Music Fatigue Syndrome
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When I was in college, my roommate Peter bought the new Album “Flood” by They Might Be Giants. For a period of three months, he was obsessed with the album, and played it repeatedly. Our CD had a “repeat album” button on it, so he could just keep listening to it in a continuous loop. By the end of those three months, although I enjoyed the album very much, I was ready never to hear any song from it again. I had Music Fatigue Syndrome (MFS). 
MFS strikes us all at some time or another. If you think you’re immune, consider how powerful your aversion is to hearing Christmas music before Thanksgiving, or after new years. Or think about that album that used to be your favorite, but that you now can’t bear to listen to. Susan Stamberg admitted to not being able to listen to Moondance by Van Morrison (the album and the song) due to too many repeated listens when she was younger. 
I don’t think there’s ever been a scientific study on MFS (if there has been, somebody steer me in that direction), but I’m willing to make the following hypotheses about it. With rare exceptions, the risk of MFS with a particular song increases each time you listen to that song. Typically, MFS sets in after the 10th or so listen, once you know all of the lyrics, and your mind can anticipate every musical event that happens in the song before it happens. MFS often strikes suddenly and unexpectedly. Because we’re prone to get MFS with songs we previously loved, it’s shocking to suddenly find ourselves repelled by them. There seems to be a tipping point, at which the love turns to hate. I believe you can speed the onset of MFS by increasing the frequency with which you listen to a song, and decrease the amount of other variety in your listening diet. Hence, if you fall in love with, say, Sheryl Crow’s “Soak up the Sun” and decide it’s your summer song, and you program your CD alarm clock to play the song every morning, you’re almost guaranteeing MFS to set in. Popular culture at large can speed the onset of MFS. Even if you don’t actively seek a particular song, the radio may seek it out for you and force MFS upon you. KFOG has played “Smoke to Joints” every Friday at 5 PM for the last twenty years. The song has passed from being enjoyable, to being intolerable, to not being even a song any more, just a ritualized sequence of sounds. This brings me to a point: MFS sometimes isn’t recognized as such. Those who listen to “Classic Rock” stations, for example, may actually be listening not because they enjoy the music they’ve heard hundreds of times before, but instead because the music cause cognitive associations and stir up memories. In other words, the music is not enjoyable or interesting, but instead familiar and comfortable (which, it must be said, are both valid reasons for listening to something.) So when you listen to a Beatles song that you’ve heard a hundred times before (say, “Penny Lane”), your listening experience the 100th listen is vastly different from your listening experience the first time. On the first listen, you hear perhaps shimmering brilliance and creativity, a sense of possibility. On the hundredth listen, it’s more like an old friend, and an excavator of memory, like Proust’s Madeline. 
Music has at least as much to do with the listener as it does with the music itself. A song is different depending on how distracted we are when we listen to it, how many times we’ve heard it before, what’s going on in our life when we hear it. Hence, when you’re in the throws of your first love, every song seems written especially for you. To paraphrase Elizabeth Bowen: no song is mysterious. The mystery is the ear. The more popular the band, the more likely MFS is to strike. Much of reason for the excitement about the new “Love” album by The Beatles is that the remixes offered old Beatles fans a way back into the music. The changes introduced by Giles Martin (George Martin’s son), though subtle and reverential, are enough to shatter the listener’s nostalgic complacency. Instead, there’s an epiphany: oh yeah, this is music, not a memory!
Once you recognize MFS in yourself, it’s a lost cause, take it from me. I wish I could be like my wife, who listens to the same Nanci Griffith album 50 times in a row without ill effect. Instead, I chase the will-o-the-wisp of the new musical experience. I have now nearly no tolerance for repeated listening to most songs, no matter how high their quality. Every few weeks, I need an infusion of new music into my life, just to keep things interesting. I keep a play list of my “favorites”, but to my ear, by the time that song gets into the “favorite” category, the opposite is actually true. I recognize the quality of the song, but I just can’t stand to listen to it any more. Familiarity breeds contempt.MFS also manifests itself in more severe forms. You can get Chronic MFS (CMFS) for an entire band, an entire album, an entire genre of music (50’s doo-wop for example) or even for music itself, at least for a brief while. I’ve had bouts with MFS for music in general that have lasted for weeks. I can’t stand to listen to any recorded music, and I just need an extended period of silence to recover. And that’s the saving grace of MFS. It’s treatable. Early detection is a must. If you really love a song, control your listening. Recognize when you’re over-playing it, cut back. If you’ve already reached the tipping point, you need to just walk away from the song. Don’t revisit it for at least six months. And for the most severe cases of MFS, you sometimes just have to go cold turkey. No music for a day, a week, or even a month. The other preventative care is listening to live music. Unlike recorded music, live music is unpredictable, transient, and ephemeral. The brain never has time to lock down and make overly-familiar the performance. This is of course note true for recorded live music, or for bands that serve simply as jukeboxes for their greatest hits (like The Beach Boys or any band that plays the “oldies” circuit). One of the saddest realizations is when you see an artist or a band that clearly has Advanced MFS for the music they wrote, because they have to play it every night, just to pay the rent. In these cases, you can hear it in the performance, which sounds absolutely dead. It’s my contention that virtually any hit song is at risk of having self-MFS. Sometimes, I swear I hear a song that’s so lacking of vital spirit that it’s dead on arrival, and I postulate that it’s because it was over-rehearsed prior to being recorded, and the artist already had MFS with it before they even managed to capture it on tape.On the other hand, there are a few recordings that are of the opposite extreme: they capture the exact moment of creativity. On these rare recordings, the onset of MFS is much more delayed than usual. The classic example of this is Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue”. From Bill Evan’s liner notes of that album:"There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a ‘take.’”
