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Music

Most-Played Song of 2020? For Many It's White Noise (nytimes.com) 59

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: In an average year, Spotify Wrapped is a sharing-optimized novelty hinging on nostalgia for a time that's barely passed. But in 2020, this data mirror instead presented many users with unexpected empirical evidence of their pandemic coping mechanisms: a strange hit parade of ambient music, background noise and calming sound effects that soothed them through an unusually anxious and sleepless time. While thousands of users posted in disbelief about their stress-inflected results, the situation made sense to Liz Pelly, a cultural critic who has written extensively about how Spotify and its competitors work to shape our listening habits. "It says a lot about the ways that corporate streaming services have ingrained themselves into our lives and facilitated music listening becoming more of a background experience," she said.

[...] The findings of some forthcoming research about pandemic coping mechanisms suggest ambient listening may be part of a larger pattern. Pablo Ripolles, a professor at New York University who studies music and the brain, was part of an international team of researchers that surveyed lockdown habits in Italy, Spain and the United States. Of 43 activities mentioned in a survey the team conducted, like cooking, prayer, exercise and sex, listening to or playing music had one of the biggest increases in engagement during lockdown, as well as the highest number of respondents who said it was the activity that helped them the most.
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Most-Played Song of 2020? For Many It's White Noise More

Most-Played Song of 2020? For Many It's White Noise

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  • Not black noise? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Carewolf ( 581105 ) on Thursday December 31, 2020 @04:04AM (#60881352) Homepage

    I thought all modern popular music had been replaced by various annoying forms for black noise.

    Or maybe I am just getting older.

    • Is it wrong to now refer to those songs as going to number one with a bullet?

      • It would have been fine for the M.I.A. song Paper Planes. But it peaked at number four. That song also had a radio edit with the gunshot sounds replaced with less realistic ones to keep from disturbing nearby people when it blasted out of cars.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Be grateful it is not pink noise. Yes, that is actually a real thing.

      • Be grateful it is not pink noise. Yes, that is actually a real thing.

        Pray they don't hit a brown note.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

        I'd hate to accidentally (s)hit an audience with that one. Careful with those grungedubstep tunings...

      • Be grateful it is not pink noise. Yes, that is actually a real thing.

        So is brown noise. Neener neener.

      • Most people working in music know about pink noise as it's one of the calibration noises used in setting up PAs and sound systems in mixing rooms. And yeah, it's a piercing, shitty sound to hear. I still remember the day I came to the venue a little too early for an outdoor Metallica gig and they were running the calibration sounds to set up the mixer. 50K Watts of pink noise blasting your face is NOT something you forget easily.

        • Most people working in music know about pink noise as it's one of the calibration noises used in setting up PAs and sound systems in mixing rooms. And yeah, it's a piercing, shitty sound to hear.

          Pink noise is just white noise with a slight treble roll off of -6dB per octave. I think it's better than white noise for relaxation as it's a little warmer and less harsh.

    • Re:Not black noise? (Score:4, Funny)

      by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Thursday December 31, 2020 @04:17AM (#60881368)
      Actually, black noise came first. White noise came along later and commercialized on it.

    • We do have brown noise, and while I was looking it up to refresh my memory, it's also known as red noise! Who knew?!

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • I make brown noise every morning at around 7:00 AM. And if it turns out to be red noise, I make an appointment with my general practitioner.

    • Most-Played Song of 2020..

      ..is something we will never know. The idea that platforms like spotify will accurately reveal actual play numbers is ludicrous on its face. Telling us what is popular is just too powerful a tool to have it reflect reality.

    • Black noise matters.
    • Music must also develop in a new trend to replace the old, if you like listening to classic music, you can refer to https://dzwonkinatelefon.pl/ [dzwonkinatelefon.pl]

  • In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Thursday December 31, 2020 @04:09AM (#60881358) Homepage

    People stuck at home for a long time tend to do more things that can easily be done at home as opposed to the office etc. Eg: "cooking, prayer, exercise and sex, listening to or playing music".

  • There will be lots of interesting stats about this year but honestly this seems like one of the least interesting.

    Of the list mentioned, personally I am more interested in sex and prayer statistics. Likewise what I assume to be a correlation between them, that more sex would mean less prayer and vice versa. However on /. we all know, no one has a sex life.

    Of those not mentioned, I think pregnancy, abortion, and divorce rates willall be very fascinating. I am currently living in China, so my sex life is

    • least atypical or most typical... eck!

    • Requiring a cool down period before divorce is a violation of the right of free association.

      What we need is a cool down period before marriage. Like you've gotta be living with someone and fucking them (assuming sex is a thing you do) for like three months before you get married.

      Seriously though, what we really need is for government to get out of the marriage game all but entirely. They shouldn't be involved with it at all except at the legal dispute level, and marriage should be a formal contract between

      • I agree about the nature of law and marriage. This is the essential foundation of "free love" as a social movement. It requires a lot of social breakdown with regards to marriage, family, and monogamy. For example a family can include more than three parents. However in Chinese culture we are very farvfrom seeing the logical distinction in these three concepts that are often seen as mutually assured. Even in America a large portion of the population would argue with you if you said these exist seperat

  • The most-played song of 2020 was Trump playing the accordian [youtube.com]

  • I go through cycles of what I like to listen to. I stopped listening to Trance about a decade ago, and returned to it in June, mainly to remember all the fun I had dancing to it.

    But there was one huge surprise: Armin van Buuren is STILL here, and STILL the King of Trance!

    It felt so good, almost like Trance was there waiting for me, letting me pick up where I left off.

  • Not really a surprise (Score:3)

    by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Thursday December 31, 2020 @04:56AM (#60881422) Journal
    Background stuff has always scored well. Youtube has lots of videos of fireplaces, 8 hours of oscillating fan noise, that sort of thing, and those videos have tens of millions of views.
  • ...but I prefer something more classic [youtube.com], thank you!

  • I'm dreaming of a white noise.

    Sorry.

    • Oh, one of my favorites! I hope nobody minds, but I'm gonna sing along!

      ~/ I'm dreaming of a white noise,
      Just like the ones I used to know
      Where the treetops burn

      And children listen
      To hear hangmen in the snow

      I'm dreaming of a white noise
      With every Holiday Greetings I write
      May your days be compliant and redlined
      Like all your Christmases have been white

      I'm dreaming if a white noise
      Like the ones I used to know
      Where the treetops burn
      And despicables listen to hear /~

  • With all the anxiety producing media weâ(TM)ve pumped into the mediasphere, More and more people turn to audio only media to cope with... the media. Thatâ(TM)s way the most listened media is white noise, yeah! hurr fpptppt smarts! yeay for mass media! Its an effective coping mechanism according to our stats that are literally exclusively biased to only those renting media! Durr!

  • Uhhhh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Neuroelectronic ( 643221 ) on Thursday December 31, 2020 @05:31AM (#60881472)

    So the most listened to track on streaming media is something people could listen to for free, by turning off streaming and listening to basically nothing, and this is somehow supposed to be evidence that streaming media is helping people cope with stress? Am I the only one here that is not a fucking idiot?

    • White noise is NOT what you can hear when you turn off everything, especially in terms of loudness. This said, I hope it's all fake news and there are no people, except for some weirdos, that listens to noise because they are anxious.

      • Unless you live by the sea and a wind is blowing. :D

      • White noise helps to block stuff out, and it's really helpful when you live in a crowded apartment building.

          Guess I'm a weirdo for using a white noise machine so I don't have to listen to the fake laughs and bullshit banter from my neighbors. :\

    • is something people could listen to for free, by turning off streaming and listening to basically nothing

      Only if you're a nerd who considers "listening to nothing" to be an op amp on a breadboard amplifying thermal noise from a resistor. And only because they give away old op amps for free at the makerspace.

    • You may be the only one that hasn't seen the millions of ASMR videos on YouTube that are essentially the same thing. They've been going around for about a decade but judging by the amount of times they're getting mentioned in pop culture the past few years, it seems pretty mainstream now. The surprising thing would be if they only just now started showing up on audio-only services.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lazarus ( 2879 )

      Am I the only one here that is not a fucking idiot?

      No bud, you just drank too much last night and don't have the cognitive means to sort out why everything is bugging you today.

      I have tinnitus (probably a result of centuries of alcoholism and living through the industrial revolution). Ambient music/noise is really helpful at blocking the broken tube television in my head that's screaming 24/7.

      As well, having background sounds without a well-defined beat help you focus. This is why people like to work in c

  • We've been in an anxiety pandemic ever since ~2004.
    And Covid, being actually real, and not just the usual shadows under the bed, of course kicked the collective mental illness* into ludicrous speed.

    I would love to test the correlations to:
    -- lack of lead pollution (Which apparently strongly correlates with violence and crime but also generally being less afraid and less ... square ... in the second half of the 20th century.),
    -- growing inteligence (=awareness of more possible dangers, but inability to hand

    • We've... since ~2004.

      You'll never be able to change how you feel if you don't start taking ownership and saying "I."

      I've been listening to Whitney Houston, AoA, and The Bangles all year. I don't have extra anxiety, now that the election uncertainties have passed.

      Since 2004?! When are you going to finally see somebody about it?

      Just some educated guesses...

      Wait, what??? OK, who were you quoting then?

  • Dozens? There's dozens of them?

  • Some of it is -- and anyone who believes listening to something will make their prick or their bank account bigger probably deserves what they get. OTOH, there is something to it all besides the soporific airplane engine effect. I've written a little about it [briandonohue.org] and the modest research so far done on it.

  • The track in TFA which claims to be white noise sure doesn't sound like white noise. It's frequency distribution sounds much more like pink or possibly brown noise centered around 400-500 Hz. Actual white noise would be grating to most because it biases strongly towards the higher frequencies.

    My go-to "track" is this SoX command in a Linux terminal:
    play -n -c1 synth brownnoise band -n 25

    ...which plays one mono channel of noise in a Brownian distribution, centered at 25 Hz, which is about as low as typical

    • pink or possibly brown

      Slashdot never could tell the difference, but in general, if it was the pink stuff you'd have known.

  • I thought "white noise" was referring to modern pop songs with modern production!

  • To block out all of the bullshit around us. I have a white noise machine for my bedroom, and a recording of a ham radio broadcast with birds chirping, complete with atmospheric noise and static lightning crashes, played on a continuous loop for when I am sitting out in public.

  • Basicalle people are listening to noises via a streaming service when a simple analogue AM radio will give the same result.
    I actually listen plain old radio on a channel where they talk, put music and so on, It actually helps to have a background, and it's useful because gives me a sense of time that working at home is somewhat missing.

    • A years ago, I was using an AM radio to create white noise on a blank station. I was on the high end of the dial (1600 or 1700), and it was just a nice atmospheric hiss. I layed down in my bed, starting to drift off to sleep when I heard a loud, shrill "BLEEREERRERP!" that startled the fuck out of me. It lasted only a second or two, but I did not expect something like that at all.

      From the sound of it, I believe it was a low speed data burst. I don't know why something like that would be on the AM broadcast

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