Music and Philosophy

I was just wondering what kind of music people listen to when you’re doing a philosophical reading or writing…?

I tend to gravitate towards metal or hard rock for some reason or another (currently listening to Ozzy). Its not that I’m an angry person… it just helps me think.

I was talking to a couple of my friends and they liked to listen to more of the new age chant type stuff… whatever floats your boat, I guess.

Metal Machine music by Lou Reed.
ok I only kid.
Seriously I would say music for strings, percussion and celesta, by Bela Bartok, or the miraculous mandarin which is also by him. Various other classical pieces, most written in the last 100 years or so. The Sonora Pine, Racheal’s Band, Upsilon Acrux, and many many more.

Mostly I listen metal, hard songs- black, trash etc, often melodic(symphonic) death - classical instruments with… well, hard metal, but if it’s something really interesting and I want to concentrate at all, I open my playlist with ballads (mainly Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Judas, Guns N’ Roses etc).

these days I’m into like… just streaming ambient for hours at a time. But I used to be into complicated metel beats… Tool, Dream Theatre etc

I try to vary the genre of music that I listen to whenever I do any long term creative project so as to help me approach the thing from a variety of moods.

Music tells you nothing, the situation is the reverse - you tell what a piece is about, as for all art - aesthetics is pure bull, a meta-physical intellectual art itself.

There are those who would argue that, and have fairly succesfully.

Music as representation of human will… etc.

What I generally do while philosophizing is I open the window, dangle my scrotum outside and listen to the rap-tap-tapping of my balls against the vinyl siding as they fly around in the breeze. (Note: It can be meditative to do this for about five minutes before you actually do any philosophizing.) Often times one ball gets caught in a nearby tree branch, and a squirrel named Evan usually comes by and thinking my testicle is a chestnut starts thwacking at the loose skin between my ball and my body, and this makes an acoustic bass sound which changes pitch as I read through various philosophical passages and/or flex the sphinx. So I guess you could say my favorite music is Drum And Bass. Or squirrel music.

I listen to just about everything. So, when doing philosophical reading/writing, I just turn on the playlist and go. However, other subjects get specific music. Don’t know why, but history has classical, math is metal, and science gets 80’s rock.

But, overall I listen to everything from Beethoven to Emperor (for those who know who this is). I try to have just about every genre on my list somewhere. Although right now I’d have to say that Tool and Blind Guardian dominate for total number of songs on the list. Although if anything gets vetoed on my list while writing, it’s usually black metal. Just doesn’t flow quite right while writing.

Oh, and by the way Gamer, if you can get a cat tapping just right on your back, you get this really neat echoey kind of distortion on the whole sound :laughing: