It's normal to play the same song over and over again (2016)
kqed.orgSemi professional musician here. Repetition goes way beyond what the author mentions:
- Most music is highly repetitive, often recycling 2 or 3 short segments (chorus, verse) with minor variations to fill out a whole song. Coltrane is known for his avant-garde composition, and even he repeats (often on a much smaller scale than a pop tune).
- The work of being a musician is repetitive. Learning (memorizing) songs takes reps! Then you've got to keep them fresh, teach them to new band members, etc. You probably have a limited book, and you know what the crowd pleasers are. Unless you're big enough to have a following cutting a song you're sick of isn't a problem, but filling out a set might be. Between rehearsal, gigs and practicing at home I probably play through most of my band's book at least twice a week.
- Being a musician is very physical, which means you're drilling exercises in your daily routine. As a brass player, I run more or less the same set of warmups, range builders and flexibility exercises every day. Drummers do rudiments. String players have their own shtick.
As far as listening to music, I don't typically put something on repeat unless I'm trying to transcribe it. But I'll listen to a song, and there's a chance it'll play on repeat in my head all day (or all week!). Steely Dan and LCD Soundsystem are particular earworms for me. It wasn't until college I realized this isn't true for many people.
I once had a gig playing piano at a restaurant. It was a weekday mid-day stretch and I was scheduled for about 3 or 4 hours, as I recall. I put together about a 90 minute set of stuff out of my fake books that I figured I could do without embarrassing myself and surely no one would stay at the restaurant longer than 90 minutes.
Well, being weekday mid-day, the restaurant was nearly empty and there was some guy who sat there by himself for over two hours. I ended up taking some of my standards and doing what I could to stretch them out, playing lots of repeats, doing extended improvs over the changes. I turned Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon” which I normally did as about a 4–5 minute piece following the structure of the Maynard Ferguson version which was the basis for the charts that I originally learned the song from into a 10 minute piece with extended improvs and some bonus repeats. “Night Train” turned into another 10-minute number. And this guy just did not leave. Finally, when I was almost out of material, he got up, dropped a twenty¹ in my tip jar and headed out.
⸻
1. I also got paid by the restaurant, but as I recall, he was the only customer out of the single-digit number of diners in the restaurant who left a tip.
> Most music is highly repetitive, often recycling 2 or 3 short segments (chorus, verse) with minor variations to fill out a whole song. Coltrane is known for his avant-garde composition, and even he repeats (often on a much smaller scale than a pop tune).
I'll note that a pop music current that has, I think, even less repetition than someone like Coltrane was the Progressive Rock genre, especially the originals in the early 1970s. Bands like Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Gentle Giant - they were all producing 10-20 minute songs that used repetition sparingly, instead of relying on a typical verse-chorus-verse structure. Not exclusively, mind, but each had quite a few, typically as centerpieces of their albums.
Prog is still alive and well. I love King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard. My fav lesser known prog is Caravan.
I'll give them a listen. I've tried to listen to a few things like Marillion and Dream Theater before, but it didn't seem to me that they get anywhere close to something like Yes' Close to the Edge. I'd be happy to find some other band that maybe does, especially if they are even newer.
> Marillion
My entire late 80's high school days were pretty much just listening to Marillion over and over again until my Walkman would wear out the cassette and I'd have to get another copy. Just something about Fish's brooding bitter anger appealed to my angsty teenage mind. Once Fish left though, they quickly moved away from what I was interest in listening to.
These days the one prog album I seem to keep going back to is "Tales From the Lush Attic" by IQ, although "Relayer" by Yes has been getting some good play lately.
I am in the beginning of a personal re-awakening with Marillion. I largely stopped following the band after _Seasons_End_ (despite liking that album). Much like Pink Floyd, I felt that the Whole was greater than the Sum of the parts: without his band to keep him grounded, Fish went into the weeds. Without their jester, the band seemed lessened lyrically.
But: I recently started exploring what they've done in the decades hence, and I am gaining a new appreciation of Hogarth's vocal expression. I find the studio/album version of the song "When I Meet God" to be particularly haunting.
P.S. On Youtube there is a 2-person band named Fleesh that has done spectacular covers of songs like /SFaJT and /Season's End/. Highly recommended.
I keep going back to them occasionally to see what they're up to. I agree, Hogarth has some great vocal skills. "Memory of Water" on "This Strange Engine" is stand out, and much of the album "Brave" is really good. But they still have never really clicked for me. Definitely agree on Fish going into the weeds. I really, really wanted to like his solo stuff, and I do go back to "Vigil" occasionally, but most of his stuff is just rambling and doesn't have the backing band to make it work.
ETA: Oh my goodness, that lady in Fleesh has a beautiful voice. Their version of "Sugar Mice" is stunningly great.
I’ve found that Fish solo is much more satisfying than Fishless Marillion. Steve Hogarth’s vocals seem completely without character to me, especially compared to Fish.
Check out Haken
Thanks for this. I'm listening to "Aquarius" now and I like what I hear so far.
You might like Spock’s Beard. The first 6 albums with Neal Morse have kind of a Yes meets Gentle Giant vibe to them. I like the later stuff as well, but I remember introducing a prog-loving friend to them with a post-Neal show and it was interesting how he managed to pick out the Neal Morse–era songs (and only those) they did as his favorites.
Thank you for the suggestion! Tried out Beware of Darkness and I really enjoyed it, it did remind me of Gentle Giant and Yes in various places!
Prog metal can be fantastic, too. Opeth is a band I seem to listen to daily.
A mid period band I don't hear about much anymore is Queensryche.
Thanks for sharing your experience with us!
I'm not a professional musician, but I've played and performed in different settings for about 15 years.
Until reading your comment, I didn't realize that many people don't get songs stuck in their head. I often get very long and complex songs stuck in my head for hours to days. Sometimes it's just portions, but sometimes it can be the full song.
I don't quite know how to describe my recollection of music, but it seems to be somewhat akin to eiditic memory, but for sounds. After looking into things, the term eichoic memory seems to come up, but I'm not sure it quite encapsulates what I'm trying to express.
Out of curiousity, do you have aphantasia? I do, and often wonder if the strength of my music recollection comes from a lack of visual recollection in my mind.
