Last night we made the mistake of watching live a programme on a commercial TV channel - the new series of the fabulous IT Crowd (laugh out loud and possibly even better than series one) - the mistake was the 'live' bit, not the programme! We had to sit rather than fast forward through the ads. Two were for newly released albums. One for an acoustic guitar bloke of whom I have never heard, but the short excerpt seemed quite pleasant if not particularly something I would feel the need to buy. The other was for a band called Mövenpick or something. On an admittedly short clip they just sounded like noise. I was about to express that view, then I pulled myself up short. I can't imagine myself listening to, let alone buying such a cacophony, but to say so makes me 'middle-aged'.
And yet quite a lot of the pop music I like I am sure presents itself to people, say 19½ years older than me as being 'noise'. I understand it to be a proven scientific fact that are hearing changes as we age, and at my age I am less able to extract something meaningful from the 'noise' then I was at 10 or 17 or whatever. But when I listen to the 'noise' from my youth I hear music. When I listen to today's pop so-called music, it's just noise. I accept that there is an element of familiarity and rehearsal, but I have a feeling there is an additional element, too. I don't know how much is me and how much is a reflection of the changes in engineering/production over the decades.
