No intro or nothing for this entry, I’m gonna straight up throw some controversial observations and hypotheses directly. There are two types of people - One, people who listen to some music regularly or periodically and second, psychopaths and depressed serial killers.
Lets ignore the second set of people, they are too dangerous to be spoken about. I’ll be focusing on the first set of people. I take immense pride in belonging to the first set of people. I listen to music very frequently, sometimes in unhealthy amounts at unhealthy times.
In general, when people talk about music taste - Let me put forward my first hypothesis - They literally don’t know what they are talking about. They have more or less zero idea what type of music they like.
Formally, Let be the set of all characteristics of any song. By characteristics, I mean characteristics of the song independent of the listener. Let be the values of the characteristics of a song. Let be the values a person considers for the song to be ideal for his type. Let and so on, be the tolerance on each characteristic of a song that the person has, to consider the song in his/her playlist. Then my first hypothesis claims that any person (belonging to the first set of course), has no idea about what their values are.
Assuming this is true, this eventually leads to my next two hypothesis.
- Let be the set of characteristics of any song that depends on the listener - For example, the time they listened it the first time, the mood when they listened it for first time, their gender and affinity towards artists etc. Let be the values of any song. Now consider the ideal song with . Then there exists a permutation on such that . A direct consequence of this property is that people tend to like the songs which they listened in their childhood or “Nostalgia listening”. The second hypothesis follows from here
- Every person partially gaslight themselves thinking that they have complete idea about their tolerances i.e. and assume that it is equal to some .
If you didn’t understand the formal rubbish I’ve written about, let me break it down for you. All I’m claiming is, people tend to like the songs they listened in their childhood. The first song they listened and they got the feel that they wanted to listen again - is the ideal song. From there on, the other songs they like are built on the previous information - something like “I liked a song from this artist, this artist might match my taste” and then they try spamming their songs, listen and eventually start liking them.
I’ve boldly put forth such an outrageous and general claim, I agree that there are lot of other factors but one thing is clear for sure - The song a person likes depends on the characteristics of that song that actually depends on the listener and the about the independent characteristics? the person has no idea about it.
How I choose my playlist
Coming to my music taste (Ah yes, I’ve been waiting so long for this!), I’m not going to into much details (like my complete playlist and stuff, I’m saving it for another entry). As I’ve mentioned above, I have zero clue what I like in a song. Given a song I like, I can point out what I liked the most. Can I put all that together, create a song that would outclass every other song in my playlist forever? No. I can’t ideally but maybe I can pretend to be.
So before all of this, I don’t use Spotify , Amazon music or any other apps that has a preloaded library of music. For me those apps are useless because most of my favorite songs (some of them are unreleased and some of them game themes) won’t be available in those libraries. What I do is download these and keep it locally. I use an app which can be used to play the songs stored locally. This is also useful while travelling when there is a high probability of fluctuating network.
There are downsides as well. Well I can’t just try songs directly. I have to go to Youtube or SoundCloud to try listening to songs. I have a very strict condition for songs, to be added to my local playlist - I should really really really like them when in their trial period. There are lot of songs which I listen occasionally that aren’t in my playlist but I’ve listened to them more times than some of the songs in my playlist. The trial period isn’t a fixed duration, it might be even a year long. As I said, I have no idea of what I like, you can see it being reflected here.
Summary of my playlist rn
At the start of my music-listening period (around 8-th standard), I enjoyed Tamil-rap songs and was an ardent fan of Hip-Hop Thamizha.
Parallelly during this time, my sister started listening to English songs, then she slowly shifted to Korean songs (This was her peak teen period). She used to put these songs in full volume when we both study together in our room and ultimately some of the songs she listened became part of my childhood and entered my playlist. Still now, I’m adding some old songs my sister used to listen from those English and Korean bands. At that point I used to hate her for doing it, but now that I think about it she knowingly/unknowingly made some of those songs give that nostalgia feeling to me when I listen to them and thereby infiltrating my playlist. We just share part of our lives now unknowingly. Pretty cute isn’t it? Even today, she was blasting some random Korean songs. I’m not sure when they are going to enter my playlist.
When I entered 10th standard (Covid period, where I got my own laptop, while my sister moved to college), I started to listen to a special set of music - Game themes. At that time I was playing Brawl Stars, and yeah I added a lot of OSTs from that game. Similarly for other games I played such as PvZ and Shadow Fight 3.
Once I joined college, I started liking Charlie Puth songs. Those were heavily suggested by one of my friends who was like an obsessed Charlie Puth fan. Eventually I also liked most of his songs. Also I added some variety of English songs, from my other friends as well. Then nostalgia hit me again during the start of my second year, where I started listening to Tamil songs I used to listen during my childhood period. Again a random wave of Charlie Puth songs. Then came some Asphalt 9 tracks.
Now currently it’s at a complete mix of random English songs, BTS songs (Korean), Charlie Puth songs, 5-6 Taylor swift songs (All thanks to my sister), a lot of Brawl Stars OSTs, some PvZ , Shadow Fight 3, Asphalt 9, MLBB OSTs, random Tamil songs, Hip Hop Thamizha songs, Piano versions of above mentioned songs and some other random songs which don’t belong to any of this category (This category is very recent, like December 2024).
Final Notes
This was a slightly shorter entry (by around 100 characters) than the previous entry, if we remove the formal rubbish, otherwise this exceeds the previous one by 1400 characters. I wanted to write in more detail about my music taste, but I’ll stop here for good reasons and save those for later. Good luck finding your values.