Sometimes it takes a few listens to fully memorize a song, but I can revisit music many years later and still have perfect recollection of the piece despite the complexity of the music I tend towards.
For example, my favorite band is Between the Buried and Me (a progressive metal band) and their compositions tend to use a ton of complex and mixed meter, as well as non-repetitive rhythmic patterns. Despite all that, I have perfect recollection of their music—even for songs over 17 minutes long.
Sorry for the long response—your comment just triggered some things I've been thinking about for a while and I wanted to process them and share.
I have aphantasia, and I also remember songs in multiple parts vividly. I won't go so far as to say it's eichoic--I can't, for example, turn around and just play a version of it on piano like some people I know, and I'm fairly sure I'm recalling an approximation in a lot of cases--but it's a detailed enough recollection I can "listen" to songs that way by recalling them. It's very much in contrast to my non-existent ability to recall even a familiar image.
I've considered cause/effect on this before and personally just decided it was probably coincidence combined with my poor visual memory making the other types seem that much more impressive. There's no particular compensatory mechanism I can think of that would explain remembering sound better because I remember vision worse.
Interestingly, I've never been any better at composition (i.e., imagining novel music) because of this. To the extent I've composed, I still pick stuff out a part at a time and figure out how it fits rather than starting with a finished sound in my head to recreate.
Thanks for sharing!
I view things like perfect pitch as distinct from a strong musical recollection. With effort, I can transcribe music and eventually learn it, but it's a separate skill in my mind.
The ability to "listen" to songs by recalling them is more what I was referring to when discussing my experiences. I'm with you on the non-existent ability to recall imagery.
I have no idea if there is some type of connection between the two, but it's interesting that at least two of us seem to have similar experiences!
Some composers are more repetitive than others. There’s an old joke:
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Philip Glass
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Philip Glass
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Philip Glass
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Elliott Carter. He intentionally tried to avoid repetition in his works.
I was into his string quartets for a while about forty-five years ago but haven’t heard them since. Maybe it’s time to listen to them again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wse3ZoUXo5M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQgZEGsUpw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6njANe60Evw
> Maybe it’s time to listen to them again.
Elliott Carter would strongly disagree. :)
A lot of Baroque music is through-composed. For instance, the Prelude and Fugue forms that J. S. Bach composed some of his music in don't contain outright repetition, or not very much. Themes recur, of course, but in different settings: differently harmonized, in different keys and so on. The two-part form features repetition that may be omitted: while it's common to perform AABB, it can just be AAB, or AB. Sometimes there is a slightly alternative ending in B for when it is followed by A again. The Rondeau form has explicit repetition: AA BA CA ... XA.
Baroque music is often highly repetitive (even fugues are a form of material repetition!) - I would think there was a distinct trend from the 1600s to the mid 1900s where classical music became more and more through composed, until minimalism became suddenly popular.
I think, you cannot have unity in a musical work if there is something new at every turn which does not reappear in any shape or form. In the best music from the Baroque era, there is new material throughout a piece. Many passages introduce motifs that do not make a reappearance. Or make a disguised reappearance just once.
I think, you will be hard-pressed to find two identical bars in a Bach fugue, where all the voices are doing exactly the same thing that was heard before. Even if a recurring theme appears, it's in a different way. Blatant copy and pasting is basically anti-fugue. Fugue-fail.
I'd agree it's rare to have exact repetition of a whole measure across all staves in a fugue, but you can certainly write a fugue using an initial theme and nothing but copy & paste with pitch shifting. Which you couldn't do for, say, a typical solo piano work by Scriabin or Messiaen...
"On the opposite end of the spectrum is Elliott Carter. He intentionally tried to avoid repetition in his works."
Yes, exactly ! That is why Elliott`s work sound like instruments talking to one another, like 4 instruments talking to each other with emotions & expressions each instrument having a specific character.
On the other hand generally we perceive some degree to repeatability as music.
My stepfather is a composer who follows in the path of Ives, one of Carter’s influences. Have been to quite a few concerts by many composers and musicians emulating Ives and Carter and others. As an amateur jazz & classical musician myself, I can understand some of the ideas my stepfather talks about, in the sense of academic concepts. The music in general doesn’t grab me or move me other than in fleeting moments perhaps, the lack of (to me) discernible patterns leaves me feeling like I have nothing to grab onto. I’d love to hear how you (or anyone) enjoy this music, what about it inspires you, what you like about it, does it evoke emotions, how is it similar or different from more mainstream music, etc. For a long time the question in my head has been, am I not enjoying this music because I don’t understand it, or am I just a person who enjoys only certain kinds of music.
> I’d love to hear how you ... enjoy this music ...
I can’t say I do enjoy that music, to be honest. When I was in my late teens and early twenties—as I said, around forty-five years ago—I was attracted by the notion that some 20th century classical composers were breaking new ground, throwing off old-fashioned constraints, being revolutionary, etc. I had studied traditional music theory and learned to play Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, etc. on the piano, and those more recent composers’ formal experimentations seemed exciting. My youthful rebellious infatuation with their music didn’t last long, and ever since I have listened to more conventional tonal music—not only Western classical but also rock, folk, jazz, reggae, etc.
I did get a bit more out of Elliott Carter when I was young, though, than I did out of other avant garde composers. Amid all the disorder there was something trippy and emotive about his music. These days, for a similar effect, I listen to Bach fugues, which have been mentioned by other commenters here. If anyone is interested, here’s an arrangement of the Art of Fugue that I listened to for the first time the other day and really liked:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lRi9N_I7iJUGXi...
As of this writing, the musicians’ channel has all of 14 subscribers, including (just now) me.
> He intentionally tried to avoid repetition in his works. I was into his string quartets for a while about forty-five years ago but haven’t heard them since.
I'd argue that the lack of repetition led to things being less memorable.
Who would argue against some things being more easily forgotten when they aren't repeated?
> On the opposite end of the spectrum is Elliott Carter. He intentionally tried to avoid repetition in his works.
Aha! So this is what the local classical radio station was playing during its avant garde sets.
Elliott Carter - String Quartet No. 1 is, I find, a deeply deeply irritating work, moreover its advocates are pretentious in the same vein that avant garde jazz muzos are, witness the comment, "Carter always wrote such visceral, intense music for strings. I suspect he really loved the physicality of string instruments." Yeah, right, sure. Call me a philistine, I don't care. Spare me.
