Less music = less noise?

Music is a fundamental happiness generator for humans. It allows people to communicate a wide range of emotions, facilitating deep self-exploration as well as interpersonal bonding. It can be listened to, danced to, played on an instrument, sung by a voice, and, recently, transmitted across the world in an instant. Listening to music is perhaps the most precise and efficient way to consciously experience the emotions, thoughts, and dreams of its creator.

My dad is a big fan of classical music, jazz, and rock. He was a music student, plays multiple instruments, and most of his friends are musicians. I share none of those characteristics, and throughout high school and early college my favorite genres were hip-hop and R&B. A few weeks ago in the car (with my dad) I played some rap songs which I loved during that time.

He commented that he didn’t enjoy it because he couldn’t understand the lyrics. Then he went a step further and said that the only reason to listen to rap is for the lyrics. I thought this was very ignorant, drawing on my own experience: most of the time I spent enjoying rap, I paid no attention to the lyrics whatsoever. Whether the lyrics were obscene and mindless or thoughtfully crafted and profound, I wouldn’t care. What I enjoyed was the melodies, the rhythm, the atmosphere, and the voice as an instrument within that.

But my dad said: “Regardless of whether you enjoyed it or not, rap as music is more primitive than other forms.”

Instantly I thought, “I can’t believe you said that”. What an arrogant and condescending argument. There is so much that goes into making a good rap song: finding the right sample, the right synths, the right drums, crafting the rhythm, tuning the voice, finding a flow, and packaging it up after many iterations.

Yet, just because it’s difficult and requires creativity doesn’t mean that it’s not less primitive. So what is it specifically? Why exactly is rap (sonically) not less primitive than classical or jazz music? Maybe it’s the complexity of the instrumentation, and the modernity of the tools used to create it. The kind of sounds that a pop song in 2026 can access is infinitely greater than Mozart, so the music is at least as sophisticated, if not more.

But we don’t judge music based on the range of sounds it can access. We judge it based on how it arranges those sounds, and, more importantly, we judge it based on the conscious experience that it projects onto us. What do we feel when we listen to it? What do we see in our mind? What do we experience? Which thoughts does it invoke? Which moods? Which actions?

In my personal experience, the conscious experience invoked within me by rap music, independent of the lyrics, is extremely narrow when compared to classical or jazz music. It invokes a kind of elated energy — a feeling of pride, ambition, and pleasant aggression, or maybe a calming rhythmic satisfaction, but not much more. In one listen of The Rite of Spring, I understood more, experienced more, felt more, and asked more than during a week out of my junior year of high school listening to Drake, Travis Scott, etc. And it is because the latter music is more primitive. So I ended up agreeing with my dad.

Primitive music drains your life

Because this kind of music is constrained by its primitivity, it is easier to enjoy. A catchy melody or a good beat is all that’s needed for it to stick in your mind, and it punches through whatever environment you might be in. It’s more exciting to listen to in the car, or in the gym, or while walking to class. You don’t have to shove anything aside to listen to it. That is why it’s popular. And so this music starts to fill every nook and cranny of our daily lives, and sometimes the periods during which we work too.

While it can be creatively enlightening in the long-term (e.g., Michael Jackson’s pop music), we mainly listen to it because we want dopamine now, and there is a tradeoff that comes with it. We trade being present in our environment and the current moment, appreciating what’s around us, conversing with people, or just sitting in silence and listening to/processing our own thoughts.

But listening to it is very, very fun, and sometimes it is worth it to just do fun stuff. Maybe you want to listen to Party in the USA on the way to the beach, and that’s it. No long-term forecast on your personal development needed. Yet this shouldn’t be overdone. A lot of the most fun things in life (cocaine, sex, listening to music, etc.) aren’t going to build you a career (unless you want to be a music star — then maybe you should make those your Holy Trinity). Fun is not necessarily beneficial to gaining a thoughtful perspective and good relationships and discipline and achievements and real creative excellence. And without those, you likely won’t be happy.

