Why auditory art (music) has a more repetitive pattern of consumption than visual art (movies/paintings)

Why do we listen to the same songs over and over, but watch movies or shows only once or a few times?

You can listen to the same song a hundred times but how many times can you watch a dance performance on loop? How many times do you jump back to chapter 1 as soon as you finish a book?

Why do we randomly remember a part of some song and then we immediately need to hear the whole song? While we don’t feel any deep urge to see Monalisa or Starry Nights again when we remember it.

We’ll speculate on the possible answers in this blog.

Songs vs. Movies and Books

Time Factor: Movies/Shows are much longer than a song. You can listen to a song roughly 60 times in the duration of watching a movie just once, and so you do. The same applies to reading books as well.

Story/Narrative Driven: Most movies and books are created around a well-defined storyline, which keeps our brain engaged with the curiosity of ‘What will happen next?’, which is gone once we know the story.

While lyrical songs are narrative-driven too, they are often limited to conveying the thought or emotion rather than a full-fledged story. Thus, the hooking factor in these songs is majorly the aroused emotion rather than the story, and we would be willing to hear it on loop until we want the conveyed emotion to stay.

Understandable. But what if I compared the repeatability of music with that of paintings, dance or photographs? With these forms of visual art there is no time factor or a narrative, right?

Songs vs. Paintings, Pictures and Dance

Multitasking: Listening to music lets you multitask, unlike looking at a painting/picture or watching a dance. The higher accessibility becomes a prominent reason for repeatability.

More often than not, we listen to music along with working on another task, say studying, cleaning etc. since listening demands less focus than visual viewing.

Passive Consumption: Music blurs in the background as we focus on other tasks at hand, and when listening to songs on repeat it doesn’t add to the mental exhaustion of processing new input, hence most people prefer to listen to songs they’ve already heard before while they‘re passively listening to music.

Space and Time: Paintings and pictures do not change with time, they continue to have the same details over 10 seconds or 10 minutes, while songs move along with time. space — limited by frame

Superimposition: Sound is superimposable by its very nature, while light reflects. For eg., if there’s music playing in your room, you’ll still hear the doorbell ring. But if you’re viewing a painting, you can’t simultaneously see an insect crawling the backside of the painting’s frame.

Even if you decidedly try to look at a painting and listen to a song all day, it would be more difficult to do the former because your position and actions will be restricted to keep the painting in line of sight.

So maybe we repeat music consumption more than any other art form because we simply can. But even if there was a way to repeat other art forms without time and spatial hindrance, would they be as appreciated? Perhaps not.

Music involves more senses

Listening to music is much more than just listening, it’s singing along and swaying along too.

It’s like looking at a beautiful painting while also drawing it, which might give a similar dopamine hit to an artist, but it can’t be done as frequently or as effortlessly. In fact, it might not be as joyful because when you draw you can see the results forever, the art becomes prone to self-judgement and criticism as soon as you’re done drawing or even midway through it hence arousing negative feelings.

But with sound, the moment you stop singing, it’s gone. You can’t pause and judge your voice, tone, or notes unless you’re recording yourself.

Music is Elementary

Music is universally appreciated, while genuine appreciation for other art forms is often limited to a fraction of the population.

Maybe because music existed even before languages did, maybe because its understanding helped us survive in prehistoric times, by correctly identifying distinct sounds and rhythm, for gauging predators from afar, for understanding non-lingual vocal cues of one’s tribe, for finding water sources and so on.

While other art forms were born later as a means of entertainment (dance), representation (drawings), and inheritance (stories).

However, one can argue that we should be even more deeply wired to appreciate drawings and paintings depicting natural sceneries, animals, and humans, being inspired by the very impression of life.

Music is all-engulfing

When you’re listening to a song, there are no empty spaces to be filled by some other sound, but there is always a visual world beyond a canvas, a screen, and a stage.

Probably the closest we can get to an all-immersive visual art experience is through architecture, or through nature itself.

Or if we could see colours and boundless paintings with our eyes closed, in the way we dream. maybe that would be the closest to it.

All these explanations are interesting to think about, and I would love to hear some more from the readers :)