Stockhausen!
I don’t remember much repetition from him either
I love that joke. I will also mention Terry Riley.
I’ll add to this—when writing music, a lot of people (myself included) make the mistake of not using enough repetition!
I think this is right. A lot of my favorite music finds ways to rotate what's repeating. It finds a balance of keeping the groove while still playing with the listener's expectations. But, to your point, if there isn't enough repetition, there's not enough to grab hold of. Obviously, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish, but for most applications, you want to give the listener engaged with your music.
Beyond, or beneath, song structure, I've noticed that experienced songwriters repeat notes in their melodies more often than people starting out.
mpv skips forward a minute with the up key (sometimes to keyframes by default, but not with flac it seems) and it surprises me a bit how often you can do that and the music doesn't change at all, or only changes slightly :/.
Beats on repeat repeating on me…
LCD Soundsystem is great for this.
You know that feeling when you wake up in the morning, and the first thought in your head is the sound of the song that's been there for 3 days already? You must have been dreaming the song before you woke up!
> Coltrane is known for his avant-garde composition, and even he repeats (often on a much smaller scale than a pop tune).
"A love supreme" immediately sprang to mind.. I guess all that repetition worked.
Except one Trane solo is worth about 4 regular songs’ in complexity
I appreciate this. I’ve had days where at work I’ve played a new song I’ve gotten into at least 30 times, sometimes with a few songs to break it up, often not though. I’ve always assumed it was slightly strange, but also probably not that strange. I also relate to the authors explanation. I’ll get tired of a song eventually, for a while, but one day come back to it and get into another usually less intense loop.
I don’t really understand what happens, but to be honest, I’m not really sure I’m bothered by my lack of understanding either. It’s just an experience that I can explain simply “I listened to this song on repeat 37 times today”, and yet I can’t explain it at all “Why does this happen? Why this song from an anime I’ve never seen? Beats me!”
Once you sleep on the song once or twice the enjoyment fades. Like that favorite song from the radio, you listen 4 or 5 times over several days and the excitement is gone. So you mine as well enjoy it 40 times in a row on day one.
It's like forgetting the words to your favorite song
You can't believe it; you were always singing along
It was so easy and the words so sweet
You can't remember; you try to feel the beat
-- Regina Spektor, Eet - https://youtu.be/nlK0zYZLBGY
That was one of my repeat songs!
My experience with albums (LPs, remember?) was that a handful of songs would attract me fairly quickly, while other's were, meh.
It was good that there were songs that hooked me early because I would wait patiently through the less-appealing songs for those good ones.
Some months or so later, the tracks had flipped — burned out on the hooky songs, loving the once-meh songs.
(I can specifically remember this to be the case with both Murmur and Reckoning when they came out — yes, I am old.)
Once I checked the stats and I had listened to a single specific song 150 times in a single year. I wouldn't be surprised if I've reached 500 by now
What song?
(I might have hit that count with Lebanese Blonde by Thievery Corporation a few years back...)
I'm the complete opposite. Playing music on repeat ruins it. But if I listen to a song/album relatively rarely, it feels just as good every time. I also notice new subtle details once in a while, and that makes it even better.
I have songs that I absolutely love and have loved for years now. I just make sure not to overdo it.
Feel like this is probably a better way to manage it if I'm being honest. Actually, this is a bit of a similar way I'd listen to jam bands (Grateful Dead, Phish, Railroad Earth, etc.) Usually too long to listen to on repeat, but interesting enough to listen to many times and pick up on things.
For me, I think short term this is kinda how it works. Although a point I'd make is that is not that I enjoy it less often, it's just that I move onto other things.
Long term though, songs I loop like this can always return and restart their cycle. So it doesn't completely ruin it for me or anything after a few days.
For me the enjoyment fades only if the song itself is not very good to begin with; I start to notice the flaws and after a while I start to hate it and wonder why I even liked it in the first place. Good songs tend to pass the test of being listened to on repeat for me.
And then it's time to find your next fix.
In a year or two, that song might be able to bring you back to that point in time. I've started building playlists by the year I discovered the song. It's a trip.
When I was younger I would get hooked on a CD. I'd do it so much that the current game I was also hooked on and the music I was listening to get intertwined into a single memory (if I see the game I remember the music, and vice versa).
These days with Spotify I get hooked on a single song and will often play that song over and over for a week or two.
I had this with books! I would play one album per book. And still when I pick up the book I hear the music and know where I was when reading it. And the other way around. When I hear the album I see the pages of the book again.
Walking on Glass - Iain Banks
and
In-sides - Orbital
been stuck there for 25 years or so
Orbital is a great band to be stuck on! One of the few I don’t tire of.
I've unfortunately at least tired of "Halcyon" because the youtube algorithm just won't stop playing it to me when I have autoplay on.
I do it to focus. Loop a known energetic song.
I do it with a single album (No More Shall We Part by Nick Cave) but it's been my focus music for about twenty years now.
I'm terrified of this. I've no idea why, but if I hear a song too many times in a couple day period I have a night of fever dreaming where I wake up over and over again to the song in my head. It's like my brain has over conditioned the pathway for that song and as soon as it starts trying to dream it falls into it and the dream breaks and I wake up. It happens to me a couple times a year and when I hear any of the songs it's happened with before I feel a deep physical revulsion.
I kind of wonder if it's a symptom of something but am otherwise more or less 100% neurotypical so I think it's just a weird quirk.
I hope you never have to work retail, they often have the same approved songs on repeat all day.
I worked at a gym, and to this day, there are songs I don't even like that pop up in my head. 3 years of hearing them every day just about drove me spare.
My dad still whines about Peter Frampton due to his time on a submarine in the late 70s. Could only take so much vinyl out to sea and I guess shanties were out of fashion haha.
I personally tend to listen to full albums repetitively. Lately it has been Billy Cobham’s Spectrum and some Khruangbin albums. I also play drums and tend to study the same handful of songs for a few months at a time. Ok maybe I’ve been meditating on Stevie Wonder’s Superstition for over a year haha.
Khruangbin is great work/focus music, they sink into a groove and stay there for a while so you don't get distracted too easily. Their early stuff with no lyrics was even less distracting but they don't go heavy on the lyrics anyway.
