Whoa! I had no idea this was a thing! I'd always thought it was just some weird thing about me. I don't really get a whole lot of pleasure out of music, or get moved by music much. I almost never listen to music. When I do listen, it's usually to drown out external noise or help me focus, but in that case I usually just listen to the same song on a loop.
I'm really curious about this. Have you ever fiddled around, learnt or messed about with any musical instrument, and if so, how did you feel?
I recall that when I was learning my first instrument, and started learning a lot of songs, a lot of the other instruments didn't really make sense. For instance, if I was learning a guitar part from a rock song, the bass/drums/keys sort of sounded like a background mix that I couldn't identify into their individual instruments/parts.
I played the viola and sang in chorus in middle school. I really enjoyed both--especially the viola--but I think my enjoyment was more of the mechanics of it rather than the actual music we were making. I also really enjoyed playing Guitar Hero in college in the same way.
I've thought about taking up the guitar or piano since then, but haven't ever gotten around to it.
You sound like me, I get stuff done in dead silence. Music actually distracts me, playing songs in same loop helps out though. I still like practicing singing in the car though on the way to work, and guitar hero is fun to me too. Looking to learn to play the ukelele. I have like almost no musical intelligence, I can't remember song lyrics very well at all
Funny you should say that - I've been slowly trying to learn guitar for a couple of months now. I picked up a ukulele last week on a whim and can't seem to put it down! It's simpler than a guitar, but there's still so much to learn: the chords themselves, of course, but also how chords are created and how that relates to the way the instrument is strung; strums/rhythm; fingerpicking; the way different types of strings change the character of the sound... it just goes on and on.
I'm not expert, but contact me if you want to chat sometime. My username is my real name, which is also my homepage's domain ( plus '.com') and my username on every social media service I use.
Just curious why you explicitly "hope there is no cure"? Seems like an odd wish. If music has little to no effect on you now, why would you even care? Furthermore if a "cure" did exist, what would be the downside of trying it?
From what I can see, there is no upside to enjoying music. People spend so much time and money (attending concerts, paying for streaming services, buying music, buying instruments, practicing instruments, listening to the music, etc.) that I'm able to happily use elsewhere. If I enjoyed music I might want to start using my time and money for those things.
I like who I am, and am perfectly happy the way I am. If you step back and look at it, letting vibrations in the air control your emotional state is kinda a scary proposition, no?
> If you step back and look at it, letting vibrations in the air control your emotional state is kinda a scary proposition, no?
How is that different than letting reflections of light off of objects control your emotional state? Do you also have no emotional reaction to art, or even as simple as preferring a certain color?
I'm not them, and don't find that scary at all (speech certainly affects my emotional state!) but I don't have any color preference, or feel like I have anywhere near the emotional reaction to art that other people do.
Are you suggesting visuals of any kind do not create an emotional reaction for you? I'm not sure what the point of your comment is otherwise.
Would painting a room bright pink be no different to you than painting it black? Does looking at roadkill or a corpse feel absolutely no different to you than viewing something most would consider calming like a sunset, flowers or someone who you consider to be beautiful? If you do feel different, then yes, light reflecting off of objects does create an emotional reaction to you.
And by the way, since HN talked about Anki a few days ago [0], this is a nice little fact which I just entered into my
database. Copy&pasted the first line of the Wikipedia article and used the cloze mechanism the ask for the term and its definition. Now I will never forget about musical anhedonia anymore.
I watched them. Honestly I got nothing out of them. It's just noise. I could see that the guy with black hair on the left in the first video was really getting into it, I just don't know what he was getting out of it.
In the second one, I felt pleasure looking at the pretty girls, but their singing did nothing for me.
The first one is interesting - if I heard it on the radio I wouldn't think twice about it, but seeing a video is different. Watching the guy play the guitar gives me a sense of how difficult it must be to play - which means I appreciate the music because I appreciate the technical skill of the person playing it.
The second one does nothing for me - it's just dull.
Can you explain how you feel when you listen to those songs?
Sure! When I see Derek Truck play guitar in that first video, I feel about his playing how BB King says he feels, like this was one of the best things I've ever heard.
The second one has a bit of a story behind it; the girls on stage are singing their hit song they wrote about Emmylou Harris, who is a famous singer herself and is in the audience. They talk about how she inspired them to sing so it's cool they have the opportunity to play for her. The song is very sorrowful sounding but pleasant and beautifully sung so it brings tears to my eyes.
> I feel about his playing how BB King says he feels, like this was one of the best things I've ever heard.
Thanks for this, it's very interesting. I've realised that I don't really rank music in that way - I don't have favourite songs, in the same way as I have favourite books, movies etc.
> The second one has a bit of a story behind it; the girls on stage are singing their hit song they wrote about Emmylou Harris, who is a famous singer herself and is in the audience. They talk about how she inspired them to sing so it's cool they have the opportunity to play for her.
The story is cool, you're right. I understand how it would be emotional to those involved, but I found the description of the story conveyed the emotions involved more than the singing did.
> The song is very sorrowful sounding but pleasant and beautifully sung so it brings tears to my eyes.
It's well sung, but I don't find it technically impressive like the guitar playing. Perhaps because, day-to-day, we are exposed to many good vocalists but very few guitar solos?
