Here's something pretty weird, I wonder if others are the same: The more music I experience, the less music I actually listen to.

To be honest I never really listened to as much music as a lot of people did, despite it being my entire passion in life and career. This is because I tended to listen to the same things over and over again. I can replicate each individual instrument from start to finish of the 24 minute rock epic Octavarium by Dream Theater (with the exception of the bits not physically possible for a human voice) and many more.

So, I suppose I always listened to more hours of music, but a much smaller quantity of different music. Further, though I genuinely don't consider this any better or worse than the alternative, I am reasonably certain I listen to more types of music than 99.999999% of people.

From Renaissance to Impressionism, Minimalism to Black Metal, Jazz to Christian Indie (I'm atheist), J-pop to Country, Game music to Hip Hop, and all in between.

Further, I don't just listen passively as a normal person, I analyse actively like a nerd. Sometimes I straight up just write stuff out or rush to the piano and play something interesting. I want to understand everything going on.

But, despite all this, it's increasingly true that there is one form of music I listen to most: Ambience.

The Sound of Silence

^^^ Musical reference

_{AI's fascinating interpretation of 'silence'}

Years and years ago, I saw a brief interview with John Cage. If you don't know, let me give you a quick intro: Cage is mostly known for his infamously controversial piece of 'music' 4'33", a piece of arbitrary length for an arbitrary ensemble, or solo, to perform absolutely nothing. In three movements.

This sparked decades of debate and has been implemented into music classrooms around the world for teachers to ask the ever-mundane question 'what is music', attempting to put a philosophical spin on it.

An though this will rarely rouse inspiration in a student, it can get pretty deep. Like, what is music, really?

Organised sound? That could be speech
An art or a craft? Both? All three?
The dictionary definition of 'vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.'?

Why is beauty a requirement - in fact, why is the expression of emotion necessary?

Are birdsongs and whale songs not songs? Where is the line drawn, with humans only? AI?

I suppose the greater point of this piece was for people to experience the ambience around them as an ever-changing, unique musical experience, from the coughing of a child to the beating of one's heart in one's ear. More on that later.

John Cage also wrote 'As Slow As Possible', a piece being performed right now in Halberstadt, Germany, where it began in 2001, and set to continue for 639 years from that point. On a little organ.

The piece starts off with a pause of 17 months. By the time any chord or note changes, it becomes a public and touristic event with crowds gathering and cheering for the moment to occur.

It even made it through the Pandemic years.

Here is a hyper-rapid extreme sped up version performed for a pathetic 16 hours.

So, back to this interview. In short, he explains how he loved the sound of traffic. 'The activity of sound'.

He says several things in this interview that really spoke to me:

I don't need sound to talk to me

(quoting Kant) 'There are two things that don't have to mean anything in order to give us very deep pleasure: music and laughter

The sound experience which I prefer to all others is silence, and the silence almost everywhere in the world now is traffic

If you listen to Mozart or Beethoven, it's always the same. But if you listen to traffic, it's always different

It's not like I was hit with an epiphany from the moment I heard these. But it certainly found a place to nest in my head and ruminate, year after year, growing and maturing.

And so I now find myself doing the same thing. I appreciate sound for precisely what it is and nothing more, and it often gives me greater joy than all my favourite songs in the world.

For example, I often find myself lately leaving work later than the clock-out time by 10, 15 minutes. This is simply because there is a drum set in the hall where I spend my day, and a drum student does her practice at the end of the day.

It's loud, chaotic, not very good. But I love it. It makes my skin shiver with reminiscent memories of my own drum lessons as a kid, of my own time practicing on other instruments, band practices with friends, and so on. Each beat gives me a unique experience or flashback or moment of musical analysis or internal thoughts on how I would teach it differently. Or more simply, there is just something very therapeutic about the percussive echoes travelling across the hall to my ears.

Another example is right now.

To my left ear, I am hearing traffic from the road immediately outside the gate of the building, 3 floors down and perhaps 20 metres ahead. Occasionally, a large truck will go by and I can physically feel, even see the rumblings on my desk and under my feet. The sound of the tyres on the road changes depending on the weather, traffic and size. Car horns are rather intriguing to me. At least in China, I have noticed all smaller vehicles' horns tend to play two notes, at an interval of either a major or minor third. The vehicles at the large end of the spectrum tend to have horns with a more dissonant interval of a minor or major 2nd.

To my right ear, I can hear the bouncing of a basketball, occasional distant shouting and laughter, and some tweeting birds. These take me straight back to my days in my hometown where I lived mere metres away from my primary school, with a rugby field at the back of our rather extensive garden. The distant shouting of those teams, or events at the school, could be heard through the air. Lawnmowers, church bells, nature, wind.

When combining the left and the right ear's experiences along with the reverberations of the hall, the typing of the keys on my laptop and the occasional footsteps of people coming and going, I find myself in a kind of musical paradise. There is nothing more therapeutic to me. I can close my eyes and disappear into unreality for as long as I'm permitted to do so before life rudely intrudes and makes me do things again.

It is a unique experience every time. There is no expectation of a chorus or a build up, a fill, a drop, a fade out. It never ends. It's a fresh, unknown experience every time.

So I find myself listening to a song I genuinely love until a moment clicks within me and I suddenly take my headphones off and decide instead to simply... experience sound. Free my ears.

But, alas, my irresponsible youthful self did everything it could to destroy my future self, my current self, and I am forever reminded that these actions do indeed have consequences, and my sound experience is one of the many things paying the toll:

Tinnitus

Yep, I got that pain in the ear. A high pitch ringing, forever. Most if not all people get tinnitus temporarily, but it's a whole other thing when it becomes permanent from all those ridiculously loud concerts I went to and all those cheap, unregulated headphones I would listen to on maximum volume which, in hindsight, physically hurts me just to think about even now.

Thank god for the invent of noise-cancelling, allowing me to enjoy all the details of beautiful music at 30% volume.

But the damage is already done. Admittedly, mine is nowhere near as bad as some people tell. Some are driven mad, or to suicide. Others living with it require multiple fans and white noise on their TV to be on constantly throughout the night just so they can sleep.

I do not suffer this extreme, but it is there. I can always hear it if I think about it - like now - but perhaps I think about it once every few days. This is no real bother.

However, when I find myself in the middle of the Swiss mountains, or an empty beach in Taiwan, or lying on a grassy hillside in England, or taking photos of the starry nights in the highlands of China or Nepal... it comes roaring back.

This is indeed one of my biggest regrets of my youth. No more will I ever be able to hear somebody say 'listen to that peace and quiet' without getting annoyed.

The one thing I yearn for above all, is to experience silence once more.

I suppose it is this yearning that made me truly appreciate the ambience of the world. Music blocks out my tinnitus, so I don't think about it. But when I hear the beauty of my surroundings, it's always there, reminding me that the world is that much more beautiful than I myself can actually experience.