Collectively, the U.S. as a country, I think, have heard Hotel California enough. Thank you.
Yup, it sucks. For me it isn't even so much the song as it is how it transports me back to that job. Like, I hear the song and can picture myself doing certain tasks in the retail store I worked at while listening to it.
Working in retail or restaurants during Christmas season is absolute torture. There's not a single Christmas song I enjoy anymore.
I once had a song stuck in my head every day for over two years! It got to the point I would hear a note from the melody with every step. Walking up stairs was horrible. The worst part was I didn't know what the song was. I figured out the melody on the piano, and once I finally figured out the song, it eventually stopped.
The song? A stupid commercial jingle. "Meow meow meow meow..."
There was a period in my life when a mantra(?) of sorts was stuck in my head. Just a short phrase or word (I think actually for a long stretch the number "256" was stuck in my head). For reasons unknown to me I would repeat the phrase in my mind or under my breath — seemingly as a way to either keep focus on some current thought or to derail the current thought. I don't remember which.
I think I was under a lot of stress then — I have worked on a team or two where the project (and management) were stressful. So likely that is it.
(Also a tell: I began to notice my handwriting when I signed checks was deteriorating to something scrawly, uncontrolled — when I switched teams and made other changes in my life to reduce stress I found my signature return to the more graceful strokes I was used to.)
Musically, there is (still) often a song stuck in my head. But I put music on in the background nearly every day, seems to keep the song in my head moving along to something new....
I never really made a connection with music getting stuck in my head, but I often get short phrases or words stuck in my head on constant repeat for days at a time too.
The stress relationship may have something to do with it though. The times where it happened the most are pretty strongly correlated with high periods of stress in my life as well.
It often happens for words that I realized I was pronouncing wrong from only having read them and never having heard them. For example, sepulcher and dais come to mind as words that I repeated internally with no control for days on end and they're both words that I was mispronouncing until I heard them while reading and listening to an audiobook at the same time.
Interesting little quirk of the mind I suppose.
Exact same thing with me, to the point where I have to deliberately avoid listening to some tracks to avoid insomnia triggers. It wears off with most tracks, but I still can't hear "See-Line Woman".
Ironically, this happened to my daughter after listening to Duran Duran's "Last Night in the City" which starts with the prominent lyric "I'm not gonna sleep tonight"
Wow, surprised to hear this happens to other people! When I discover a new song I love, I'll nearly always have a night where I wake up with the song blaring in my head. Even if I don't know the song that well, my mind somehow reproduces intricate detail and fills in instrumental or lyrical gaps. In my teens and 20s I had really severe ear worms, some lasting for days or weeks. Fortunately that has lessened with age, but the nighttime concerts are still a regular occurrence.
> I've no idea why, but if I hear a song too many times in a couple day period I have a night of fever dreaming where I wake up over and over again to the song in my head.
Do you use stimulants of any kind? I have a pet theory that even high doses of caffeine can lead to earworms or IMI. I think there’s even OTC medicines that are well known to contribute to earworms.
I get it when I substitute methylphenidate with caffeine for a day or so (which is how I keep myself below 20mg MPH a day), and usually just at the crash point.
A song stuck in my head can make me restless all night as well.
One fix I’ve found that often works for me is listening to instrumental jazz every night before bed. It’s variable/random enough that it knocks the stuck song out of my mind without replacing it with another. Search for “jazz for sleep” playlists, there are a few decent ones out there.
As an adult I never experienced this, but I have vivid memories of staring up at the ceiling at 3 AM hearing "Paradise by the dashboard lights" play over and over and over again as a teen.
♪♪♪ Wake me up before you go go, don't leave me hangin on like a yo-yo! ♪♪♪
What about music without singing? Does it happen listening to that as well?
Yes.
I've had this happen with various Ace Attorney soundtracks[1]. The best bit of advice I found to beat the earworm was to play the song to the end in my head. Which didn't help a bit, because every song on those soundtracks has a loop point.
[1]: example here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-QiKy-iEkQ
OP here
Stumbled upon this article while researching reasons why Wes Montgomery is so good; Not because I was looking for an objective fact; Rather, just wanted to read some of the love others have for his voice
While reading this article it struck me how well written the article is. Certainly the subject is relatable and Wes is more of a grace note than the melody of this article, yet the article was written by a human who has found Wes and elevated him to his pantheon of "repeatability", making this article ultimately worth reading and sharing. Maybe even....more than once
Nice article! Thanks for sharing.
You could append “(2016)” to the title if the edit window is still open. Generally older articles that get posted to HN have it so that readers know it’s not new news. /cc @dang
Back in my first job we had a CD drive but somehow only one music CD, so me and the other guy in that office just kept listening to that one all day.
Now despite access to all the music in the world, I still have per-project playlists. So I might listen to the same ten songs again and again for weeks on end, as starting the soundtrack quickly puts me in the mood to resume work where I last left off.
I've also adopted a mild superstition that it's bad to listen to the soundtrack for a project that failed.
With me it's similar: I don't play individual songs on repeat, I play whole albums (mostly on Spotify however, not on CD). But I change the album once in a while. Listening to new music or one of those endless Spotify playlists doesn't allow me to concentrate on programming, the music has to be familiar.
" And is it cognitively normal -- not to mention socially normal -- to listen to so many songs[...]on repeat, day after day after day?"
Even provided it wasn't normal, how any person engages with art is up to them and it doesn't require someone else's approval. No need for your tastes to be normal.
And as Nabokov used to point out, a good reader, that is an active and creative reader is a rereader. Same goes for music. Many incredibly talented people spend their entire lives studying and playing a handful or maybe only even one composer, so why shouldn't listeners do the same.
Interesting that you bring that up (rereading). I found that the first and foremost reason to learn at least a few poems by heart is that you will be able to "reread" them at will without the printed text: on the bus, in the shower, etc. It helps you appreciate the text so much more.
Active listening is a real pleasure. Qualitatively, it’s a very different experience to having music on in the background while doing some other activity, and it merits listening on repeat.
Mentally separating out the different voices in the composition, listening for how they enter and exit the soundstage, how that layering of sound builds up the texture of the music, not to mention melody, harmony, dynamics, pacing, phrasing, repetition, structure, timbre, rhythm, and the interplay of all these factors.
