Hey, hey you, you there, drowning in that Coldplay song that I can hear from five feet away even though you’re listening through hot pink earbuds, you’re hurting your ears. No, not necessarily in the sense that Chris Martin’s waifish vocals are directly harmful to your hearing; it’s just that blasting amplified noise directly through your ears isn’t good for them. Maybe you’ve heard a nice, clear ringing noise after a particularly bouncy commute, at a certain pitch? This is because the hair cells in your ear that receive that pitch have literally snapped, dumping potassium ions into your inner ear for the last time, resulting in that high-pitched whine which is actually pretty analogous to the process behind rigor mortis. P.S. — unlike your nostalgia for *NSYNC, these hair cells don’t grow back, so listen closely to that ringing noise; it’ll likely be the last time you hear it.

While you might derive some hedonistic pleasure from having destroyed your hearing in your early 20s, it can’t be very good for you in the long run; you can forget about using the mosquito ringtone. Music’s a great escape, especially for a nice walk to campus, but sometimes it’s best to just turn it down a little and listen to what’s going on around you; you’ll probably get run over less. Anyway, please, turn it down and save your ears, or at least listen to some sweet metal if you’re going to blow them away. Either way, here are some quick recommendations:

Quiet: Stars of the Lid: If you want to take a nap listening to music that’s barely there, this is the group for you. Sometimes I forget I’m listening to something when I put them on, which isn’t the worst thing in the world. Lullatone: If the name isn’t a huge hint, this band is also good for the sleepier times. Play it soft, but listen close for splashes of water and glockenspiels. Bon Iver: This soft-spoken acoustic guitar-driven folk band is from Wisconsin, a Midwestern state that has managed to churn out a decent band. Listen while tossing back a Milwaukee’s Best and eating a brat; moping is optional. Dntel: If you haven’t checked out the (better) half of the Postal Service, now is the time to wean yourself from Ben Gibbard’s teat and check out some electronic noises from Jimmy Tamborello.

Loud: Boris: Hitting all kinds of metal genres, this Japanese group is not afraid to slay some dragons and burninate some sweet licks through the awesome might of guitars. LCD Soundsystem: Not metal, but don’t you want to let everybody around you know that Daft Punk is playing at your house? The New Pornographers: Again, not metal, but this is some sweet Vancouver power-pop that doesn’t know how to quit. Amon Tobin: Not an obvious choice for blasting, but if you turn it up loud enough, maybe you can make light bulbs fall out of the ceiling like when he played in Rangos last year.

Ever since I moved to Pittsburgh, I haven’t owned a TV, so thoughts of the music video had really escaped my mind until recently, when a few friends of mine were commissioned to make a music video for a local rapper. As they were experimental filmmakers, I was a bit surprised that the young rapper wanted them to make his video. They had green screens and crazy editing tricks, but as far as rental bling-bling, romping rear ends, and a mean-looking posse, there was not a whole lot they could offer.

When I voiced my concerns about this deficit of quintessential rapper paraphernalia, my friend made a solid point to me: No one cares about the music video anymore.

Most of us grew up in a time where after school we could plop on the couch, turn on MTV’s Total Request Live, and it seemed like one of the coolest things in the world. We were envious of the people in that Times Square studio that made hand contact with whomever the big guest was that day, and of course with that dreamboat of a host, Carson Daly. We liked how interactive it was, with people all across the country voting to see their favorite video. We got sad when our favorite videos went to the retirement home, and pissed off when the video we liked even more never made it out of the purgatory of being ranked 11th.

There was even a point at which the music video was so exciting that they started making TV shows about making music videos. Making the Music Video launched in 1999, and now almost 10 years later, you can hardly find a music video being broadcast on MTV.

What it comes down to is this: Video killed the radio star, and YouTube killed the music video. Before the Internet was always at your fingertips, you relished the opportunity to see it broadcast — the same way that before you could buy a single song from iTunes, you relished the chance to hear it on the radio. The excitement of anonymously voting your favorite band into TRL stardom doesn’t have half the glory of posting your own video response, heckling on the comments board, or spamming blogs with links to the video.

The music video has become so irrelevant that no one needs a $50,000 budget, 300 naked chicks, 10 choreographers, and two body doubles for it to be watched in households across the world anymore. As proven with OK Go’s 2006 YouTube video wonder “Here It Goes Again,” you can throw a bunch of household shit together, and make it interesting enough for someone to watch while they’re procrastinating from everything else they should be doing.

In Pittsburgh, some might argue that experimental music is king. From heavy noise bands to kitchen sink recordings, if you’re into the weird, you’re not too far away from a decent house show (provided you know the right people). Experimental music seems to be gaining popularity across the board, and with that popularity comes new people finding new ways to create it. What used to be a couple of dudes with microphones down their throats, running their guitars through frequency analyzers, and showing a rainbow display of effects pedals slowly seems to be getting replaced with full-on machine-made music.

So, try to picture it: a whole band of robots playing robot instruments, which are far more complex than anything a human could do. Is the robot band cooler? Are they more talented? Which would you rather listen to? My question is: What makes this kind of music cool? I recently read an article about a band that uses an EEG (electroencephalograph) to convert brainwaves into effective noise pedals that control the tone, pitch, etc. of the noise that the band is creating.

If I were to hear this band without knowing what it was and it didn’t sound too good, I’d probably turn it off. But after knowing the concept and the process, I would want to give it a shot and listen to it the whole way through. I have no problem admitting that it’ll probably sound extremely bad, but I would still appreciate it.

Now, I’m not saying that I would appreciate it nearly as much as the sound of, say, Chick Corea pouring his heart and soul into a piano, but I would still respect it. In a sense, the brainwaves are a portrayal of the creator’s emotions so I could even claim that I could relate to it, if I wanted to. But I don’t think that I would.

Back to the robots, though. Let’s say the whole band is a bunch of instruments that are programmed to make noise based on some computer algorithm that is randomly generated. That would catch my attention for sure. I would be quite amazed by whoever created these robots, but as for the music, I don’t think I would really listen to it. I mean, I would hear it, that’s for sure, but the whole time I would just be thinking about the process by which it was created, not the actual composition. The robot band is definitely cool, there’s no doubt about that, but I would prefer to listen to Chick Corea for the rest of my life rather than a whole digital playlist of every genre created by robots.