How do I open my musical horrizon?
I want to explore new songs new artists new genres but it’s hard to listen to music you don’t know about/ never heard of and even harder to give it a chance when you have a short attention span. Should i stick to what I know and if not how do I find music that will peak and keep my interest?
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Try various radio stations to find new types of music that will pique your interest.
listen to hit singles from different bands, that’s usually how get to know more genres like that’s how I discovered 3 days grace, basshunter, “3”, and so on
Average song – 3 minutes
Your attention span – less than 3 minutes?
Have you thought of seeing your doctor?
@Bobbydavid if it goes 30 seconds ithout words I get bored and change the song
Learn how to sing. Learn how to play a musical instrument. Learn how to listen to music being able to identify the various instruments. Learn how to identify intervals, the major key, the minor key and so forth. This will rewire your brain and it will widen your horizon. You won’t be able to appreciate many genres without that training. Just checking out new websites won’t do the job. I’m serious. It’s like staring at chinese characters. Sure they might look beautiful.
if you truly want to expand your musical horizon, you should first know your music history. read quickly through periods of classical music. know the significance of bach, haydn, mozart, beethoven, brahms, tchaikovsky, mahler, shostakovich, stravinsky, john cage and so on. understand which composer falls into which period of music. from there venture out into jazz in chronological order. you can cover all of this in a relatively short time with just a few minutes of research everyday. of course, gaining good knowledge takes a lot of listening. but listening without knowing the time and circumstances under which it was written won’t let you gain much from it. Music is a huge form of art, the public now sees it as merely entertainment, yet it is far greater than that. To broaden your horizon, you need to think differently about music itself. There is a lot of imagination, emotion, structure and form in music. Popular music is constructed very simply, in rondo form usually and uses very simple chord progressions in order to construct a song. In popular music, lyrics play a big part of what should be taken in, and instrumental music is harder to get a grasp on since it requires experienced ears to understand whats going on. Gaining a broad horizon I don’t think is about finding what you like and don’t like, but a matter of research and trying to get a grasp on what has happened and what is happening now. Good luck with your ventures. Oh by the way.. I’m a musician, and even though I was trained in classical music, I write modern experimental music that you can listen to on http://myspace.com/mehmetaydin check it out and see if you can find the elements that construct the story on what is going on. cheers
Public radio offers a wide variety of music than normally found on commercial stations. Or, you might try www.woxy.com and see if it’s to your liking. It’s gaining popularity on a lot of college campuses that don’t have their own stations.
Rose…......I’m exactly the same!!!
I was going to suggest public radio also, but @PandoraBoxx beat me to it. The nice thing is that the programs often mix in a discussion of the music, the musicians or the composers, and the types of music range from folk or latin music to symphonies and movie music.
In fact, I have found many movie soundtracks to be a nice introduction to classical music in that if you have seen the movie the music is already familiar so you are better able to listen to it even if it is wordless.
thankya…not super used to it yet. just downloaded the iPhone app.
@Blondesjon its pretty good, but its no last.fm. I do like that it allows you to upload your own music to the online database to make playlists and such though.
@uberbatman . . .i thought you could upload your iTunes library to last.fm
@Blondesjon really? Like i know you can upload it as to show what songs you like and whatnot but i dindt think you could upload a song for say like me to send to you. I may be mistaken on that though.
oh, i’m not saying for sure. i could just swear i’ve run across the option on there. i guess i could check but, you know, keystrokes are so exhausting.
i have nooooooo clue what your talking about. i mean not that i just sat here with this page open waiting for you to respond rather than going and looking for myself :P
I don’t think you can do that. But I hope I’m wrong.
i was wrong…and now my fingers are tired :(
www.musicovery.com allows you to choose your mood and then it picks music for you. You can set it to only top 40 songs or things more off the beaten path.
Get some free indie junk.
Electronic music totally changed how I think about music. I started with daft punk, moved onto DJ shrapnel, and finally, Aphex Twin (and by then, I could listen to anything!). Aphex Twin (and IDM in general) is like the express route to tolerating different music :P
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