Everyone should be able to enjoy art in the way they like - but be considerate of the people around you.
The article starts with the anecdote that his son was seriously annoyed by the song - and then goes on to counter him with basically "but it's such a great song, it would be a shame if I could only listen to it for 3 minutes!"
That's the musical equivalent of getting out your Triple Onionator with extra garlic for lunch and, when your coworker complains, shutting him up with "but it's so tasty!!"
Please be nice to your non-repetitionist fellows and wear some headphones.
There are some songs that I think I enjoy because of their brevity. I sort of look forward to the encounter, pine for the song again when it's over.
Rather than put it on repeat though I always shuffle, preferring to (impatiently) await our next visit. (My music library is such now that it can be a while before it comes along again.)
wow. what a great comment
There must be a certain amount of discernment and refinement that comes with savoring songs in such a way... though having built said music library must have been fun.
I was looking through my playlist (sort by duration) and the obvious example that leapt out at me was Simon and Garfunkle's Bookends (under 90 seconds).
Seems boring; Would rather move to Canada and make juice
This reminds me of this classic bit of radio I stumbled onto. A WFMU DJ playing Bob Dylan's 17 minute long ballad about J.F.Kennedy 'Murder Most Foul' over and over for three hours. It's archived here. https://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/92415
I'm opposite; more than one hearing of same song per day and something inside gets triggered. Books, movies, shows, I need to wait something like two years before I can enjoy them again. My mind for some reason dislikes repetition. For background music I put on chill-hop which has a lot repetition inside individual songs but the live stream doesn't repeat tracks.
I've noticed than my enjoyment in any song peaks at around 3rd or 4th listening. After that I can enjoy a (good) song for hundred more times but it will never exceed that feeling of familiarity combined with freshness.
I tried putting the "Impressions" track on loop for 20 mins. It's a great melody and quite engaging listen, but I was distracted each time the song jarringly looped back to beginning.
I have the same! I wish music players and recommendation systems had support for this. I'd like an option "This song is great, but stop playing it for a month or I'll start to hate it".
My player is not as precise as that but it works for me. I have a dedicated skip button and I keep adding meta keys to make it skip more (each meta key is x2).
I seldom want to choose a track to play. The next track to play is automatically selected based on the combination of two factors: being skipped less and being selected less.
I get to hear my whole collection in a way that's far more enjoyable than an unweighted shuffle.
That sounds brilliant. Did you roll out your own player?
Thanks. No, what I wrote just selects tracks. I use mpv to play them.
The dopamine release diminishes the more you repeate.
People who enjoy repetition (in this context) are maybe doing that more as a calm or focus mediator, rather than pleasure.
This would indicate that your pattern storage and recognition of songs lasts up too two years. Given a songs "unique" data density, and your listening habbits, we could computate the storage capacity of music in your brain, until brain internal compression degrades the recognition to nil.
Lets find out how many terrabytes of you are made of this. Who m i to disagree, i travell the world and the 7 seas..
I feel kinda similar, would like to know your opinion to this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6WNB9JN_2o
Works great, cozy and doesn't draw attention.
My wife plays the same song over and over. This may be acceptable for those who listen songs on repeat, but it's terrible for those who live with them.
Haha I feel this so much. Only a few minutes ago I asked my girlfriend to pick a few new songs to listen to...
I often listen to the same song on repeat for days in a row during periods of intense work. Usually "Djohariah" by Sufjan Stevens. It helps that it's like 17 minutes long. But I also listen to "Saturn" by the same artist, which is only 3 to 4 minutes long. It kinda puts me in a trance.
Sadly, the enjoyment of popular music has been so decimated by dynamic compression that I rarely repeat a song mastered (or, heaven forbid, "remastered") since the mid-'90s.
What should be very catchy music is now a fatiguing wall of noise that you just don't want assaulting your eardrums any more.
I often wondered what the term / production technique was, and "dynamic compression" it is.
Makes me think of Oasis records from the early 90s that were mastered to be the loudest sounding songs on the pub jukebox, and they were, then.
Yep. It's so insidious, stupid, and destructive. Every recording artist and consumer has superb fidelity available, and yet today's music sounds like absolute shit.
I have 45s from the '80s whose sound quality utterly destroys all-digital masters from the last decade. And that's not a digital-vs.-analog thing; I can make MP3s out of those 45s that will still destroy "lossless" versions of the same song on Apple Music.
Related: Linkin Park Man https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/843/303/10e...
> I’ve listened to Montgomery’s Impressions recording for as long as an hour straight
I've spent many consecutive days with the same song on loop for several hours a day. Was hoping this article would validate that a bit more, but I'll take what I can get.
Yeah really, I've listened to the same 11-second loop for over an hour! (William Basinski's "El Camino Real")
By the way, for all you loopheads out there, here's a protip: drop the song you're looping into Audacity and slow it down by 5%. It tricks your brain into processing the song as "new" again, so you can wring a few more listens out of it.
I do this. A lot. Play the same song over and over and over. Often this is just in appreciation of a particular song (do this a lot with Yeasayer tracks).
But these days, I most often do the repeat while I'm programming or writing; I want to keep in a particular zone-emotional and mental. Here are some tracks I've done this with (a good "music for programmers" list, actually).
Meeting in the Aisle - Radiohead
Sketches - Daniel Lanois
Jolie Cycliste Sous la Pluie - Galerie Stratique
In Threes - Loscil
Gelis - Natureboy Flako
Closed Circuit - Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith
Birds Fly by Flapping Their Wings - Biosphere
Unknown - Kutiman
Rainforest Suite - Robert Rich
Surface Currents - Kutiman
Structures from Silence - Steve Roach
Le Ballet des Mouches - Michel Moulinie **
No Partial - Rhythm & Sound
Mango Drive - Rhythm & Sound
Minus - Robert Hood
Echoes of Nothing I - Kyle Gann,, Aron Kallay from the Beyond 12 compilation
Night Vigil I - Michael Harrison
Sun Inside The Sun Loscil Remix - Souns, Loscil
Black Monk In The Dunes - X.Y.R.
** This (and the rest of the album Chrysalide) is a brilliant brilliant gem, and almost impossible to find, except here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUWvXb6jVpw&list=PLh2Bth4KYI...
