I’ve found that a lot of music takes 5+ listens before I really start to enjoy it. This is particularly the case of complex, subtle music. This could be just me adjusting to social demands but I find it can happen even with music I want to dislike. Katie Perry grows on you.
As people learn more about an art form, they can more-easily predict it, and need more and more novelty to keep them interested; like porn viewers who seek out movies with continually-stranger sex acts. (This is a cognitively-plausible variant of “there is no such thing as objective beauty”.) If there were departments of pornography at ivy-league universities, they would scoff at the simplicity of films lacking bondage, machines, or animals.
Most of what I listen to is popular music and I find that a lot of the music I used to love just goes down too easily now. It’s a very similar experience to eating sugary candy you loved as a child but is too saccharine now. When I listen to new music that is at similar levels of accessibility and ease of listening this manifests itself in a lower limit to the number of times I can hear the song without getting sick of it.
I’ve found that a lot of music takes 5+ listens before I really start to enjoy it.
I may simply have less musical sophistication than most (I’ve got more than a decade of choir experience under my belt, but have developed neither a familiarity with the mechanics of music nor a significant body of opinions,) but I more often experience the opposite. As a piece of music becomes familiar, it gradually loses its power to move me.
I’ve found that a lot of music takes 5+ listens before I really start to enjoy it. This is particularly the case of complex, subtle music. This could be just me adjusting to social demands but I find it can happen even with music I want to dislike. Katie Perry grows on you.
Most of what I listen to is popular music and I find that a lot of the music I used to love just goes down too easily now. It’s a very similar experience to eating sugary candy you loved as a child but is too saccharine now. When I listen to new music that is at similar levels of accessibility and ease of listening this manifests itself in a lower limit to the number of times I can hear the song without getting sick of it.
Rebecca Black’s “Friday” became reasonably tuneful after 5 listens. (Perhaps that suggests I shouldn’t have listened to it 5 times to begin with?)
I may simply have less musical sophistication than most (I’ve got more than a decade of choir experience under my belt, but have developed neither a familiarity with the mechanics of music nor a significant body of opinions,) but I more often experience the opposite. As a piece of music becomes familiar, it gradually loses its power to move me.
That happens to me too. Enjoyment peaks between 5 and 25 listens.
For me, the first is generally the best.
Although if I don’t like a song quite a bit the first time I don’t deliberately subject myself to it repeatedly.
Does the ability to enjoy a piece of music come back if you haven’t heard it for a while?
More than if I’ve heard it a lot recently, but not to the point that it’s like listening to it for the first time.