On my college campus I often see people walking around with full over-ear headphones. Some people listen to music when they do any kind of homework. When people are in the gym, they listen to music. When people are alone in their room, they listen to music. When they’re on the toilet or in the shower, they listen to music. You can have AirPods in while doing pretty much anything. Even sleeping. And so any silence that might arise is filled. Any emotion that the subconscious might serve is replaced, along with any idea or a question the person might have.

Let’s say that someone does all this before they arrive at their first class of the day. They’ll find it much harder to enjoy that class, because that music created a dopamine baseline, raising the stimulation the person requires to feel good. A class can’t compare with the dopamine-drenched hour that a person spent blasting music right before. Studying for a test sucks so much more if it’s right after you listen to your favorite song, because the dopamine effect is so much more concentrated and so much easier to attain when listening to music than when studying. Any subtlety or nuance in your schoolwork that might’ve brought you excitement is hard fought because you have to understand it. That battle is even harder when you can get a much better short-term hit from an easier source.

If you fill in all “in between” moments with music because those “in between” moments are too boring or perhaps you’re even upset during them, then you should probably stop, take the AirPods out, and think. Why am I bored right now? What is giving me this emotion that I want to escape? Why exactly am I going through these daily motions every day? Does it align with my long term goals? Is there something actually interesting in the homework that I’m doing, or do I actually hate what I’m studying and am only doing it for money? What is my subconscious telling me that I haven’t noticed? What kind of environment am I in? What does the wind feel like? What are the people around me wearing? You start asking questions. Your brain latches on to the things around you. It starts generating excitement all on its own through ideas. Your boredom has time to convert to insight or action, rather than getting promptly swept away by an auditory tsunami.

I think that easy-to-listen-to music drains your productivity while also leaving no room for the more complex, subtle music which is harder to listen to and requires learning and attention over a period of time. The music which took hundreds of hours of practice across dozens of individuals to perform as an orchestra like a beautifully sentimental yet well-oiled machine. Or maybe the music which represents some of the greatest creative progress among a group of 4 guys ever (The Beatles 1963 —> 1966). Music which stems from a deeply rooted emotion in the human that created it, able to convey the highest high and lowest low of conscious experience, evoking a sense of naturality and truth which gives the impression that the universe itself composed it, independent of humanity. The music which bestows upon you a feast for thought deeply interconnected with science and the social structures of the world in ways that your favorite album of catchy tunes just isn’t.

In my own experience, this kind of music is highly complementary to other things I actually want to pursue, rather than being a representation of a lifestyle completely disconnected from who I am or want to be. It complements my academic pursuits, my questions, my ideas and my observations. The Rite of Spring feels synonymous with evolutionary biology. The Blue Danube feels synonymous to space and black holes and galaxies and planets. Rhapsody in Blue feels synonymous to the atmosphere of New York and the ambitious feeling of living in that great city. And it all has made me feel much more inspired. Much more curious. Much more in awe of the world around me and much more appreciative. Much more ambitious. And much more present. It is a whole universe that is much more synergistic, sentimentally explosive, and awe inspiring. Now it feels like my high school music-listening days were some kind of delirium.

Cutting it out

Along with replacing the music that I do pay attention to, I’ve also aggressively cut music which I don’t pay full attention to. A lot of the time, if I’m not going to sit down and listen to a full album with my eyes closed and good headphones, I feel that I’m far better off just not listening to the music at all. If I listen to music while doing other activities (even folding the laundry, for example), it eventually jumbles up. I get tired of it. It feels like a relentless droning. The very fact that I can focus fully neither on my music nor my activity is frustrating. I have to turn it off.

I find it more beneficial to just sit in silence and observe what’s around me. Or to think. Or to write. I feel like this brings me much more fulfillment in the long-term. Now I file “listening to music casually” in the same folder of anti-productive activities as “YouTube videos” or “scrolling through reels”. Music, regardless of its form, is rarely put in this category — the concept of music escapes scrutiny because it has such a rich and profound history. But for me, it was at one point the main perpetrator of that category, and part of the danger comes because it seems so innocent on the surface. Now, after not being caught up in that kind of music-listening anymore, I feel much better. Perhaps the boring, pretentious-looking old people that surrounded me at the Kennedy Center as my parents dragged me to various performances when I was a kid saw something that I had only begun to discover recently.