The brain looks for rhythmic and melodic resolution, and in lots of popular music – and popular classical music – themes tend to resolve in 4, 8 or 16 bars. However, in some Latin American music, themes continuously develop, telling a story with "jazzy" chords that don't completely resolve immediately, and in other music, such as some classical music and even black metal, the challenge is for the brain to be willing to go into unresolved dissonance; one famous example is the Tristan chord, where the resolution takes rather literally the time of a whole Wagner opera.
It would be interesting to see a study on the correlation between musical taste and delayed gratification in general, though of course different situations require different musical choices – one wouldn't pick something that requires mental focus when cleaning the house.
Before CDs, I laboriously made a tape with Queen's "We Will Rock You" repeated over and over. I wanted it for car stereo demonstrations, but when others found I had it I sold dozens of copies, mostly to people who just liked the song.
Nobody was interest in my Mozart supercuts, alas.
I really enjoyed this book which covers the subject deeply https://www.amazon.com/Repeat-How-Music-Plays-Mind/dp/019999...
That book is mentioned throughout the article ;)
Interesting been hoping this topic would get discussed at some point.. I've noticed at certain times I get this happen to me. Nootropics can also seem to amplify the addictive effect.
A few of these I think I listened in excess of 200x in a week. Some being particularly more addictive whilst driving.
https://youtu.be/Q-AAVX6Re30 https://youtu.be/sN3C-CEJtyM https://youtu.be/frCVrHATnLo https://youtu.be/gPRtxgirjFQ https://youtu.be/FvzgtCpVzcA https://youtu.be/QxB0S6bxvEs https://youtu.be/sIn1asgcZEU https://youtu.be/fPdKHueTseY
I sometimes play the same song on loop for days; especially when I am trying crack a complex algorithm or trying to come up with the system design of a large pipeline.
My hypothesis being: with every repetition the song move toward the "background of my mind" such that I am not spending too much "compute time" on the song itself; the sound is still there, helping me ignore external noises and therefore I am able to focus more on the task at hand.
PS: 2 songs that have helped me Between The Bars, Elliot Smith Memorial, Russian Cirlce ft Chelsea Wolfe
I'm curious about other people's experiences with how they choose what music to listen to.
Many of my friends carefully curate playlists on Spotify, or listen to the playlists they make for you. Others listen to the radio and just enjoy whatever comes on.
On the other hand, I have a large library of music (~13k songs) and just kind of decide what I'm in the mood for on a whim. No playlists, just a large collection of albums that I manually select or tell Siri to play for me. This method doesn't even work with Spotify for me due to their 9,999 song limit for libraries so I had to change to Apple Music when it surpassed that amount.
I don't think I've ever met another person who manages their music collection the same way so I'm curious about how rare it is. Shockingly, I manage to not fall into habits of listening to the same thing over and over, but actually enjoy the majority of the music somewhat regularly.
If my entire library were put on shuffle, I could likely name the artist with around 80% accuracy and the song / album with maybe 50% accuracy. There are definitely ones that I get wrong, but with a library of that size, I don't think it's particularly realistic to memorize everything.
Back before I switched to streaming, I did the same thing. I had ~5k songs and zero playlists. I just dumped albums into the play queue (whatever I felt like in the moment) and shuffled them. I always knew what song was playing.
It gave me a level of familiarity and appreciation for my collection that I miss with streaming.
I eventually switched to streaming for a couple of reasons. One is that managing many tens of GB of FLAC files and syncing them between devices is a big pain. It was especially bad when I made the switch about 5 years ago, when 64GB storage was a lot for a phone.
The other reason is my musical tastes shifted away from stuff that's readily available on CD or download. Most of the artists I listen to now only publish to streaming, and the streaming apps just aren't so good at the ad-hoc play queue workflow.
One day I'd like to use the Spotify SDK and recreate the Amarok 1.4 interface with Spotify's library.
Thanks for sharing!
I feel you on curating and self-managing FLAC files. At the end of the day, it just wasn't worth the effort I used to spend managing them all.
I'm not sure what streaming app you use, but to accomplish your old method of listening on Apple Music at least, you could just go to each album you wanted to enjoy and add it to the Up Next queue a full album at a time. From there just set the queue to shuffle and it sounds like that would do what you're missing!
Maybe you've already tried that and ran into issues that I can't think of, but I've done something similar in the past and it was pretty capable at handling an ad-hoc workflow.
That Amarok 1.4 interface project sounds fun! Best of luck on it if you decide to tackle it!
I do that with a currently similar size library, although a fair chunk of that is new so maybe more like 5-8k songs that I've usually been listening to, mostly in albums. Maybe more repetition than you, particularly when I first get an album (for me there is a "burn this album or song into my memory" aspect of repetition), but I often pick out an album or artist I'm in the mood for and haven't heard for a while. For me it is mostly FLAC files that I play with mpv, organized in directories by artist and album (often shortened to easily type, in the /a directory). I think many people don't like albums for some reason but for those of us that do it much easier to pick a few albums to play than to pick a bunch of random songs. Of course, more people used to do this out of necessecity when music was mostly distributed by CDs or records, so it may partly depend on age as well how often people do that and for the people who don't like albums it was a relief to be able to easily make playlists or pick randomly from all songs. I have a few playlists that I've made but not many, although I have been thinking that I should make a few more (partly because I have a bunch of songs that aren't in any album, although I also often listen to everything I have from a particular artist). I've been trying to do more of a mixtape thing, matching the music and getting the right amount of silence between tracks. The few playlists I have I think of as just another album.
I do keep most game music separate since that tends to be short and have excessive repetition, although the few games with music that stands on its own I put in my general collection. I'm also working on creating an alternative tree with volume normalized opus files, but I still have a ways to go.
I've always had a better memory for music than most things and can play a bunch of music in my head fairly well, never complete songs but maybe up to a minute or two with quite a bit of detail (and usually but not always accurately :/). From various threads, it sounds like a lot of people can't do that. Although it is also mostly as I happen to think of it, intentionally recalling particular music is harder and takes some time (and depends on how long it has been since I heard it). I have some challenges with memory in general due to health issues but can still pick out the albums I'd like to hear from memory fairly well.
Thanks for sharing some insight!
I definitely have a similar experience with initial repetition for new albums and burning them into my memory. I used to manage all my FLAC files in a similar manner, but the benefits stopped outweighing the costs as my library grew larger.
