Published on 12, July, 2020
I've always had an interest in music, whether it was going through my dads collection of vinyl records, Italia '90 and the incredible sound of Luciano Pavarotti or recording songs off the radio (one of favourite things was trying to arrange a list of all the songs I had according to which I liked most).
Since getting diagnosed however, I've been questioning how my taste in music fits in with my autism because I love loud rock and pounding dance music.
I relax to the sounds of Muse, Marilyn Manson, Deftones and Foo Fighters. I love the wall of sound generated by bands like My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth or Sigur Ros. I still get prickles up my back listening to Prodigy's "Firestarter" or when the beat drops in the middle of Chemical Brothers "Setting Sun".
And I don't get it. One of my autistic traits is that if there is too much noise around me it can become overwhelming and difficult to focus on things. Yet I can still pick out the rhythm section (bass, drums etc) in bands like Interpol, Pixies, Nirvana and ...Trail Of The Dead.
I'm wondering what everyone else feels about music. Do you like loud music or does it have to be quieter and gentler or music from a specific genre? Does anyone have sensory issues when they hear any kind of music?
Thanks!
I am, or was, a working musician. Suffered autism burn out a couple of years ago and that's why I am here now. Interesting thread - my music is stormy stuff. And I completely relate to that love of noisy music while hating noise - there's something to be said about sensitivity there. Music is art - it comes from a different human place to strimmers. Music tickles the autistic senses. In the film "The Big Short" autistic hedge fund manager Michael Burry has death metal at full blast in his office... Marilyn Manson is probably NPD/Asperger's like Eminem and Mozart - I can listen to all of them. I get full blown synaethesia only when I am deeply relaxed but I get lasting impressions from music I hear of colour and texture. I'll start a separate thread about some questions I have. I have one important musicianly statement to make: When musicians gather and play instruments it is very loud. When you play stuff at home you are listening to "Mechanically Reproduced Music" it has a different, smaller dynamic, and you will turn it up if you want it to work at all like the real thing. I am forever in trouble for it!
NAS62055 said:Music is art - it comes from a different human place to strimmers
Made me smile. Sums it up very well :-)
Hey, nice to make people smile. Thanks. This thread just came alive again so I'll chip in again and get a bit geeky - I'd love to hear from anyone with synaesthesia. A bandmate once said to me over a cuppa that playing music was 'weird'. Why? '..because we spend our whole time making patterns in the air.' 'We make air molecules behave in a certain way, it's strange thing to do'. I probably pondered his point silently, I think there's more to it than that, but I agreed it was weird. It is very weird. So weird in fact that I cannot think of a single thing like it. Humans appear to absolutely depend on it, for survival almost. I've been listening to some of the same music for decades, must have chalked up many thousands of plays. Has anyone ever read a book or watch a film a thousand times?
Here's the thing I think is the trick, I wonder what you think. Imagine a piece of written music on a page -it's all there, the pitches, dynamics, shapes - the patterns are described there. It's a form, a thing a chunk of spacetime perhaps. I think of it, see it, feel it as a piece of three-dimensional architecture with colour and texture. So imagine that it is a building, perhaps a large interesting building that you cannot see all at once. You walk round it, go inside, visit the different rooms. You might go back many times, it might be your home. You will never tire of seeing it in different light, different moods, discovering things you hadn't noticed before.
A supercool way of saying that is that music is 'holographic' and this is how I think it works on the brain. It plays all the time with memory. And with that statement I'll pause.
Any geeks out there into Penrose/Hameroff theory? Ahh, the things I have to read!