The one that influenced me least
Instrumental only — lo-fi, ambient and meditation. An honest account of the medium that shaped me least, and why I think that is.
The distinction
Everything else here is input. Music is environment.
- Lo-fiThe default. Enough rhythm to mark time passing, not enough event to pull attention off the page.
- AmbientFor the longest and least interruptible blocks. Closer to weather than to music.
- MeditationFunctional rather than aesthetic — paired with breathwork and the wind-down rather than played for its own sake.
Of everything on this site, music had the least influence on me, and I'd rather say that plainly than manufacture a relationship with it I don't have. There's no album that changed my life. I can't name a formative record the way I can name a formative film.
The specific reason is that I've never been into music with vocals. It's been instrumental my whole life, near enough without exception. And it isn't neutrality — vocals actively irritate me. Something about a voice in the mix competing for the part of my attention that's already in use.
I don't have a clinical answer for that and I'm not going to invent one. But I suspect it's the same sensitivity that shows up elsewhere: I run high by default, I cap my time in dense crowded environments because precision degrades after about an hour, and I schedule genuine silence into the week. A voice in my ears is one more input, and inputs are the thing I'm already managing.
Which reframes what music actually is for me, and explains why the influence question was the wrong one. Films, television and books are input — I consume them for what they do to my thinking. Music isn't input at all. It's environment: the conditions I set so the actual work can happen. You don't ask a room to influence you.
That's also why the three things I listen to are what they are. Lo-fi, ambient and meditation are all, functionally, the same tool — texture without content, presence without demand. Nothing in any of them is asking me to follow it.
Mainstream music isn't for me, and I've stopped treating that as a gap to close. A handful of songs get through. That's about the whole of it.
The sensory side of that is written up properly under sensory regulation, which is where the crowd caps and the silence blocks live.
The one place music stops being background is when I'm making it. I own the hardware, I know FL Studio well enough to be dangerous, and the original plan was to produce lo-fi and monetise it — a plan AI comprehensively ruined and, in doing so, freed up.
The production chapter →