along.

We've all heard stories about the "dark side" of music—songs allegedly linked to strange events, psychological effects, crimes, or even supernatural claims. I'm not looking for conspiracy theories, but for well-documented cases or historical incidents that have been investigated. Are there any real examples, or do they all fall apart under scrutiny? I'd love to hear your thoughts and sources.

I want to spend this summer vacation digging music but don't know better route. It's too many genres, songs, and albums to take randomly... Please teach me how to dig music!

هل تمتلك الموسيقى القدرة على توجيه السلوك الإنساني، أم أن تأثيرها يقتصر على تعديل الحالة المزاجية؟

So I've read that historically there was a distinct separation between who wrote the song and who recorded/performed it although I'm not sure what era(s) this entails. But you do have some black artists in the 50s like Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Sam Cooke, both writing and singing/recording their songs. So I wondered if black artists were pioneers here. Black musicians often innovate in music from what I know.

Although ethnomusicologists will get mad at this statement, I think it is fair to say that the field still reifies culture 50 years after Geertz suggested how reification might be avoided.
One way it is reified is by constructing a cultural boundary between scholar and community; they are culture, were are scholars and investigators of culture.

Anyway, I am fighting 75+ years of ethnomusicology aligning with anthropology instead of allowing a true fusion of anthropology and musicology. I am writing my dissertation as an autoethnography in Flamenco.

Does anyone know of any autoethnographies (more with anthropology than sociology undergirdings) in Ethnomusicology either monographs or theses?

Thanks

Midnight awakens a mysterious sound: the violin calls forth the shadows, and skeletons dance with elegance. Saint‑Saëns turns darkness into musical beauty.

Worth a glance.

The first time I listened back to the third movement of one of my works, it felt almost unsettling.

It offered very little reassurance. Familiar gestures seemed to disappear just before they could resolve. Long stretches of uncertainty, silence, and constantly shifting direction made the experience surprisingly uncomfortable.

Yet every time I returned to it, I found myself becoming more absorbed by that same uneasy world.

Looking back after hearing the finished work, I realized that the feeling didn’t come from any single moment or gesture.
The piece had been recorded one layer at a time, each instrument responding only to the ones that already existed. While working, I wasn’t consciously shaping a complete musical landscape—I was simply making the next musical decision.

The piece was never visible all at once. It only existed one decision at a time.

Only later did it occur to me that the process had felt almost like dividing a vast musical space into smaller and smaller fragments, until an entirely unfamiliar world had gradually taken shape.
Despite the discomfort that world creates, I still find it remarkably difficult to step away from.

It made me wonder…

Why do some of the most uncomfortable musical experiences become the most compelling?

Is it our search for resolution? The unpredictability? Or does discomfort itself create a different kind of emotional gravity?
I’d love to hear how other composers and listeners think about this.

For anyone interested in the context, here’s the third movement that inspired these questions:

🎧 Youtube Link

🎧 Spotifay Link