2026.04.09 - music thoughts
I am pleased to report that yesterday's intention setting went entirely according to plan.
It is just past 8:20 A.M. and I am sitting fully dressed, caffeinated, showered, medicated, and having eaten breakfast (with my sandwich in my bag for lunch!) at a table in the college library. Truly a miracle.
At this hour of the morning, the big bay of windows gets a wash of sunlight, which is absolutely delightful.
I'm listening to Bon Chic's "Corporate Dreams VI: Tropical Division" because one of my not-so-secret "guilty" pleasures is corporate wave music. My roommate hates it, because it's got too much "bleep bloop," and is aggressively ambient in a way that is intended for you to ignore it. She is a musician, she actually can hear things when she listens to music, and can understand it in real time. I have played music, and I have a sense of rhythm, I can sing, I can sightread music, and I like to dance. I am not a musician. I can't pick out individual instruments when the harmonies are good (I can only hear the harmonies as a whole) and I struggle to understand lyrics while they're being sung (even in languages I understand).
I work with music playing more often than not, because a good dance beat is the perfect BPM to eat up the spare processing power of ADHD brain so I can focus. This means that I'm usually not listening to the music that I've chosen to play, not really. It's one of the reasons I can and do enjoy playing the same song/album on repeat. The longer it plays, the more opportunities I have to tune into different parts of the song/album as my brain switches input focus throughout the experience and I can suddenly experience new parts of the song that I was otherwise overlooking/missing.
Corporate wave albums often create a textually varied, consistent ambiance, which I find especially pleasing/helpful in terms of "work noise". The input isn't identical for the entire experience, because the songs are changing, but the BPMs and the overall "vibe" of the music remains pretty consistent, so I'm not suddenly drawn out of the flow state by an abrupt change in styling.
I'm also extremely partial to French hip-hop (GIMS, Black M, Bigflo & Oli, etc) and French electronic/pop/dance music (whatever genre you would put THÉA, Copycat, KALIKA, and Zaoui into). It seems counter intuitive that listening to music in one language and then doing work/typing in another should be so compatible, but I have found it to be true, nevertheless.
There is much to do and ever less time to do it in. Good luck out there.