The Humanist Protocols Pt. 1: Pay Attention To The World

Hi all!

This is a brand-new series for all subscribers called The Humanist Protocols, where I'll share a series of personal essays on how to become a humanist in our distracted times.

And I'm super happy to announce that the A Mug of Insights podcast is back! You can now tune into the latest episode: Struggle To Put Thoughts On Paper? through Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts!

Please leave me your thoughts below in the comments. I'm really excited about this new chapter for A Mug of Insights, and I'd love to evolve this series based on your feedback.

Enjoy!

My partner and I get into a fight whenever we jump into the car to listen to music.

See, she’s a Spotify girl, and I’m an Apple Music boy. Spotify is a confetti canon of new music & curated playlists, whereas Apple Music is the closest thing to having a rack full of old records.

So, our conversation in the car goes something like this:

‘Apple Music’s selection is shit.’

‘All the albums I need are right here! Why would I need all that variety?’

‘Well, I can’t find anything good on here!’

‘Everything is good on here!’

Then, we’d continue driving without listening to anything for the next 30 minutes.

Now, 99% of people probably agree with my partner. Music is all about variety, and every trip in the car is about finding a soundscape to accompany a skyline.

But for me, I now approach music like how I approach anything: a borderline unhealthy obsession with repetition, and I want to walk away from an album knowing that I’ve memorised & understood every verse, every bridge and every chord progression.

While a part of me thinks that I’m due for a psychiatric evaluation, I think there is value in experiencing music in this way as a gateway to develop something that’s becoming increasingly rare: attention. Let me explain.

How jazz ruined my life

Music has always been a hard nut to crack in my life.

See, ever since I was 4, I was trained as a classical pianist in Shanghai. My childhood was full of episodes of playing Chopin with tears streaming down my face and clutching my scorebook with whitened knuckles before I headed in for a music grading.

In short, I hated music and just like any other classical musician, I thought music was always about deferred enjoyment. You can only see the magic of classical music after years of training.  

This all changed when I moved to Australia when I was 11. All of a sudden, all the music around me could be enjoyed without any training. I loved the strange new tunes that were coming out of the speakers in restaurants and the radio.

So, before the time of Shazam, I would memorise a tune from the radio or a restaurant, try to Google it (was it Stay in the Light or stayin alive?) and then save a bootlegged MP3 file onto my iPod Nano.

This resulted in a Smorgasbord of movie soundtracks, songs from Vines, random Michael Bublé numbers, the occasional Sinatra & Fitzgerald duets, and Martin Garrix EDM all housed in one tiny orange iPod. Back then, a pair of white, wired headphones and 30 minutes alone was all I needed to be happy. Music, as Fran Lebowitz said, was a drug that didn't kill me.

But then, I got into jazz…

Jazz is a strange case because it sounds enticing from the get-go, but it also has that intricacy of classical music. When I first heard a Miles Davis number, I didn’t know what to do with it. Should I enjoy it like that strange mix from my iPod, or should I sit down with a cup of coffee and dissect every bar?

I was so confused that I started reading books and taking university classes on jazz, and everywhere I turned, the answer remained the same.

The Jazz critic Ted Gioia summarised it quite well in How To Listen to Jazz:

‘Even if I’m a music critic and historian, I’m still no different from any other fan. I listen to music for pleasure, just like everyone else. But unlike most people, I feel compelled to analyze the music and try to pinpoint why I enjoy it.’

It’s not quite the classical music I hated when I was a child, but it’s also not quite a Martin Garrix mix. It demands pleasure and analysis at the same time, and this started my string of failed experiments with jazz.

A string of failed experiments… 

The first thing I did was to follow Ted’s prescription to a tee. He wrote about how he would slow down the music to see the structure and isolate instruments from a track, so that’s exactly what I did. I listened to the same album again and again, tried to pay attention to the instruments and even slowed down the track on YouTube to try to find the magic in the music.

But the closer I looked, the more I saw a 4-year-old me staring back with tears, lamenting that music is supposed to be enjoyed.

So, like many people having a quarter-life crisis, I thought that the only thing missing from my life was a record player. I dragged my partner to Costco and bought an Audio-Technica turntable, then darted over to JB Hi-Fi for a copy of Coltrane’s Blue Train before I sat on the floor, staring at the record spinning under the plastic lid, waiting for the magic to happen.

A few hours went by: nothing. Then, I got a CD of the same album to play in my car: nothing. Then, I even went to a jazz bar to listen to the number live: nothing.

Before I entertained the stupid idea of buying the score from eBay for $300, I decided to leave the album on in the background when I did some writing. See, at the time I only owned that one album: Blue Train, and it was all I listened to for the week of that string of failed experiments. But then one day, it all clicked.

I was packing up my gear to drive to karate practice one night, and my iPhone decided to autoplay the first track from that album. I don’t exactly know what happened, but the music moved me so much that I wanted to cry.

The opening theme gripped my ears, and Coltrane’s solo was so beautiful that I almost forgot to stop at a red light. Then I heard Lee Morgan’s trumpet solo, then Curtis Fuller’s Trombone, then Kenny Drew’s piano, then Paul Chambers’s bass, all backed by Philly Joe Jones’s drums. I saw the structure of the music and enjoyed it at the same time, and it was the best evening of my life.

Making sense of this sudden turn: attunement

Rita Felski wrote about this in her book Hooked: Art and Attachment. She called these moments ‘attunements’ where, out of nowhere, we find ourselves completely attached to a piece of art with no explanation. And one of the ways to reach this state with a piece of art is prior exposure.

In the book, she used the example of students reading literature in class. At first, a student reads a poem/novel mechanically. They memorise passages and regurgitate ideas with no inspiration. Then one day, a moment, a random conversation or a split second of seeing the poem/novel mentioned in a TV show sparks a moment of recognition. Life and art intersect, and they become totally attached to the said poem/novel.

I started thinking about all the numbers on my old, orange iPod. All the songs on there didn’t start off being my favourite, but I’ve heard them somewhere enough times that they took on a personal meaning for me. That’s when I became attached to them and cycled through them again and again without getting bored.

Moreover, attunement is a rare moment when we let the art speak without needing anything from it. The common reaction is: how could something this beautiful exist? And the next move is to listen to the same song again and again.

These moments, I would argue, are what make us truly human. It’s an act of acknowledging that there’s another human on the other side of this creation, and that their lived experiences & artworks have intersected with our lives. We’ve allowed a piece of art to see us as we are: other humans in this strange universe.

Back to my strange, strange listening habits

After that realisation, instead of viewing these moments as a bug, I see them as a feature of appreciating anything: music, art, writing, martial arts, you name it, and it’s an increasingly rare skill, especially in our world that’s constantly speeding up with novelty.

Nowadays, I head into an album expecting not to connect with it straight away. I know that for me to become attuned, I have to pay attention to its details, rhythms, lyrics, etc. with surplus attention. Yes, it takes a lot of time, and it looks incredibly boring.

Then, I allow my mind to wander. Sometimes, I’ll get a lyric stuck in my head. Sometimes, I’ll remember a chord progression from an alternative band. And sometimes, if I’m lucky, it will all click, and I’ll become completely attuned to an album and make it my personality for a week straight.

This is why now I have an album-first approach to listening to music, and while it looks strange and repetitive to a lot of people, I know what I’m going to get on the other end.

It is a gift to my younger self, acknowledging that deferred enjoyment is a condition for seeing more detail from a distracted world.

I don’t just want the music in my life to simply fade into soundscapes. I want to listen to them with the utmost attention, and in turn, they can reflect who I really am through what they bring up in me.

Until next week

Robin