This is fascinating! Can any of you with musical anhedonia watch either of these songs and explain how you feel?

https://youtu.be/SS0NHlWgi5w?t=3m22s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi5A9OCAyIk

I watched them. Honestly I got nothing out of them. It's just noise. I could see that the guy with black hair on the left in the first video was really getting into it, I just don't know what he was getting out of it.

In the second one, I felt pleasure looking at the pretty girls, but their singing did nothing for me.

The first one is interesting - if I heard it on the radio I wouldn't think twice about it, but seeing a video is different. Watching the guy play the guitar gives me a sense of how difficult it must be to play - which means I appreciate the music because I appreciate the technical skill of the person playing it.

The second one does nothing for me - it's just dull.

Can you explain how you feel when you listen to those songs?

Sure! When I see Derek Truck play guitar in that first video, I feel about his playing how BB King says he feels, like this was one of the best things I've ever heard.

The second one has a bit of a story behind it; the girls on stage are singing their hit song they wrote about Emmylou Harris, who is a famous singer herself and is in the audience. They talk about how she inspired them to sing so it's cool they have the opportunity to play for her. The song is very sorrowful sounding but pleasant and beautifully sung so it brings tears to my eyes.

> I feel about his playing how BB King says he feels, like this was one of the best things I've ever heard.

Thanks for this, it's very interesting. I've realised that I don't really rank music in that way - I don't have favourite songs, in the same way as I have favourite books, movies etc.

> The second one has a bit of a story behind it; the girls on stage are singing their hit song they wrote about Emmylou Harris, who is a famous singer herself and is in the audience. They talk about how she inspired them to sing so it's cool they have the opportunity to play for her.

The story is cool, you're right. I understand how it would be emotional to those involved, but I found the description of the story conveyed the emotions involved more than the singing did.

> The song is very sorrowful sounding but pleasant and beautifully sung so it brings tears to my eyes.

It's well sung, but I don't find it technically impressive like the guitar playing. Perhaps because, day-to-day, we are exposed to many good vocalists but very few guitar solos?

Looked a minute into the first one. Did not recognize the song but since I'm not into music, I don't know that much.

I find myself distracted by the body language of the guy on the left (and later the one to the right). It is more interesting to me to watch how people behave than to listen to the music.

Nice selection of tunes btw, at least they resonated an emotional response with me, but I love music.

Emotionally? Nothing really. It's just someone playing music, which doesn't really do anything for me. I appreciate that the person in the first video is doing some neat things with a guitar though. It looks & sounds neat.

Felt probably the same as you would feel if I asked you to watch a youtube clip of paint drying to the din of a noisy train station or other public place.

Really it was just that, noise.

I have a question for musical anhedonics:

Do you find it harder to enjoy movies?

Typically the score does so much _work_ in the name of emotional manipulation, that I wonder if it would make movies less enjoyable.

More specifically I wonder if you would like certain movies (Spielberg) less and other movies (Er, Um. Who doesn't use scores that much?) more?

How would I know if it is harder for me to enjoy movies than for somebody else?

I don't like "music movies" such as High Fidelity, 8 Mile, School of Rock, Blues Brothers. They are just average comedy/drama flicks for me. Maybe normal people like them more?

For a while if someone asked me what music I like, I replied film music. I do enjoy film music but maybe just because the music makes me remember the movie?

I'm definitely affected by the music. Maybe music can still emphasize emotions for a musical anhedonic and it just that music in itself does not do much?

Interesting. I also have mostly soundtracks in my playlists, for when I feel like listening to music at all (usually to drown out distractions). It's all soundtracks of things I've watched and enjoyed, and puts me in the mood of the memory of the movie or TV show its from. The music itself doesn't do very much at all for me directly.

This mirrors my own experience exactly. I too listen to a lot of soundtracks, from movies or from video games that I have enjoyed. Although music doesn't provoke an emotional response on its own, it has an incredible ability to being back emotional memories.

For a similar reason, when choosing music to listen to, I generally listen to the same songs again and again - those which have a connection to my past. It is very hard to feel anything about a new piece of music.

This means that I may regularly listen to one track by a particular artist, but have no interest in any of their other songs. I don't even like listening to remixed or live versions of songs that I enjoy - they are sufficiently different that they do not evoke any memories and hence are uninteresting to me.

How would I know? I don't have an emotional response to music and never have, so what would I compare it to?

You know, I also don't dream. I wonder if there is a name for never dreaming and if there is any link between not dreaming and not having an emotional response to music.

> Do you find it harder to enjoy movies?

Quite possibly. I do enjoy watching a movie on occasion, but there are many other things I would rather do with my time. It turns out that compared to most people, I don't watch many movies - I've seen well under 100 of the "IMDb Top 1000 Movies of All Time" [1].

I've never considered this to be related to music, but I guess it could be.

[1] https://www.listchallenges.com/top-1000-greatest-movies-of-a...

I dunno, I think soundtracks to movies are one of the only places where I ever get any sort of emotional response from music, and it's always because I associate some sequence of sounds in the piece with something that's happening in the film then. It doesn't feel like appreciating the music so much as just being reminded of the part of the movie that happened around that time. Sort of like an aural mile marker.