Every Song Ever Quotes

“Speed in music is like a sweater on a dog: mostly for show.”
― Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty

“We think of pieces of music from a distance as blocks of time, but can we hold more than a second or two in our minds? And are we—with all music, to some extent—waiting around for some pinpointed extraordinariness to happen? Not”
― Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty

“Music coheres and resolves according to lots of intrinsic rules—so many that we tend to call it a "language." But natural languages [...] typically have many specific words to point toward specific commonplace ideas. This language doesn't, or at least resists being used quite in that way.”
― Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty

“Tone doesn't demonstrably exist in composed notes. It exists only in played ones. It's the most human part of music, the carrier of emotion.”
― Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty

“because genre is a construct for the purpose of commerce, not pleasure, and ultimately for the purpose of listening to less”
― Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty

“Crucially, the effect of repetition depends [...] on a relative change moving against a relative constant, which is really the key to life's riddle of time and gratification.”
― Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty

“Algorithms are listening to us. At the very least we should try to listen better than we are being listened to.”
― Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty

“Infinite access, unused or misused, can lead to an atrophy of the desire to seek out new songs ourselves, and a hardening of taste, such that all you want to do is confirm what you already know. But there is possibly something very good, too, about the constant broadcast and the powers of the shuffle and recommendation effects. There is a possibility that hearing so much music without specifically asking for it develops in the listener a fresh kind of aural perception, an ability to size up a song and contextualize it in a new or personal way, rather than immediately rejecting it based on an external idea of genre or style. It’s what happens in the moment of contextualization that matters: what you can connect it to, how you make it relate to what you know.”
― Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty