Music

I didn't start listening to music for enjoyment until I started high school, when I began to develop my own preferences. At University of Madras, I discovered many artists through last.fm such as Tiësto.

The majority of music that I listen to lacks vocals. There are several reasons for this: I just don't like listening to most singers, most song lyrics are inane, and listening to vocals largely prevents me from getting any programming or writing done. I do like some songs with vocals, just not very many - this is why my music collection is often largely disjoint from the music collections of other people. Aside from MC Hawking's Entropy, whose phat lyrics are also scientifically accurate, Vienna Teng's My Medea (from her album Warm Strangers) has the best lyrics which I've heard, both in terms of singing and content. When she sings "for you I'd burn the length and breadth of sky", I believe it. That's some next level scary shit, yo. I lump all of the vocal music that I listen to into a single genre (imaginatively named "Vocal"). The actual genres of the artists that I listen to run the gamut from nerdcore (MC Hawking) to Russian (Doctor Watson) to disco (Bee Gees).

I broadly categorize the music without vocals that I listen to into anime, game, and movie, as well as trance and instrumental (since Rob Dougan's album Furious Angels Limited Edition couldn't fit under anything else). The anime music that I most frequently listen to is that from Full Metal Panic (both volumes of the original soundtrack, as well as the soundtracks from Fumoffu and The Second Raid). I particularly like the music from Deus Ex, Halo, Halo 2, One Must Fall (both 2097 and Battlegrounds), SimCity 3000, SimCity 4, and Tyrian. I also love the Star Control II remixes done by the Precursors.

Most of the time I listen to what I call trance. I'm not very discriminating when it comes to classifying music; what I call "trance", others call "techno", "dance", or "electronica". Probably the best-known trance artist that I listen to is Chicane. I also highly recommend Amethystium and Ulrich Schnauss. (These three artists sell CDs through Amazon.) I often listen to songs by Dire Straits, Gregorian Chants, and Tiësto - all artists I discovered through last.fm

I don't know why other people like certain types of music. I especially don't understand how some people can define themselves by the type of music that they listen to. I prefer synthesized music with strong, multilayered, nonrepetitive melodies.

My own musical aptitude is nonexistent.