"Interesting" vs. "Enjoyable" - Music - Forums : Best Ever Albums

Satie

Happymeal wrote:

Not extremely intrigued by the topic, but I will state that those broad descriptions are not as important as elaborating upon why one used them. Essentially, i find these two terms to be irrelevant in any serious discussion or attempt to understand someone's taste.

Surely, no single term can gather up any substance without loads of (stated or unstated) context, so I'd agree that if one were to reduce all music to a spectrum between the two or to choose one or the other to describe a piece of music, much less their "taste" as a whole without any sort of elaboration, it would be quite silly, but isn't the point of discussion to provide that context?

Failing that being of interest to you, what terms (or otherwise summarized factors) do you think are more relevant in serious discussions to understand taste?

Norman Bates

Gender: Male
Age: 51
Location: Paris, France

'Interesting' is 'enjoyable'.

meccalecca
Voice of Reason

Gender: Male
Location: The Land of Enchantment

permafrost wrote:

Surely, no single term can gather up any substance without loads of (stated or unstated) context, so I'd agree that if one were to reduce all music to a spectrum between the two or to choose one or the other to describe a piece of music, much less their "taste" as a whole without any sort of elaboration, it would be quite silly, but isn't the point of discussion to provide that context?

You really summed up my own response to Happy's statement.

We can surely elaborate in more detail in what may make something interesting and enjoyable to ourselves.

For instance, what's interesting will vary from person to person, and a lot of the time it will be dependent on previous listening experiences. The first dub album you ever hear will likely be interesting even if it's not a particularly great or innovative one, simply due to the context that it's the first you've heard.

My own personal enjoyable of albums is wide ranging and set off by a multitude of variables, but lyrics and relatability do often play a major role. I've often stated that extremely aggressive forms of music fight against my personality, therefore making them less enjoyable than much more mellow music.
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meccalecca
Voice of Reason

Gender: Male
Location: The Land of Enchantment

Norman Bates wrote:

'Interesting' is 'enjoyable'.

Norman, Have you ever heard a record that you felt was particularly interesting, but left you with very little desire to return again for the sake of pleasure?

On that note, 4'33 is something that takes this to the extreme in that it's exceptionally more interesting than enjoyable.
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sp4cetiger

permafrost wrote:

In other words, an interesting album will stay interesting for a long time, and there is some kind of pleasure that can be derived from confronting it time and time again.

I once had a drummer whose day job was as a graduate student in psychology. He said he had been studying an effect (I don't remember what it was called) where human beings have a tendency to develop a greater affection for things the harder they've worked to appreciate them. He then seemed frustrated at the possibility that his love for certain types of complex music may actually be an "artifact" of this effect. In other words, it seemed to him that there was nothing special about the music itself that made him love it, but rather his pleasure came from the work that went into understanding it.

And this makes evolutionary sense, right? Nature ought to reward us after undergoing great effort to understand a complex system. Certainly this could be considered a kind of "enjoyment," but it's noticeably different from what seems like the more emotional response we have to, say, pop music. Is this the way that others here are distinguishing these two terms: interesting vs. enjoyable?

Last edited by sp4cetiger on 05/21/2015 22:10; edited 1 time in total

Happymeal

permafrost wrote:

Surely, no single term can gather up any substance without loads of (stated or unstated) context, so I'd agree that if one were to reduce all music to a spectrum between the two or to choose one or the other to describe a piece of music, much less their "taste" as a whole without any sort of elaboration, it would be quite silly, but isn't the point of discussion to provide that context?

Failing that being of interest to you, what terms (or otherwise summarized factors) do you think are more relevant in serious discussions to understand taste?

I phrased it incorrectly. I think either of the terms can spark discussion pretty well and that someone utilizing it can very well be in a serious music discussion. It's not like I think these terms should never be used or anything. it's just that what's important to me is the subsequent explanation of these very broad terms. Just like any form of discussion, things become irrelevant or relevant depending on what's being discussed so I was extremely premature with the quote "Essentially, i find these two terms to be irrelevant in any serious discussion or attempt to understand someone's taste". It's a wrong statement that I made because of my lack of time while creating it.

Norman Bates

Gender: Male
Age: 51
Location: Paris, France

meccalecca wrote:

Norman, Have you ever heard a record that you felt was particularly interesting, but left you with very little desire to return again for the sake of pleasure?

On that note, 4'33 is something that takes this to the extreme in that it's exceptionally more interesting than enjoyable.

1. I don't want to sound too positive, but I don't think so.

2. I don't even agree with you on 4'33. I think that, among its admirers, the sheer idea of 4'33 existing and being designed as it was is a pleasure and an enjoyment. I don't particularly enjoy 4'33 (not any more than I would enjoy four and a half minutes of silence at home, and probably less), but then again I'm not sure I found the idea interesting more than 4 minutes and 33 seconds in all in my whole life anyway.

meccalecca
Voice of Reason

Gender: Male
Location: The Land of Enchantment

Norman Bates wrote:

1. I don't want to sound too positive, but I don't think so.

It's all good. I mean, there's obviously pleasure in experiencing something interesting no matter what.

I guess I'm kind of thinking of things that may be more interesting in theory than execution
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craola
crayon master

Location: pdx

WiLD BRiDLeD wrote:

The albums I've listened to the most have lost a lot of the "interesting" factor to me because I've already stolen every fruit from the table, hyper-analyzing them to death. I still find them quite enjoyable, but what made them interesting on the tenth listen was the depth of the mysteries - the parts of the album I still didn't quite understand (be it from production, writing or technical skills).

On the other hand, the level of enjoyment I have for albums I've heard once is relatively low, and the only way to get to the truly "enjoyable" level is to be interesting enough for me to get there.

So the music I find most "enjoyable" is the same music I find most "interesting", but the catch is that in the end, it's more enjoyable than interesting. So...it's a catch-22. It's both, but it's neither.

TL;DR: Norman Bates is right.

Life is hard, man.
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sp4cetiger

This still seems pretty muddled to me. I can understand how "interesting" and "enjoyable" would be an unimportant distinction for someone who spends most of their time listening to albums they've heard 100 times before, but I doubt that's the case for many of the folks here.

Maybe part of the problem is that the terms sound as if they're describing the music itself, when in fact they're really subjective descriptions of one's experiences. No music is intrinsically interesting or enjoyable, it's only such as the listener takes it. With this in mind, it's hard for me to understand how someone would have trouble distinguishing when they found something interesting as opposed to merely enjoyable.

To clarify how I'm thinking of these terms, I'll try a non-musical example. Suppose you're lazing about on a sunny Sunday afternoon and it suddenly strikes your fancy to take a jaunt about the countryside in a state-sanctioned natural preserve. There are two local preserves, both of which you've visited once before, and both of which have something positive to offer. In the first, Beyonce Presley State Park (named after the buck-toothed mountaineer of local folklore), there is relatively little space to traverse in your proposed jaunt, but your previous experience was highly pleasurable and you're sure that a repeat visit would yield similar felicity. In the other direction down the highway can be found Joanna Zappa Coltrane National Preserve, a vast mountainscape that you were only able to get a small taste of in your previous visit. Although you enjoyed your first visit well enough, what really urges you to return is the many yet-undiscovered pleasures that could lie in wait in some hidden valley or spring.

Which park do you visit? Does the answer change after 10 or 20 visits?