Looked a minute into the first one. Did not recognize the song but since I'm not into music, I don't know that much.
I find myself distracted by the body language of the guy on the left (and later the one to the right). It is more interesting to me to watch how people behave than to listen to the music.
Emotionally? Nothing really. It's just someone playing music, which doesn't really do anything for me. I appreciate that the person in the first video is doing some neat things with a guitar though. It looks & sounds neat.
Felt probably the same as you would feel if I asked you to watch a youtube clip of paint drying to the din of a noisy train station or other public place.
How would I know if it is harder for me to enjoy movies than for somebody else?
I don't like "music movies" such as High Fidelity, 8 Mile, School of Rock, Blues Brothers. They are just average comedy/drama flicks for me. Maybe normal people like them more?
For a while if someone asked me what music I like, I replied film music. I do enjoy film music but maybe just because the music makes me remember the movie?
I'm definitely affected by the music. Maybe music can still emphasize emotions for a musical anhedonic and it just that music in itself does not do much?
Interesting. I also have mostly soundtracks in my playlists, for when I feel like listening to music at all (usually to drown out distractions). It's all soundtracks of things I've watched and enjoyed, and puts me in the mood of the memory of the movie or TV show its from. The music itself doesn't do very much at all for me directly.
This mirrors my own experience exactly. I too listen to a lot of soundtracks, from movies or from video games that I have enjoyed. Although music doesn't provoke an emotional response on its own, it has an incredible ability to being back emotional memories.
For a similar reason, when choosing music to listen to, I generally listen to the same songs again and again - those which have a connection to my past. It is very hard to feel anything about a new piece of music.
This means that I may regularly listen to one track by a particular artist, but have no interest in any of their other songs. I don't even like listening to remixed or live versions of songs that I enjoy - they are sufficiently different that they do not evoke any memories and hence are uninteresting to me.
How would I know? I don't have an emotional response to music and never have, so what would I compare it to?
You know, I also don't dream. I wonder if there is a name for never dreaming and if there is any link between not dreaming and not having an emotional response to music.
Quite possibly. I do enjoy watching a movie on occasion, but there are many other things I would rather do with my time. It turns out that compared to most people, I don't watch many movies - I've seen well under 100 of the "IMDb Top 1000 Movies of All Time" [1].
I've never considered this to be related to music, but I guess it could be.
I dunno, I think soundtracks to movies are one of the only places where I ever get any sort of emotional response from music, and it's always because I associate some sequence of sounds in the piece with something that's happening in the film then. It doesn't feel like appreciating the music so much as just being reminded of the part of the movie that happened around that time. Sort of like an aural mile marker.
Whenever aphantasia (absence of visual mental imagery) or musical anhedonia (http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337) come up on HN, I can count on someone to be surprised to discover that that's what they are and that when other people talked about "seeing things in their mind's eye" or being emotionally moved by a song it wasn't just another idiom or metaphor but quite literal. :)
There's actually quite a lot of this: it takes some people a surprisingly long time to realize that they can't smell things the way everyone else can ('anosmia'), or that they don't see the same colors.
> Whenever aphantasia (absence of visual mental imagery) or musical anhedonia (http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/E7337) come up on HN, I can count on someone to be surprised to discover that that's what they are and that when other people talked about "seeing things in their mind's eye" or being emotionally moved by a song it wasn't just another idiom or metaphor but quite literal. :)
That's exactly what's happening to me right now! I always just kind of assumed people were just using overly flowery speech to describe music! I remember one time in high school a kid who was way into music got really mad at me when I said I didn't really like music much. He said that I didn't seem much more than a sack of meat if I couldn't enjoy music.
> it takes some people a surprisingly long time to realize that they can't smell things the way everyone else can ('anosmia'), or that they don't see the same colors.
I've known I had a color vision deficiency since I was really young, but it isn't very strong so I don't run into trouble much. I only really got a strong example (outside of a purpose-built color vision test type thing) recently while playing Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress has a world map which represents volcanos as little red "^" marks. I was generating worlds repeatedly looking for a volcano near some grasslands. I was getting frustrated because I'd look at a map and wouldn't see anything. But after staring at the grassy areas for a while, I'd slowly start to see them. There were usually quite a few volcanos actually, it just was hard for me to find them. I was kind of confused as to why I wasn't seeing them easily before it hit me that the grassland is shown as green characters.
I tried showing a map to my sibling and my partner, both of whom have normal color vision. They both found all the volcanos immediately with no issues. It was wild!
Fortunately, Dwarf Fortress lets you customize all the colors used by the game. I should be able to make a higher contrast color palette for myself in the future.
> I always just kind of assumed people were just using overly flowery speech to describe music!
Yes! I realised this a few years ago. When people say "that's a sad song", they really mean that the song makes them sad in and of itself.
Whereas, for me, the only way a song can make me sad is if it brings back sad memories - i.e. if I had previously heard the same song on a sad occasion.
Incidentally, one thing I'd like to know about musical anhedonia, which perhaps all the anhedonics here can try out, is whether psychedelics affect it. They are famous for heightening the emotional response to music; do they work at all on anhedonics, and if so, does it bring them up to the normal level? Surely some have tried it a few times, since music is a common accompaniment on trips.
