Staying inside with a global pandemic welcomes you to weird obsessions.
Most people who were cooped up at home got into stress cooking, stress baking, binge-watching movies and tv shows and binge-listening to both old and new music, exercising, eating more healthy among other new habits.
A weird obsession I picked from quarantining at home was playing 1-hour loop and 10-hour loop YouTube videos.
To distract myself but not too much especially during intense work hours, I rather stick to playing songs on repeat to get maximum concentration.
These 1 hour and 10-hour loop videos mostly of pop songs and people are loving them as seen by the millions of views they attract.
People have been enjoying music on repeat for a while now.
“Musical repetitiveness isn’t really an idiosyncratic feature of music that’s arisen over the past few hundred years in the West. It seems to be a cultural universal. Not only does every known human culture make music, but also, every known human culture makes music [in which] repetition is a defining element,” said music psychologist Elizabeth Margulis who a couple of years ago decided to make some alterations to the music of Luciano Berio.
“Let’s say you’ve heard a little tune before, but you don’t even know that you’ve heard it, and then you hear it again. The second time you hear it you know what to expect to a certain extent, even if you don’t know you know. You are just better able to handle that sequence of sounds. And what it seems like [your mind is saying] is just, ‘Oh I like this! This is a good tune!’ But that’s a misattribution,” she continues.
People passively listen to these I hour and 10 hour loop videos to either game, study or code for long sessions as a form of white noise.
This white noise music also comes in handy when you want to sleep as the repetition gives that lullaby vibe.
A lot of this x-hour videos feature ambient backdrops, soundscapes and calming nature recordings people love listening to in the background or actively watching.
I have even found myself listening to these videos even when I’m not working. I mean, look at this:
Now, I wanna go to the beach so bad…