“There are 10,513 MP3s on my hard disk. According to iTunes, that’s nearly 30 days worth of music. It has taken half my life – 15 years – to build this collection but I decided to listen to them all in one go. One continuous concert, playing songs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I wanted to revist all the songs I’d once loved, and the memories and places they called up. The only choice I made was the first track. After that, the computer randomly decided what was going to play. No stopping. No skipping. No changing the volume. Music, all the time, for a whole month. The Month In Music blog charts the progress of the playback project, updated once a day with original writing and photography.”
First off, I just suck at writing about music, for the most part barely able to even say why I like a given song, album or artist other then “I like it”. (I leave that to Kasper the funky ghost and his chums. )But a bigger obstacle would be putting my music on random because I just can’t listen to music that way, other than when I got the radio on. When I’m listening to music I tend to be in the mood for a particular kind of music: a particular artist or genre or period and I tend to listen to complete albums — I loathe shuffle.
Also, if you play your music 24/7 it gets annoying fast and you can’t do anything like watching tv or anything else that interferes with the music. Not to mention that you’d be playing a lot to empty rooms, or in my case, the cats — and they’d rather have Radio 4 because that’s what they grew up with.
But it does demonstrate an important aspect of music that’s far less true of other media like television, videogames, books or movies: it takes much less time to gain some fluency and insight into a given musical genre than it does to gain the same sort of mastery in most other media. To put it in raw numbers: I got about 2500 books in my personal library. To read them all would take me at least, if I did nothing else and could finish one in two days, some 5000 days or thirteen years. My library at the moment holds almost thirtythousand songs, which would cost me almost 881/2 days to listen to if I can believe Itunes.
Found via Metafilter (yes, I’m on Metafilter now.) Check out the thread; it’s quite good if only for seeing all the other obsessive compulsives waxing on about their cataloquing strategies…
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