It’s impossible.
Explaining music is not possible.
Everyone experiences music in unique ways, but like everything else, humans like to try quantify such a thing.
It’s quite ironic actually, music is an imperfect way to encapsulate not just events, but entire experiences and raw emotion, yet we then try to explain it further. I’m not just talking about tablature and notation (though I’ll get to that at some point), but the all senses and perspective that goes into making and listening to music. I thought it would be best to start extremely broad in this post: answering the question “what music do you like?”.
Immediately one would think of categorizing there music into a couple of genres, but that is such a rudimentary and ineffective way to categorize what is a potentially meaningful topic to someone. For me, genres can be extremely limiting, as a listener and a musician. Common themes among music can be extremely valuable, but oftentimes categorizing them in broad genres diminishes music’s meaning, yet categorizing music into specific “sub-genres” eliminates the use that genres have in the first place.
For me personally, I think that every genre has at least a couple good songs, and I think any open minded music listener should agree. After looking at genres to classify musical styles, people generally move to specific bands or musicians. This can actually be effective, because it doesn’t attach their music to a vague identifier, but a specific band or artist, which could be easily be attached with music itself. This only works if both parties are familiar with the artist, which for me is often not the case.
Again, I believe that every artist has the potential to create a good song no matter their chosen style, but the artists that I believe best encapsulate my listening preferences are not the commonly known (Polyphia, Cory Wong, Seiji Igusa, etc). Furthermore, as I alluded to previously, I generally value specific pieces more than the artist itself in a listening/streaming setting. I do this to keep an open mind about songs, as well as to get a taste of the art made by a wide variety of different people. This is not to say that the product is less impactful than the creator, in fact, I believe it to be the other way around, but in this context I am trying not to put specific sounds under the potentially wide umbrella that is a musician.
For me personally, the best answer I have to the question of “what music do you like?” is guitar instrumental music.
Guitar instrumental music does not come close to describing the relatively wide range of genres, styles, and musicians I try to expose myself to, but it is the simplest answer that makes sense to most people. I listen to other music, but either I don’t want to be rambling on, or I don’t have the words to explain my music taste, as music is unique and cannot be classified using just words.
I also offer to send my Spotify profile information to anyone why might be genuinely curious about my music taste, as I believe that to be the most specific and detailed way to get my music taste across.
My Spotify profile is linked here. At a later date I might write an article on how I arrange my playlists.
Edit: Here is the post on how I arrange my Spotify playlists.
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