Nova Daily - 8 March 2025

Hi!

One of my fellow bloggers at BlogChamps has started writing a blog on chess and music. I wanted to help him with his survey, but unfortunately I can't help him as he wanted to look at performances by players listening to music while playing 10+0 rapid. At present I don't play 10+0, and I normally don't listen to music while playing rapid games.

Although the topic of chess and music is seamlessly rich, I don't want to infringe on what my fellow blogger wants to write. But I can share a thought about my own experience, as a form of compensation for not being able to help him filling in his Survey.

I absolutely love music. Normally when I'm not listening to audiobooks or my own chess thoughts, my head is filled with music. At times I find it hard to stop the jukebox in my head. When I'm listening to music, it doesn't really matter whether I chose to play the song or not. I'll listen and follow the entire song start to finish. I can't help it, and I can't stop it.

When I say "I can't stop it," I mean that literally. Hearing is a sense that is essentially impossible to switch off, at least not without external aids. You can close your eyes but you can't close your ears, and during my serious chess endeavours I almost always experience sounds as a serious distraction. I don't have misophonia (which is sometimes mocked as "I can't chew my food when that person is around" but it's a daily hell on earth for the poor people suffering from this condition), but I simply can't focus when there's music on.

So there we have it: I take my rapid play very seriously, and music would be a distraction. I know this, which makes me frustrated with it, and that's happening at the expense of my performance on the board. And I know this, which repeats in either a circle or a downward spiral. And in either case I'd be a bad test subject for what my fellow blogger wants to write about.

The game

Sometimes a beautiful game of chess is compared with a Mozart sonata, a Beethoven symphony or a Verdi opera. But more often than not I'd compare my own games with the sound of a highschool teenager garage band that has untuned guitars with the d-string missing, a flushing toilet for a vocalist, and a drumkit consisting of dented cymbals and inflexible drumheads.

Today's game was somewhere in-between. For now just the moves:

I'll fill in the thoughts and analysis tomorrow.