There was a phase where I cared about audio quality more than most people care about their health. Spending lot of money on IEMs, Spotify premium even when it was not launched in India, and what not. The music almost didn’t matter, the reproduction of the music mattered. I was listening to everything then. Bollywood. Hip-hop. Alt rock, Metal, Punjabi…

Then my left ear decided it had opinions. Mild tinnitus (that high pitched hummmmm), it’s mostly gone now. But for a while it made lyrical music genuinely irritating. Vocals cut through in a frequency range the damaged ear processed slightly wrong.

So I drifted sideways. Instrumentals. Music where the space between notes mattered as much as the notes themselves. And then I never drifted back.

BlackStratBlues, Sultan Shephard, Blaze, NOSI and the deeper end of deep house, where the kick drum is felt more than heard. On the Indie side, likes of Paper Kites and Circa Waves where lyrics exist but sit beneath the texture rather than above it. Metal occasionally, because sometimes you need music that sounds like structural steel being tested to failure, and that is a completely legitimate emotional requirement.

What these have in common is that none of them are in a hurry. They don’t hook you in couple of seconds. They assume you have the attention span to stay.

There is a documented phenomenon called aesthetic shift with age, where preferences move from high energy lyrically driven music toward more structurally complex instrumental forms. The neuroscience explanation involves the prefrontal cortex gaining more influence over the limbic system as we age. The analytical brain quietly starts curating the emotional brain’s playlist. Moreover, research from Edinburgh and others has found correlations between musical sophistication, specifically perceiving complex harmonic and rhythmic structures and fluid intelligence scores. People who gravitate toward this kind of music apparently do better on cognitive processing tasks too.

So technically, preferring Bombay Rain over whatever is trending could be framed as a cognitively sophisticated choice. Except my IQ has almost certainly not increased. The far more likely explanation is that I have aged maybe, accumulated minor hearing damage, grown impatient with anything formulaic, and developed a mild superiority complex about music taste that I am now writing this to justify. The correlation between musical preference and intelligence is real in research. The direction of causality in my specific case is not. It is a coincidence. Haha.