Background sync.
Apr. 15th, 2026 04:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alisxOn .
I went through a phase a couple of years ago of discovering sync/production music, and spend a good couple of months listening to it in fascination. Remnants of this time still occasionally pop up on iTunes, and one of the things that’s very noticeable is how, uh, basic it is, and how you train yourself out of noticing that if you listen to it a lot. Like, songs that I remember thinking were fun when basically everything I was listening to was sync absolutely do not hold up when you listen to them alongside more traditional an-artist-made-this-to-put-on-their-album style music. Which isn’t to say the songs are bad, exactly — as the article points out, they’re made by real humans with real talent — so much as they’re designed to be hooky accompaniments to other things. Stuff that fuzzes your brain while sliding off your ears.
As someone who is listens to music a lot but is in no way talented in the area — I played trumpet in the school band for like four years and I don’t think I could even read music any more, is how much none of that penetrated — the way I would describe it is, like. Pick a song you really like. Any song. Now listen to it with your eyes closed. Really listen to it. See how your attention shifts to different parts, how each part is in itself interesting to listen to, and how what your attention is on at any one point subtly changes the texture of the whole song. Take note of all the things the song makes you feel; maybe a strong emotion, or a strong sense of time or place, a real-world memory of part of your life you associate with it. Even a smell or some other abstract sensation. And note how you can do this with basically any piece of music — from the most complex and lauded and high-brow composition to your high school best friend’s brother’s garage band that never went anywhere — and do it no matter how much or how little formal music training you may or may not have. This is, in fact, arguably why humans like music in the first place. And we sure do like it; it’s one of the universal human traits, present across all times and cultures.
And sync music? Sync music is intentionally designed not to do that. It gives one thing, then it slides off.
And this isn’t bad, exactly. It has its place, as all art does. But, like I said, you can very easily train yourself into not noticing how insubstantial sync is, if it’s all you’re listening to. And the thing is, there are services out there who would really, really like you to train yourself into this. Services like Spotify, for example, who would really like to get you listening to the cheapest music available, to maximise their own profits.1
And that? That, I think, is a real problem, and would be a real loss. For culture, for humanity, and for ourselves.
- And that’s still talking about human-produced sync; what they’d really like you trained into tolerating is slop . . . ↩
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