I think the generational aspect of age and preference for singles vs. full albums probably has some correlation, but I mostly grew up in the age when mp3 players picked up (I'm 27) and I'm definitely part of the latter.
For a more intentional listening experience, I prefer enjoying a full album from front to back too. Many artists I listen to have songs that directly feed into each other or motifs that recur throughout so a front-to-back listening experience is the best way to fully appreciate the composition.
Sometimes though, I just want to jam to a specific song to fit the vibe :)
I'm the rare gen-xer who owns zero music (even after going to college during the "10 CDs for a penny" deals). It is all rented from spotify. I could create a playlist like yours with over 100k songs, but I often feel a specific mood and need to narrow down to a composer or work.
For me, a free-for-all would involve a lot of skipping. Hope this helps you deduce rarity!
Similar situation here: ~23k songs, meticulously tagged, no playlists.
However, I'm a little different in that I end up listening to the same handful of artist/albums/songs for a period days or weeks, then move on to something else.
Thanks for sharing!
I definitely get in moods where I listen to a particular album a lot in a short period of time too. I try to vary my listening but sometimes there's just an album that feels right for the moment.
Back in the day, together with my friend we played this trance tune on repeat for straight 5 days at the office :) both of us remember of this till this day and occasionally I play it for 10 or 15 times on repeat to honour that week :) James Holden & Julie Thompson (Nothing 93 returning mix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD8cRAjFB1w
James Holden's recent (last decade or so) work is incredible. I saw Animal Spirits live and it is a gig that I truly treasure having seen.
I'm not a huge fan of trance and more conventional dance music so his evolution has been quite interesting.
Glad I'm not weird for listening to "Running up that Hill" on repeat after watching Stranger Things
It's literally on repeat in a separate tab right now. Excellent choice.
Neither the article mentions it nor is it somewhere in the comments so far: Common TikTok wisdom seems to be that listening on repeat is an ADHD thing.
I wonder if there is something to it or if it's just one of those oft repeated 'facts' that run by themselves after a while?
I came here looking to see this comment, but I think honestly TikTok is really damaging for people wrt mental conditions and understanding them.
There is a TON of mis-information and "I have condition x and behavior Y" correlation/causation BS on TikTok. There's articles of people developing "tik tok tourettes syndrome" from watching videos of other with Tourettes. There's a growing literature of the affects of follow-along mental health conditions coming from watching other people on media with certain issues. I've seen a ton of TikTok ADHD claims that are BS or are "normal" but people shared as ADHD symptoms. I don't know how, but I suspect this sort of mis-information is bad for society.
That said, I'm not a doctor/psych but I think its true that this is also an ADHD behavior. The article talks about how the author will listen to certain songs forever, but I think the ADHD behavior is a binge-and-forget type behavior, which seems different, and more related to the hyper-focus aspect of ADHD.
Source: I have adhd, do this with music, and recreationally learn about ADHD for fun.
On tikTok _everything_ is an adhd thing. The algorithmic loop practically gives you it.
As a side note on the design of that website, I noticed that they play a rather unusually long confirmation animation when you click Accept on the cookie consent, prior to removing the banner. This feels like the exact opposite of what most users probably want, which is to make the banner go away as quickly as possible. Especially on mobile where the banner takes up a significant portion of the screen.
I don’t typically comment on UX design for HN links, but that one literally made me do a double take… I loaded it up again in incognito mode just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things.
I'm right in the middle of pretty much only being able to listen to Zac Zinger's Sanma Samba. I've listened to it for hours the past few days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=434xCyCSXBg
Another record I had this with recently was Change - Paradise (I've just put this on, and no I'm not at all sick of it!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9l4aSg3u0s
"In the War on Terror, the US used the songs "The Real Slim Shady" by Eminem, the Meow Mix theme song, and "Fuck Your God" by Deicide to torture.[6]"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbyZDq76T74
Now we got an extended club version MeowMixTape, on Youtube, for kids!
Did they pay the royalties?
That's a great question. I don't know.
Somewhat the opposite, but are there tips/tricks to get a song stuck in head -- sort of in a controllable manner? I enjoy having songs stuck in my head, but usually it's not the song I want!
It's my personal experience that songs that I haven't played to the end get are more likely to get stuck. What's more, it's usually the span around the point at which I stopped the playback that keeps echoing on andon andonandon. Same thing with any other media. I remember books I've left midway with incredible detail. Books I've finished, I find hard to remember titles let alone the name of the main character. I believe it's called the Ovsiankina Effect[0]. And as someone who's had a relatively bad memory, it freaks me out.
Thanks. Come to think of it, that rings true in my experience.
I'll sometimes play a new song on repeat with some strange aggressive need to hear it over and over, and then the very next day wonder why I was so into that song.
> Usually, they’re what I’d call “creative types,” as with architect Zaha Hadid, who before her death in March told the BBC’s Desert Island Discs program about her propensity to play films and songs on a loop while she painted and did other work.
Maybe everyone listens to music on repeat (which is why every music app has that feature), including creative types, but creative types are more likely to be interviewed about what music they listen to and how?
yeah, probably.
"But this gem of musical dervish-ness"
Hits on the key point, in my opinion. Repeating songs, phrases, rhythms can by hypnotic and put the listener/performer into a trance-like state. Something that can be quite enjoyable and even addictive.
I find that listening to music with lyrics simply won't do it for me. It must be instrumental only. Something like Keith Jarrett, Earthless or a good Frank Zappa vamp. Time no longer has meaning. It's wonderful!
Can't abide hearing the same stuff repeatedly.
We have more material now than we could ever get through in several lifetimes.
No more than once a day per tune, please.
> Can't abide hearing the same stuff repeatedly.
It depends.
Sometimes I'm doing "critical listening" and I'll repeat the same song many times carefully examining the interplay between instruments, vocals, effects, rhythms, whatever - and intentionally re listening to it over and over so I can concentrate on one specific interplay each time through.
Sometimes I'm just drowning out next doors power tools of vacuum cleaner, and one song on repeat is just as good as a playlist.
But I grew up in the golden era of albums, and I love to listen to a whole album in the order the artist carefully curated them into. I _can't_ listen to a single song off Dark Side Of The Moon, I need to hear the entire album end to end. (And I will stab anyone who plays the songs out of order - let that be a warning to any Spotify engineers or product managers I ever meet...)
