Music is unlike any other medium because you can – if you’re lucky – zone in and out of paying attention to it. You would never watch a film and tap into one minute in every 10, but with music you can do that. For me, I had never realised how much of my life is set to the backdrop of music until I cut it out of my life. For an experience which is so ubiquitous, listening to music brings with it a surprising amount of distinctly different responses that go way beyond simple taste for a genre. Giving something up teaches you about your relationship to it and, for me, the lack of music in my life has highlighted the fact that I probably have control issues, because even after a week I couldn’t settle into the idea of surprise, of the city and the people in it dictating the sounds I hear in my day-to-day life.