On 18 Feb 2007 at 7:06, dhbailey wrote: > Spam as in e-mail or junk mail we don't like is a mere nuisance which > can be worked around easily
While I don't disagree with your characterization of the major difference that "musical spam" has with various forms of junk mail, I definitely disagree with the above statement. Email spam is *not* a "mere nuisance" -- it costs a lot to provision email servers to handle all that email that is unwanted and is going to be discarded. I don't know what the numbers are these days but I'm pretty sure that for several years now, spam has been 50% or more of all email traffic. You and I may have it under control with tools like SpamAssassin so that we never have to be bothered with it, but the email servers still have to handle all those messages (there were 57 messages in my spam folder today when I downloaded email, out of 87 total, so my email servers are spending more time handling spam than handling the real email). Unlike email spam, "musical spam" doesn't have any monetary cost to the receivers. It's just a psychological cost. The worst time of year for it is the Christmas holidays. The business district nearest me in Astoria, at Steinway and Broadway, has Christmas music playing over loudspeakers. Every time I go to my bank during that season, I wish I'd thought to bring ear plugs, because the music is such incredibly low quality that it drives me crazy. I fear, though, that there's nothing that can be done about it. Most people's relationships to music is much more passive than ours -- we musicians cannot help but end up being actively engaged by music, because it's the way we are trained as musicians. We wouldn't be good musicians if we weren't able to engage in that fashion. Unfortunately, for me at least, I can't really turn it off. I can't tune out music. But we're a minority. I found when teaching college students that most young people "listen" to tons of music of all different kinds, but never really *hear* what they are listening to. They are passive and teaching them active listening is one of the things I was aiming to do in my class. One student wrote to me at the end something to the effect that now that she'd taken my class whenever she listened to music she would find her mind picking out various aspects and analyzing them. I was thrilled by this, except that here conclusion was "It's very annoying." :) Yes, indeed -- it *is* very annoying at times. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