The thought alone of playing Dark Side Of The Moon on shuffle makes me shudder. Why anyone would butcher albums that way is beyond me.
Even my own playlists (of electronic music, which doesn’t tend to be released as albums) very quickly attain a ‘canonical’ order to my own ear. It’s jarring when the anticipation of the next track is disrupted.
While I agree and feel the same jarring effect when listening to songs outside their album context, I've accepted that as the past of commercial music. The present and future lies on listening to singles.
I think you're missing out. There's plenty of music that almost requires repeated listening to even begin to appreciate. Leonard Cohen definitely requires this treatment. His texts are so laden with multilayered metaphor you simply can't even begin to unpack most of them by merely listening to them once. A lot of hip-hop also falls in this category, because just like with Cohen, the emphasis is on the lyrics and their delivery rather than the beat.
I have what feels like an infinite backlog of bands and albums I want to listen to.
My quirk is deep dives. I'll discover a new band or style to me, then listen to as much of it as I can. Very often someone's whole catalogue at a time.
I'll occasionally repeat an album many times - recent examples are both Pixvae's albums or Ott's new album Heads (after 8 years waiting)!
No need to make it a goal to try to get through it. Most stuff sounds sufficiently the same anyway that it doesn't really matter. If you enjoy it, press repeat!
Very late to the discussion here, but I often put a single song on repeat and listen to it all day long. Well, "listen" to it -- it's usually something that I can tune out (heh) or fits as background music for whatever mood I'm in at the time. Could be anything from Timber Timbre's Hot Dreams to Air's Sexy Boy.
And then there's this. People making 10 hour long videos of the same song on repeat: https://youtu.be/4T0QUdQu7RY https://youtu.be/xm3YgoEiEDc
It must be a challenge or something.
At least choose something musically interesting!
I don't know why these exist, because YouTube does have a loop function.
Sometimes there are gaps at the beginning or end. These videos make the song loop perfectly.
It didn’t always have that loop function. It’s also not available on all platforms, eg if you wanted to chromecast it or play on a smart tv.
Recently seen to happen to a DJ in a Canadian radio station [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/29/canadian-radio...
This guy found an interesting way to repeat-but-not-repeat a favourite bit of music. https://medium.com/@alexbainter/generating-more-of-my-favori...
Somewhat related - I've been listening to Snarky Puppy on repeat on and off for months now. Highly recommended for the modern jazz fan.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL52RKVKBFM328OwddSMRQS9BY...
haha, i literally have been playing a song on loop all day today. I've probably heard it 30 or 40 times. I wasn't aware other people also do this. It's like the music is stuck in my head unless I listen to it. Then after listening enough I can let it go.
Some bands specialize in extended cover versions of songs, like this 45 minute version of Witchita Lineman, which is a similar phenomenon:
It occasionally happens that I put a song on repeat and leave it running for hours, much to the annoyance of many past roommates. I have no explanation for why I find it appealing, but I'm relieved to read that it's apparently not uncommon.
I do not agree at all. It's just not normal to listen to a single song for 35 times in a row unless you are musician working on it. It's even weirder when you play it loud, harassing your coworkers.
Your first part just sounds judgemental (unless you mean it in a strictly statistical sense) but I agree fully with your second sentence. Tolerance for repeated listening is such a personal thing that someone who does it in a group setting has to be some kind of sadistic sociopath.
Everybody seems to assume that tolerance for non-repeated listening cannot be a personal thing too.
The issue is respect for shared space, whatever the preferences.
Nah, just thoughtless is enough.
"Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity"
Can confirm, that Margulis book is great! So is her other one.
I've found that if I play a song enough, I begin tuning it out. My brain interprets it as background noise with no information content.
That just reminds me, why is it ok that work cafeterias are fine playing music over and over that if I quoted would get me fired?
Reminds me of a cool hackathon project I saw a few years ago, The Infinite Jukebox. It finds pairs of beats in a song that sound alike and during playback has a chance at each beat with of jumping to its paired match, creating a seamlessly looped version of the song with added novelty from verses and choruses having varying order and length.
The original hack, done on song that works particularly well, is still up: http://infinitegangnamstyle.playlistmachinery.com
The playback code often gets stuck looping the first beat when loaded for the first time or when the tab loses focus, which is fixed by reloading.
It works quite well on songs with repetitive elements and instrumentation divided cleanly between beats. The original site for submitting arbitrary songs is broken, but a fork is hosted by someone else. Here with an instrumental piece it works well on: https://eternalbox.dev/jukebox_go.html?id=1LaCW0R8Q7oIY3tKtD...
An interesting series of posts on the creator's blog explains it works, how it interacts with the structure of pop songs, and how the parameters can be tuned for individual tracks.[1] And it's open source,[2] though the beat splitting is based on an API from (a company since purchased by) Spotify. It seems that once the initial processing is complete, the playback is purely client-side; this is probably why snapshots of the site at archive.org are fully functional, quite remarkably for such interactive content.[3]
There's also a variant where one playback 'needle' skips to similar parts of the track and one plays straight through, so that verses and choruses overlap as in a canon: https://eternalbox.dev/canonizer_go.html?id=7GhIk7Il098yCjg4...
[1] https://musicmachinery.com/2012/11/12/the-infinite-jukebox/
[2] https://github.com/UnderMybrella/EternalJukebox
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/2016/http://labs.echonest.com/Up...
I do listen to some songs over and over.
Though after 3 or 4 times I usually switch it up. I do like albums..
Or sometimes one song can last like 30 minutes. (Phish does this). It’s great to drive/work to because it does have a rhythm that moves.
Back in the beforetimes, when I went to an office, I'ed play Chameleon by Herbie Hancock when I rode the bicycle in. It's just under 16 minutes long, and I'd use it as a way to time my ride, aiming to get door to door before the song finished.
It's not unusual
This reminds me of the John Mulaney standup bit :)
Haha you got it, that's what I was going for. I was hoping someone would respond with the line.
To be loved by anyone
It's not unusual
To have fun with anyone.
But when I see you
Hanging about with anyone
It’s not unusual - to see me cry
You can loop part of a song using loopsome.com
Needs year tag: 2016.
Like humans do.