VEGANGELICA

Thanks for addressing your comments about wisdom's wisdom. From my perspective, it has appeared that people in this thread are taunting him for his preferences and opinions. When I see a peckfest, I err on the side of caution and jump in to take a stand.

I can understand that you, in your experience, have never heard a song that you disliked because of its length.

I am, however, skeptical that you or Ki or others who like songs "regardless of length" would not get just a little bit bored by an extremely long song such that you started disliking the experience of listening to it. You may not have heard such a long song yet, but one could be out there.

Can you imagine getting bored while listening to an extremely long song simply because of its length? If so, then our only difference would be in how long a song has to be before we start feeling some negative feelings about it because of its length.

I can understand your feeling annoyed if it were true that I had misquoted you when I wrote the following:
However, I was not quoting you, Trollheart, but instead was creating a conditional sentence, which is a sentence discussing a hypothetical situation and its consequences. Conditional sentences contain two clauses, such as in this example: "If it rains [condition], (then) the picnic will be cancelled [consequence]." Conditional sentence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I wrote the above conditional sentence because I wished to test your limits to see if a song could ever get so long that it might feel excessive to you and reduce your appreciation of it.

I suspect I would get bored if I had to listen to a song that lasts 100 years, and its length would reduce my pleasure while listening. The reason I make this prediction is that I have discovered, through experience, that the longer a song lasts after around the five minute mark, the more likely I am to experience one of the following:

(1) Boredom or irritated, even if I like the long song's sound;
(2) A sense that the long song is disjointed and meandering, with its various parts no longer relating very much to each other because there are so many parts; or
(3) A sense that the long song is too repetitive, if the artist chose to use repetition to make the song so long.

A long song either has to include a lot of variety OR become repetitive (repeating sections or stretching them out for many minutes)...or both!...to create its long length, and I find too much variety and too much repetition in a song to be unappealing. How I define "too much" is subjective and reflects my preferences.

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I feel you have summarized our differences in listening styles very well, Ki.

It isn't unrealistic to like music; it is, in my opinion, unrealistic to claim that the length of a song can have no effect on your enjoyment of the song.

As with my analogy that I offered to Trollheart, if you had to listen to one artist's 100-year-long song (or if that seems too excessive to you, imagine a song that takes 1 day to listen to), can you imagine getting bored by doing the same activity for so long such that your pleasure in the song is reduced?

Yes, whether someone finds a song to be "too long" or "good" or "bad" is just personal preference and is subjective. No "proof" can be provided for an aesthetic opinion. (That's my opinion! )

This observation cuts both ways.

You will have a finite amount of time in your lives that you will spend listening to music. If you spend more of that time listening to longer songs, then you will miss out on hearing a larger number of shorter songs. If you spend less of that time listening to longer songs, then you will miss hearing the ends of longer songs, but you will have spent more time listening to shorter songs. With either music listening style, you will miss quite a bit of music that you might have liked.

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I agree.

Formulas distinguish music from random noise made without intention, and so I feel you make a valid point by noting that music follows at least some formulas or conventions (even if it it is just the convention of trying to break conventions! ).

I prefer a musical form that has a certain mixture of pattern (repetition) and variety. I have found that, in my experience, long songs tend to have either too much repetition or too much variety for my tastes (and sometimes both!), and their length exacerbates those problems.

I don't view songs as inherently "good" or "bad," but I definitely prefer certain songs to others, and I tend (as you know) to dislike longer songs.

I think biological reasons exist for people's responses to songs based on their length:

(1) Our brains tend to "tune out" repetitive or constant stimuli, such as an unchanging sound or smell so that we are no longer aware of them. If a song becomes too repetitive, which can be the case with long songs since they have a longer time than short songs to *become* repetitive, my brain starts to tune it out, and I find the song less interesting:

"The brain is interested in changes that it needs to react or respond to, and so brain cells are charged with looking for any of these differences, no matter how minute. This makes it a waste of time registering things that are not changing."

BBC - Future - Science & Environment - Adaptation: Why your brain loves to tune out

(2) Our brains search for pattern in the noise of stimuli.

If a long song has so much variety that it is hard for me to detect a relationship among its parts, then I tend to dislike the song because I miss finding a pattern or rationale for the song's structure. A long song that aims to provide a lot of variety can pack in much more variety than a short song and so is more likely to feel meandering and disjointed to me than a shorter song.

(3) People get bored, and so it makes sense (to me and you) that the length of songs can relate to listeners' sense of boredom:

"Scientists have found that our perception of boredom can be affected by our sense of passing time, which is managed by the frontal cortex in the brain." What happens to our brains when we're bored? - Curiosity

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