The Particulars of Peter by Kelly Conaboy

Author:Kelly Conaboy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Does My Dog Like Music?

Peter is not a very agreeable guy, in general. I really like that about him. It’s not that he has a bad attitude—he’s incredibly sweet, and if you say a bad word about him I’ll harm you physically, ha-ha, “just kidding”—he’s just not easily won over. He’s not very doggy in that way, excited about anything and everything that might cross his path. He’s not the type to go insane over just any new treat or toy. He’s reserved. He takes his time to assess, and he’s honest about how he feels. He knows what he likes: the kind of bacon treat that you have to keep in the fridge, his plushy platypus. And he knows what he doesn’t: Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come.

The first time I put the album on in his presence, his head SHOT up from resting position—what is this?! An influential album in the free jazz style. Okay, well…I’m not sure the atonality particularly suits my taste…He was visibly annoyed, making direct eye contact while he shifted around, communicating his restlessness clearly, until I put on something more palatable to him. While I don’t agree, I do understand. The Shape of Jazz to Come is not the easiest thing to listen to, and it in fact sounds nothing like the music dogs “like,” if we’re to believe the sort of music made for dogs is the sort of music dogs like.

That sort of music is like—well, have you heard it? You can find it if you search “DOG MUSIC” on YouTube or Spotify, or wherever. There are some outliers, some dog albums that are actually pretty good, but most of it is like if spa music were somehow less distinctive; it’s what you would produce if you got a job providing live musical accompaniment for a yoga class without having any prior experience with music and only a vague idea of yoga; it’s like if you programmed a Casio keyboard with “soothing” noises—birds, OOOOOOMMMMs, tones, chimes—and played them all at once.

That isn’t to say it doesn’t work. It is strange magic, dog music. Almost all of it, even the bad stuff, seems to calm Peter. He relaxes, he lies down on the couch, he goes to sleep. But I don’t know that this means he likes it, necessarily, which seems to be the idea implied in “dog music”—music that dogs like. The sound of rain makes me sleepy, but that doesn’t mean my favorite kind of music is “the sound of rain.” Almost any podcast annoys me to slumber, but that definitely doesn’t mean my favorite kind of music is “almost any podcast.” Instead, my favorite music is the band Spoon. And they don’t make me sleepy at all!

I was more fanatical about music in my youth and, in fact, went to school to become a recording engineer. (Similar to a producer except more technical and less glamorous, though sometimes the jobs are done by the same person.)

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