Eh?

Christmas is coming…

Well actually it’s not due for nearly a quarter of a year just yet, but it hasn’t stopped the retail centres of Hobart from starting to put trees and decorations on the shelves. I made an anticipatory joke about it as we got back from our honeymoon, and was a little surprised to see that reality had overtaken my sarcasm.

But what Christmas in the city tends to remind me of is carols, and the cacophony of musical dissonance. I’m not talking about dissonance in the sense of any specific christmas ditties – Silent Night and Jingle Bells are hardly replete with tritones – but the surreal wash of conflicting tuneage that you get as you walk past shop after shop, each blasting its own choice of holiday cheer. I’ll never really know what ADHD feels like (actually some people might take issue with that) but I can imagine that it might be something like the feeling you get as your brain attempts to track 5 familiar but unrelated melodies, diverting any additional computational power it might need from other activites like, oh… intelligible speech, or not running into walls.

I had a similar moment this-morning on the bus. The drivers tend to play 7HOFM, which is the local middle-of-the-road commercial station. Nothing too objectionable music-wise, and the “zany morning show banter” is just shy enough of completely mindless that it keeps me from wanting to jump out the window onto the highway. I generally read a book anyway, and there’s nothing on the radio that’s so distracting as to cause any problems there.

Except occasionally – like today – you’ll get someone who decides that an appropriate volume for their iPod headphones is the one that allows everyone within a 4-seat radius to hear what they’ve decided to listen to. He was three seats away from me, and across the aisle, and the leakage from his headphones was actually drowning out the radio in the speaker directly above me.

At the risk of sounding like a bit of an old fart (actually, I think I may have crossed that threshold somewhere in the last couple of paragraphs), WHY do people have to listen so loud?! I mean, hey… I’ve been playing in live bands at pubs since I was 16, and I absolutely understand the appeal of volume and dynamics when it comes to the enjoyment of music. But there comes a point of diminishing returns, and I’d say if your earbuds are running hard enough they can actually function as heating elements to keep your head warm, you’ve possibly passed that point.