Album Rating: 5.0

now that makes sense

Album Rating: 4.0

that's what i said, but my roommate complains that she has to turn up her youtube "let's plays" to hear that over my music and album.

Album Rating: 4.5

@Sniff When I try to sit down and just listen to an album, my mind wanders away from the album, so I best digest an album when I give a few listens while doing other stuff. I keep the volume so that it's in the foreground of what I'm doing so I'm still "truly" listening to it, but not so much that it's my only focus and my mind wanders onto other stuff. My go to used to be Skyrim with the in game music muted.

Album Rating: 4.4 | Sound Off

hot dang im glad i waited this is fire stuff

Album Rating: 4.5

I mean, all their stuff is pretty fucking fire. You could say, when it comes to Ulcerate...















Everything is Fire.

Album Rating: 4.4 | Sound Off

wink

Album Rating: 3.0

This is similar but better than the Fiona Apple

“Haven't listened yet cause I like to do other shit while listening (talk to people on Discord, game, etc) and I couldn't adjust the volume on the stream“

90s >

Album Rating: 3.0

I used to play most of my music in the 90s with a video game playing tbh



In some ways I'm more of an attentive listener now - gaming used to be the primary activity, but after 10 listens the one album you could afford to buy that month would start to seep into your soul.



I still associate certain albums with games - 'Master of Puppets' with Cannon Fodder, Elliott Smith 'XO' with Zelda, 'Incesticide' with Revenge of Shinobi, Stone Temple Pilots 'Purple' with Donkey Kong 64, Alien 3 on the Megadrive with Megadeth's 'Rust in Peace' etc



I gave up pretty much all video gaming aged about 30, too much of a time sap

le time to jam

Street Fighter 2 with Dodgy

That’s about it from recollection. Although I do remember stopping whatever it was I was playing at the time while listening to Morning Glory and I first heard Champagne Supernova. Thing blew me mind.

Oasis basically was the reason I wanted to start playing guitar in the first place.

Album Rating: 3.0 | Sound Off

"I still associate certain albums with games" I can relate. But I listen to music nowadays while working etc.

("Alien 3 on the Megadrive" Ahh, that's a fun game!)

I remember checking the new Matana Roberts while playing MHW and then reading Wines' review during a loading screen. There was a bit where he said the album was impossible to listen to while playing a video game (accurate tbh) and I don't think I've ever felt more @ed in my whole time on sput

Will always associate Time I with Skyrim and In Utero with making BigPleb ragequit tinychat seshes

Good times

I will always associate mozart with minecraft

All sorts of music with Rocket League. One of those games that doesn't have an essential soundtrack.

Album Rating: 4.5

@MementoMori

OK, onto the culture discussion.

Reading over your replies, it occurs to me the real difference we might have is the extent to which evolutionary psychology can account for culture. This is not unlike the view that biology is really just physics in disguise. Though true, it's often useful (even necessary) to discuss things on a macro rather than reductive level, the same way we talk about a film in terms of plot/characters rather than individual frames of film (or bits of digital code). So I think we agree that even if culture is theoretically reducible to evolutionary psychology, that's not always the best--most practical, enlightening, etc.--method in which to analyze it.

As for cultural universals of things like the monomyth, I guess I'm just less skeptical than you are. While I might agree there is no science currently that can confirm that such "collective unconscious" elements exist, I think it's difficult to deny their prevalence when one looks around at the art of various cultures, including those that existed at a great disconnect from each other geographically, historically, and (otherwise) culturally. Again, though lacking in scientific evidence, it doesn't seem outrageous to hypothesize that because most humans existed as hunter/gatherers for centuries before civilization that this constant repetition of starting at home (the familiar), adventuring out and encountering danger, and then returning home was, in some sense, embedded into our collective psyches. I'm also not sure I'd call this a "text," per say. I doubt very few people throughout history have actually conceptualized the monomyth, the same way few conceptualize or model any of the various structures of their psyches. But humans tend to produce art that is a reflection of their own lives, and while much of our life is culturally dependent, there are definitely aspects and themes that are universal or else there's no reason why so many would love culture from the distant past and other cultures.[1]

Album Rating: 4.5

@MementoMori

I am skeptical, however, that you can boil down the lack of acceptance of atonality to the dominance of tonality, or that the dominance of tonality itself was merely a product of socio-cultural/historical conditions. If you accept that brains are genetically predisposed to indult in pattern-seeking, and that explains much of music’s appeal, then it shouldn’t be hard to accept that some forms of music contain patterns that are easier to intuit than others, or that, even ontologically, contain more patterns than others. Patterns require repetition, and it’s through that repetition that minds are able to predict, even if in some vague/general sense, where/how the pattern is going to develop. It’s also through that repetition that we appreciate and apprehend change, or surprise.

It’s easy to see where that patterning exists in tonality, as the repetition of the tonic gives context to every other note, chord, and key. Atonality can only exist by doing away with the tonic and its relationship with other notes/keys/chords. The 12-tone system, especially, made it so that no tone was repeated more than any others, meaning that any patterns could only emerge out of the rhythms and sequences of tones that, in themselves, were no more prominent than other sequences. This is no different than saying that the regularity, the patterning, of stress and rhyme in verse poetry is innately more memorable than the lack of such in free verse. Yes, one can create patterns in free-verse (and atonality), but they are no longer either as regular, as dominant, or as intuitive. There’s also actual research backing this up saying that listeners cannot intuit the patterns in atonality: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/7279626/Audiences-hate-modern-classical-music-because-their-brains-cannot-cope.html [2]

Album Rating: 4.5

@MementoMori

Further, Schoenberg and Webern didn’t emerge in a vacuum. The late 19th century was already pushing the limits of tonality with Wagner and Mahler. Wagner’s Tristan is a masterful display of ambiguous tonality that withholds resolution until the very end of its 4+ hour saga. Debussy pushed that tonal ambiguity even further without destroying it; and all of these composers are widely listened to and beloved by audiences in a way Schoenberg and Webern are not. I find it difficult to justify why this is so, given that the socio-cultural context from which they emerged from was not dissimilar to their predecessors; we’re still talking about upper-middle class white Germans/Austrians here (OK, French for Debussy and Bohemia for Mahler). It’s doubly odd given that so many composers after them have taken up the atonal mantle and ran with it, to the point that atonality is actually a fixture in a lot of mainstream art like film, TV, and video games, which almost exclusively use it to express tension, anxiety, horror, the unknown, etc.

I find it hard to explain merely in cultural terms why atonality has taken on this cultural “meaning,” while the tonality (even the ambiguous kind of Wagner) has become the cornerstone of emotive, classic scoring in media. Psychologically, though, it makes sense given that the lack of patterns is analogous to chaos, which, in itself, is a good psychological representation of the unknown, and the encountering of which can easily produce anxiety, tension, even horror. So is it merely an accident of culture that atonality has come to be associated with these things?

You may be skeptical that evolutionary psychology alone can explain this, but I’m equally skeptical that cultural analysis can, or that the cultural analysis is anything more than “evolutionary psychology in disguise.” I find it otherwise baffling why cultures with very different cultural histories, like Japan, so easily accepted tonality when it was introduced there. [3]