If all songs with vocals had consisted of oohs, aahs, humming, lalas and scatting, my enjoyment of music wouldn't have been greatly diminished. Had Madonna sung "Ladi doo-dahh" instead of "Like a virgin" in the same exact voice, I wouldn't have enjoyed the song any less. Even if a saxophone had played the melody, it still would've been an enjoyable instrumental number, only mildly diminished by the lack of Madonna's stage persona. Lyrics are very much a superfluous thing to me.
@thor I am completely incapable of understanding this way of existing, though I am aware there is a sizable minority of people who are like this. So strange :)
@thor Good question. I did some digging and couldn't find studies about the proportions of people who do or don't focus on lyrics. It's very clear, though, that there are a lot of people for whom lyrics are important, and a lot of people for whom they are not. There is also a lot of speculation (and seemingly little else) on "lyric deafness" - some people *can't understand* lyrics, at least without difficulty, sometimes even when delivered a capella. #music #lyrics #psychology
@thor Yeah, I read some speculation that this has to do with differing functional connectivity between brain regions and found one study that examined differences in brain activation between listening to a normal song vs the same song with the melody sung as "la la la" and the words on a screen. Didn't find anything else though. Now I'm really curious. What's surprising to me is how many devoted music lovers fall into this category - it doesn't impede enjoyment at all.
@scattergather I feel partially deaf to lyrics in the sense that I don't hear them unless I make an effort to pay attention to them. The exception would be exclamations like "Yeah!" or "Fuck!", as well as unusual or funny lyrics like Weird Al's or Raffie's. They're usually better enunciated than most pop lyrics. Lyrics in my own language also seem to be easier to pick up on, but even then, I rarely remember them.