I LOVE PERCEPTION SHIFTS

Listening to music in the dark that I should hate but now it’s my music and oh my god

I love perception shifts.

On of my little personal rituals that makes my day better when I have time to indulge is taking a shower in the dark. I put on a song that I like, and turn off the lights, and take a few minutes to just let the water wash over me, eyes closed, in the dark.

The cool thing (to me – maybe I’m being a dork) is that when I go in, it always feels like I’m in pitch darkness, with just a thin line of light showing around the bathroom door.

And then, when the song is done and I step out of the shower, my eyes have adjusted and I can see so much. I can see where everything is quite clearly – the shape of my clothes dropped on the floor – the light flooding in from the edges of the door and illuminating everything.

I know it’s simple – yes – my eyes just adjusted.

It’s not magic.

But it kind of *is*.

Because so much of our existence comes down to perception.

Cue the segue to bringing up AI, because apparently I can’t talk about anything this year without doing that.

I recently tried asking AI for music suggestions. I was in the middle of a project, and a little burned out on my usual “work-marathon” stand-by’s. And the idea struck me – AI keeps doing all these other amazing and unexpected things – maybe it can point me to some music I’d like but don’t know about yet.

So I asked, and told it everything I like now, and who my major bands had been over my life, and who I listen to the most and when, and even threw in film composers and favorite moments from film soundtracks (Down the Rabbit Hole from Us by Michael Abels is hands down one of my favorite things ever), and even random stuff like that I’ve spent half of my life trying to love early Black Sabbath because there’s something there, but the whininess of Ozzy’s voice always kills it for me after a few songs.

And it came back with suggestions.

And one of those suggestions was a specific song called Oblivion, by a band called Mastodon.

And it threw me, because I knew just enough about Mastodon to know that they are Heavy Metal. And I know that I’ve just never really liked Heavy Metal.

But I tried it – ready to laugh off the absurdity of the experiment.

And then my world changed.

Because all of the elements shouldn’t have worked for me, but the song hit. Hard.

I’m not even going to try to describe it, but it was like meeting a best, long lost friend that you didn’t remember having.

And this is key – it probably wouldn’t have worked if I’d started with any other song.

But something about that song clicked with the way my head works, and made me want to hear more. It opened me to something I was closed to before.

And then because I explored outwards from there, I found myself getting to like other things that I never even would have given a chance to before.

And suddenly – like an annoying teenager who keeps blasting a song or album on repeat, I’m driving everyone crazy by cycling through their catalog on repeat.

I’m so in love with this music it’s ridiculous.

And then I was telling someone about the process, laughing and inspired, and suddenly a different aspect hit me:

I just trained AI to retrain my brain.

Somewhere out there in the nebulous black box of info, that roadmap exists for someone or something else to find.

What the hell did I just do?!

I’m laughing at the joke of it and horrified at the implications in equal measure.

(But seriously – Mastodon is incredible.)