Will Baude plays wordless classical and jazz music during his Drezner exam and says:
Some of my music-loving friends are baffled by this ability to not hear what’s on; they love music so they can’t just ignore it and let it be helpful background noise. [This isn’t to say that I don’t love music, but I certainly have less of an ear for it than a lot of folks do.] I noticed this morning, though, that this inability to not-hear what’s playing isn’t entirely limited to music-lovers but also extends to some of us folks with tin ears.
And he quotes Nabokov on background music.
Just for the record: I’m a classical music lover, and I play “serious” music as background music all the time. In fact, right now — as I’m blogging and doing some economics work — I’m listening to the Tallis Scholars’ Best of the Renaissance 2-CD set, and over the last several months I’ve been going through my sizeable music collection largely by listening to it as background music. (I usually do hear what’s going on, but I can do “real stuff” over a wide range of music, provided it’s not one of my favorites, it doesn’t have easily distinguishable words that one would want to pay attention to, and so on.)
Does this make me a Bad Person?
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