Katooooooo🌲

On and off, I've been reading a book called Why You Like It, by Nolan Gasser. It's a really enlightening book on music genre, composition, recommendation algorithms, and culture, and i love how it's written in such (mostly, some bits are a little dense) approachable way.

However. It'd understandbly be a little hard to write a book about cool music without providing examples of the music.₁ Like that.
WYLI, of course, more than delivers on this. Every written example in the book comes with a link to a webpage with the mp3 displaying the example in audio form. Cool, right? At least, it really should be. Problem is, it's a webpage. That's not, yknow, in the book. Despite me using an e-reader₂ to read this, the constant back and forth is a weird antethesis to the way i approach reading books with my undivided attention.
I'm not exactly a stranger to swaths of information ₃ being delivered via footnotes and citations₄, so that's not the problem stopping me from shotgunning this book. The problem is that, for me, listening to music and reading a book require two different forms of concentration. And trying to hear what i'm trying to read in this way is, uh, kinda hard.

I guess on the opposite end of the spectrum, would be a book with visually illustrated examples, the best example of which being a guide I love dearly, The Animator's Survival Kit, by Richard Williams.₅ Animation is probably one of the most purely visual mediums, ever.
Visual information (drawings) + More visual information (more drawings) = the most visual information (illusion of movement. Animation!). So, the illustrated examples used in that book make a ton of sense being there. It doesn't take you out of the book's examples unless you decide to also get the $300-or-so DVD box set.₆ And even in that case, the examples given pretty easy to follow, if you've been reading along.

Writing this out makes me feel kind of elitist; and I really hope i'm not coming off that way. I think that rules should absolutely be fucked around with and broken as much as possible! But, i'm not sure, i feel like these two mediums are much too opposite₇ to fully enjoy this as a Book and not a Textbook.

tldr i like it mostly but if this book sounds great to you i think you should probably get it in audiobook form ok

_{1: song i think is cool.
2: e-reader i'm using.
3: book i read once and can brag about it but choose not to
4: thing i used in graduate school
5: sorta. if you reeeeeally wanted to go opposite you'd probably get a literal comic book or a video tutorial
6: sorry the only link to this is a shady pirate website and not archive dot org
7: you may be asking me. "Silv! What about sheet music?" despite having every ability to read sheet music i was never really a fan of that either. the reason being, i'd say, the inverse of this; music being translated to visual form, and relying too much on your potential ability to have Perfect Western Tunage or an instrument right in front of you every time. if that makes any sense at all.
8: i have always wanted to make a subsection like this where i can just say whatever. like famous book "House Of Leaves".a
a: i want inline audio on cohost so bad it makes me look stupid but i'll be very patient as it'll probably take a while thank you devs}