Try memorizing a phone number—or following an anecdote, or filling out a spreadsheet, or remembering second-grade times tables—while listening to Ariana Grande's Top 5 hit "Break Free". It is an exercise in futility: Your thoughts are whiffle balls in a tornado. The song was co-written and co-produced by Max Martin, the Swedish guru who has been at the helm of pop music for two decades now, and it bears his stamp: You cannot, and will not, entertain non-"Break Free"-related thoughts during its runtime. Cue up "Break Free" and then read this paragraph again, just to prove my point.

This is what it means to not be able to hear yourself think. It's not just an expression: The sounds on Martin's songs—from "Oops!… I Did It Again" to "Since U Been Gone"—are compressed into weaponized high beams specifically designed to obliterate your focus. His productions, running back to his time as the go-to guy for boy-band smashes in the 1990s, tend to rely heavily on a brickwall limiter, a mastering tool often employed in the final stages of pop song recording. The brickwall limiter ensures that no sound in the mix "clips," and in doing so, smooshes out any ceiling or floor in the mix. It's a blunt-force instrument, and whoever named it chose well.

If you regularly read articles about music, you've probably come across someone grumbling about the loudness of modern records. This is the so-called “loudness war,” although the “compression war” may be more accurate. Loudness, like taste or smell, is tricky to measure—more perception than fact. In an extended inquiry for Sound on Sound in 2011, Emmanuel Deruty found that while music recordings in general increased about five decibels from 1970 to 2010, their perceived loudness—how loud they sound or feel to us relative to everything else—hasn't changed much at all. Loudness, like pain, plays out on a different time scale than other sensations; it can happen in an instant or it can sustain itself over minutes. Its hard to know which way is “up.”

Compression,which reduces the dynamic range of a recording, shrinking the space between the quietest and loudest sounds, is simpler. You can watch both sides of the loudness war play out in the upward swoop of a well-articulated sound wave. For people on the quietness side, a good producer or masterer is someone who respects the shape the audio signal is making. If you use a brickwall limiter, its opponents argue, you are, in essence, lowering the basketball hoop to dunk—the motion is the same, but, without the thrill of the leap, the meaning is gone.

So while music hasn’t gotten appreciably louder or flatter, it’s grown blockier, more modular: Decibel levels notch up and down according to a song's structure, creating emphasis. In this way, manipulating levels and waveforms is now a kind of songwriting, used the way an earlier generation might have relied on a key change.

This approach—the tweezers followed by the hammer—characterizes about 90 percent of mainstream pop radio. You can hear it on the chorus to Chris Young's country mega-ballad "Who I Am With You". You can hear it in Sia's "Chandelier", when the singer’s hiccupy, odd little voice doubles up until it feels like a jet plane. And you can hear it on "She Looks So Perfect", from 5 Seconds of Summer, a boy band with pop/punk affectations (or the other way around… it's confusing). The mix for these choruses is smooth and rounded and impenetrable, and the only thing you can do to prepare for them is duck.

While the massive success of last year's comparatively soft, richly dynamic Random Access Memories by Daft Punk pointed the path to a (potentially) quieter future for mainstream music, the truth is that garishly vivid production and mixing have a permanent place in pop, and producers turn to them when they want to accomplish specific goals. Like Michael Bay films or appletinis, they can be spurned or scorned, but they can never be vanquished.

The act of squeezing an arena's worth of information into an audio file doesn't belong to Max Martin, or to his protege, Dr. Luke. (There's no question, however, that they are the best at it.) Their secret weapon is their mixing engineer, Serban Ghenea, who has mixed over 100 #1 songs, from Ke$ha's "Timber", to Katy Perry's "Dark Horse", to Pink's "Raise Your Glass”. His mixes have no notches, no joints, no seams. They are the aural equivalent of a glassy wall.

And it is this towering, right-in-your-face style of mixing, as much as a given song's lyrics or message, that usually triggers our "mindless" filter. All these sounds pressed into a hard, impermeable block tend to make the higher brain—the part used to parse out smaller elements and puzzle over them—wince in mercy. It's a big factor in what makes those songs work so well in filling up huge spaces, and it dovetails with their overall message: Turn off your thinker, let's party.

A quick way to signal to modern ears that you are a breed apart, then, is to surround yourself with a cavern of silence. It's a powerful shorthand: Lorde's “Royals”, a pop song about avoiding the glitz of other pop songs, would have its context capsized if a massive synth crashed in on the chorus. The finger snaps on the track, lightly touched with reverb, help make Lorde seem wry, wolfish, poised. Sam Smith's "Stay With Me", meanwhile, focuses our ears on some low-lit piano chords, a kick, a snare, and nothing else. Smith doubles down on the "above-it-all" signifiers with lyrics about "not being good at a one-night stand" and a gospel choir, which is sort of a nuclear respectability option for pop stars. He's not that kind of guy, Smith’s lyrics tell us, while the mix assures us that this is not that kind of song.

But wide open spaces don't magically bestow sophistication on performers. Sometimes, in fact, they do the opposite. Witness Robin Thicke, strutting around in a Beetlejuice suit and inviting the mockery of Western civilization with last year's "Blurred Lines". No one blames Pharrell's backing track, a perfect, glittering retool of Marvin Gaye's "Got To Give It Up", for the silliness, the hashtags, the unpleasant whiff of horny-high-school-principal. The music, seemingly made only of cowbell and Pharrell's shit-eating grin, is sly, sexy, and playful in all the places that Thicke is oafish, obvious, and clumsy: Sometimes a gorgeous sports car simply points out the inadequacy of the person driving it.

Nonetheless, music with a pronounced sense of space always stands out on the radio, because we can instantly sense that we are no longer listening to something seeking to maul us. Our agency returns, as does our capacity for thought. Very few words of this piece, in fact, were composed while listening to the bright, blasting songs it mentions—it was too difficult. For the analysis, I turned to FKA twigs, whose subdued, cavernous new album offers abundant room to accommodate daydreaming.

After a steady monthlong diet of Max Martin, though, I found myself examining the spaces in music more carefully, and with new appreciation. I tried to imagine what would happen to the fragile mood of twigs' music—bruised, carnal, profoundly alone—if these sonic openings closed. Imagine, for instance, that the synth for "Two Weeks" was pumped up to "Dark Horse" size. Would the song's line "higher than a motherfucker" suddenly sound like a night at Señor Frogs? Would her boast "I can fuck you better" feel less like something murmured from afar and more like a brassy declaration? The intimacy, the ache: It would all disappear like an overexposed photo. There's a reason we tend to instinctively say "give me space" when gripped by overwhelming feelings. Our messiest emotions require space, and music that offers it beckons like an invitation.