MFS strikes us all at some time or another. If you think you’re immune, consider how powerful your aversion is to hearing Christmas music before Thanksgiving, or after new years. Or think about that album that used to be your favorite, but that you now can’t bear to listen to. Susan Stamberg admitted to not being able to listen to Moondance by Van Morrison (the album and the song) due to too many repeated listens when she was younger. I don’t think there’s ever been a scientific study on MFS (if there has been, somebody steer me in that direction), but I’m willing to make the following hypotheses about it. With rare exceptions, the risk of MFS with a particular song increases each time you listen to that song. Typically, MFS sets in after the 10th or so listen, once you know all of the lyrics, and your mind can anticipate every musical event that happens in the song before it happens. MFS often strikes suddenly and unexpectedly. Because we’re prone to get MFS with songs we previously loved, it’s shocking to suddenly find ourselves repelled by them. There seems to be a tipping point, at which the love turns to hate. I believe you can speed the onset of MFS by increasing the frequency with which you listen to a song, and decrease the amount of other variety in your listening diet. Hence, if you fall in love with, say, Sheryl Crow’s “Soak up the Sun” and decide it’s your summer song, and you program your CD alarm clock to play the song every morning, you’re almost guaranteeing MFS to set in. Popular culture at large can speed the onset of MFS. Even if you don’t actively seek a particular song, the radio may seek it out for you and force MFS upon you. KFOG has played “Smoke to Joints” every Friday at 5 PM for the last twenty years. The song has passed from being enjoyable, to being intolerable, to not being even a song any more, just a ritualized sequence of sounds. This brings me to a point: MFS sometimes isn’t recognized as such. Those who listen to “Classic Rock” stations, for example, may actually be listening not because they enjoy the music they’ve heard hundreds of times before, but instead because the music cause cognitive associations and stir up memories. In other words, the music is not enjoyable or interesting, but instead familiar and comfortable (which, it must be said, are both valid reasons for listening to something.) So when you listen to a Beatles song that you’ve heard a hundred times before (say, “Penny Lane”), your listening experience the 100th listen is vastly different from your listening experience the first time. On the first listen, you hear perhaps shimmering brilliance and creativity, a sense of possibility. On the hundredth listen, it’s more like an old friend, and an excavator of memory, like Proust’s Madeline. Music has at least as much to do with the listener as it does with the music itself. A song is different depending on how distracted we are when we listen to it, how many times we’ve heard it before, what’s going on in our life when we hear it. Hence, when you’re in the throws of your first love, every song seems written especially for you. To paraphrase Elizabeth Bowen: no song is mysterious. The mystery is the ear. The more popular the band, the more likely MFS is to strike. Much of reason for the excitement about the new “Love” album by The Beatles is that the remixes offered old Beatles fans a way back into the music. The changes introduced by Giles Martin (George Martin’s son), though subtle and reverential, are enough to shatter the listener’s nostalgic complacency. Instead, there’s an epiphany: oh yeah, this is music, not a memory!Once you recognize MFS in yourself, it’s a lost cause, take it from me. I wish I could be like my wife, who listens to the same Nanci Griffith album 50 times in a row without ill effect. Instead, I chase the will-o-the-wisp of the new musical experience. I have now nearly no tolerance for repeated listening to most songs, no matter how high their quality. Every few weeks, I need an infusion of new music into my life, just to keep things interesting. I keep a play list of my “favorites”, but to my ear, by the time that song gets into the “favorite” category, the opposite is actually true. I recognize the quality of the song, but I just can’t stand to listen to it any more. Familiarity breeds contempt.MFS also manifests itself in more severe forms. You can get Chronic MFS (CMFS) for an entire band, an entire album, an entire genre of music (50’s doo-wop for example) or even for music itself, at least for a brief while. I’ve had bouts with MFS for music in general that have lasted for weeks. I can’t stand to listen to any recorded music, and I just need an extended period of silence to recover. And that’s the saving grace of MFS. It’s treatable. Early detection is a must. If you really love a song, control your listening. Recognize when you’re over-playing it, cut back. If you’ve already reached the tipping point, you need to just walk away from the song. Don’t revisit it for at least six months. And for the most severe cases of MFS, you sometimes just have to go cold turkey. No music for a day, a week, or even a month. The other preventative care is listening to live music. Unlike recorded music, live music is unpredictable, transient, and ephemeral. The brain never has time to lock down and make overly-familiar the performance. This is of course note true for recorded live music, or for bands that serve simply as jukeboxes for their greatest hits (like The Beach Boys or any band that plays the “oldies” circuit). One of the saddest realizations is when you see an artist or a band that clearly has Advanced MFS for the music they wrote, because they have to play it every night, just to pay the rent. In these cases, you can hear it in the performance, which sounds absolutely dead. It’s my contention that virtually any hit song is at risk of having self-MFS. Sometimes, I swear I hear a song that’s so lacking of vital spirit that it’s dead on arrival, and I postulate that it’s because it was over-rehearsed prior to being recorded, and the artist already had MFS with it before they even managed to capture it on tape.On the other hand, there are a few recordings that are of the opposite extreme: they capture the exact moment of creativity. On these rare recordings, the onset of MFS is much more delayed than usual. The classic example of this is Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue”. From Bill Evan’s liner notes of that album:"There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a ‘take.’”
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