19 July

I’m too old for false modesty. I’m extremely good at music, which might surprise some who see me post so often about music today. Music is one of my gifts, as we all have gifts, it comes as easily to me as breathing. But growing older with that gift, I’ve realised a lot more about it. I realised that my earlier love of music was really a love of sound. Music is the tiniest subset of sound. I spend more time listening to ASMR or to things like brown noise (and no, it’s not people sharting) than I do to music now. Because they connect me to much more complex, multi-dimensional experiences with sound. And I now think music is a bit of a modern tyranny. It drowns out the extraordinary richness of sound, with its repetitive refrains. Nothing but earworms, that have the same function as birdsong, to create territory. Many days driving in the car I can’t think of a single song I want to put on, because once you directly feel the structure of music, as territorial refrains, it can begin to bore or even annoy you. Remember Bellbird Hill, on the drive to Sydney, where people stop to listen to the Bell Miners? That sound is actually the sound of an ecosystem in ruins, Bell Miners are bullies, driving out all other species. And that’s like music. It takes sound, and regiments it into repetitive refrains, that drive out the noise. If you listen to white noise or brown noise, for example, many would say ‘that’s just noise’. But it is infinitely changing sound, impossible to control, you can get lost in it in a sort of meditation in the richness, there are whole universes there. Compare that to the way a song for example can compel people, even thousands at once, to sing it. That’s what refrains are, bullying, repetitive, territorial commands. Like military marching music, but that’s the model for all music. Sound marshalled in that way marks territory and demands a repetitive ‘ear worm’ response. Meditators actually know this. One of the most profoundly calming and relaxing things you can do is to sit and to just listen. And as you practice that, you will begin to notice the entre universe of sound out there, in every situation, that is suppressed by the repetitive refrains of the endless music in our lives and in our heads. It opens your entire being out to an experience of the wider universe.