Introduction

For a few years, I listened to music at 1.4x (not 1.3x, not 1.5x, exactly 1.4x) speed. When I told this to other people, their reactions ranged from “whatever” to “what?” to “WHATTT???". I thought it would be interesting to go over some conversations, with varying degrees of convincingness, I encountered with the “WHATTT???” people.

Not convincing (to me)

“You're not respecting the artists’ intentions!”

This argument can be broken down into 2 components that are not convincing to me:

1. There generally exists some coherent artist intention for a body of musical work
2. If that intention exists, there exists some practical production of that work which respects that intention

Artist intention

So who am I supposed to respect, anyway? Take Thank U, Next by Ariana Grande. The producers credited on the album (according to Wikipedia) are:

1. Ariana Grande
2. Charles Anderson
3. Brian Baptiste
4. Tommy Brown
5. Michael Foster
6. Ilya
7. Max Martin
8. NOVA Wav
9. Happy Perez
10. Pop Wansel

Is it possible for me to interpret all 10 of those producers’ intentions? Perhaps I only need to care about Ariana Grande's intentions. Besides feeling disrespectful to all the rest of the producers who worked hard to make Thank U, Next, can I even reliably know Ariana Grande's intentions (could people possibly, gasp, lie about their intentions?)? Producers aside, should I care about other people who were important in the making of the album? What about writers? What about featured artists? What about instrumentalists? Where do the boundaries lie?

Respectful production

Let's say we've done our research. We've managed to objectively establish the boundaries of artisanship, and we've determined the artists’ intentions for sure. What if those intentions are impractical, like “the only respectful production of my album is played through this $20,000 studio system we used.” Well, that sucks for you doesn't it? I don't seem to have $20,000 laying around anywhere.

To be fair, that's a bit contrived. We can probably figure out which “intentions” are impractical and discard them. Forgetting that what's practical and impractical is not clear (I won't, though, don't worry), it's very possible that the artists’ intentions are bad¹. For those of us whose morality is not “because someone intended it, it must be good,” it's very likely a non-negligible amount of intentions are bad. I don't want to respect bad intentions. Also, I'm not in the business of judging the goodness and badness of people's intentions, anyway (perhaps a post for another day).

“You're not going to understand the lyrics!”

Most of the time when I listen to music, I'm doing something else. Even if I were to listen at 1.0x speed I wouldn't understand the lyrics. If I really do want to understand the lyrics, I can pull up the lyrics online. My reading speed is generally more than 1.4x the speed of the artist(s) singing.

“You're degrading the audio quality!”

I've taken an ABX test to establish whether I can tell the difference between a low-quality lossy audio file and a lossless audio file. I can. However, I have to replay the same sections over and over to notice miniscule differences. The conditions under which you can tell the difference are generally not the conditions under which you normally listen to music. In addition, it's not obvious that higher resolution is better. Back in 2013, Archimago, an audio blogger, performed a blind comparison survey between MP3 (lossy) and FLAC (lossless) files. The majority thought that the FLAC files sounded worse than the MP3 files. Whoops! ²

“You're making it sound worse!”

An argument of taste and preference quickly devolves into “Well I like it this way, so I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.” As easy as I find that path (and as much as I like easy), some sicko could extend that to claiming something like:

Well I play all my music through a wired potato, and no one can stop me! I like it this way! Muahahaha!

And we don't want to give that sicko the satisfaction, so we'll have to work together to find some reason to put them in jail.

Somewhat convincing (to me)

“You're not supporting the artists!”

That's fair. There's also an argument about how streaming doesn't support most artists very much, so they have to rely on more expensive tickets and merchandise to get by. Streaming platforms do come with their own problems, though. For example, algorithmic recommendations which heavily influence how people use streaming platforms do concern me (yet another potential post).

Convincing (to me)

“You're putting in too much effort (relative to other options)!”

Those who knew my system for listening to music at 1.4x speed well knew of dirty Python and Rust code used to “simplify” the process. Despite my best efforts, that “simplify” did not mean simple. I do enjoy arguments that appeal directly to my interests on a conceptual level (and on some egotistic level, who are we kidding!).

“You're not getting the same meaning!”

Okay, so this argument seems a lot like the artist intention argument from before. However, when I say “meaning,” that meaning doesn't necessarily come from artist intention. For example, the meaning I would get from watching World War II propaganda would probably be vastly different than the propaganda makers’ intentions.

The meaning we get from music often derives from how it makes us feel. Therefore, the speed at which I play my music does change the meaning of the music, at least somewhat. For instance, the same melody sped up from 1.0x to 1.4x speed may come off to me as less serious. Combined with the convenience of Spotify (which did not let me play music at 1.4x speed! WHATTT???), I figured 1.0x speed was worth it to explore the meaning of the music I was listening to.

Conclusion

I listen to Spotify at 1.0x speed now, before any of you send me angry emails.