Music listening as puzzle solving

October 9, 2009 3:15 PM

Nick Hornby wrote an essay p15 where he compares listening to a new song over and over to figuring out a puzzle. Can you point me towards any other writing about this same idea?

Any type of writing would be great. I'd love to read personal essays from other music fans, music reviews, neurology papers, fiction, you name it.

posted by martinX's bellbottoms to media & arts (6 comments total)

This was posted a while back -- it begins with a story of two people on the phone trying to puzzle out the lyrics to a blues song, Last Kind Words.
posted by creasy boy at 4:38 PM on October 9

I may have been a bit unclear originally about what "figuring out a puzzle" meant. The Nick Hornby essay really captured the feeling I get when I hear a particularly intriguing song for the first time: I need to listen to it over and over again for a couple of days or even weeks until I can figure it out. I'm not sure how to describe it besides that it feels like the song has some mystery that I need to uncover. I'm sure Nick Hornby and I aren't the only people who feel that way and I'm looking for other people who have written about that feeling.
posted by martinX's bellbottoms at 6:44 PM on October 9

You might enjoy Theodor Gracyk's Listening to Popular Music
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin
posted by billtron at 8:38 PM on October 9

LargeHeartedBoy does a series where musicians talk about their favorite books and authors tell what their music playlist would look like. It's not about the feeling of solving puzzles, but it does give an insight into how artists think about music and literature.
posted by CathyG at 8:57 PM on October 10

Is a bit of pop science OK? I think you might be interested in this segment of a Radiolab podcast. If you want to cut to the chase, start listening at around 14:40. It talks about how the brain has to "put together" the puzzle of never-heard before sounds, and how it starts getting used to them. The example they give is the riot caused by Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" dissonance --- and how one year later everyone was used to it and it was a huge success.
posted by natalinha at 7:17 AM on October 11

I really liked that essay by Nic Hornby as well - I knew exactly what he meant. Figuring out how a song works, or listening for the little pieces that add to the whole are some of the most important things for me in listening to music (most important is the emotional response).

Once I figured out all the guitar parts to the Strokes' first album, I realised that I wasn't that interested in it anymore.
posted by awfurby at 3:05 AM on October 12