Jeeze, it’s been way too long since I posted. October has turned out to be the busiest month of the year.
At any rate, Garrett Warshaw at “Meh, Why Not” has a post about the IPodification of contemporary life. I should say, first, that I really love the title of his blog–”Meh” is one of my current favorite expletives.
The post reminded me that some undergrad students of mine, apparently turned on by my discussion of ethnomusicology as a practice in an intro course, told me in the hall the other day that they have been doing field work. I should say, they’re under no obligation to, and it does not count towards any project for the class. Truly, that’s the reason to teach.
Their research was to ask anyone on the quad that was listening to an ipod what they were listening to and whether they had their ipod on shuffle. Natch, the statistics said the majority were, indeed, listening on shuffle. We had a nice discussion of the impact of shuffle–that far fewer people record an album any more (my ultimate example, Tom Waits’s Orphans, which is really unlistenable except on shuffle, in my opinion). It’s neither here nor there, I suppose, but I have to actively resist the nostalgia for the good old days when people produced albums…
That’s great about the unprompted field work!
I still listen to things in order. You know how when you’ve listened to an album a bunch, you know what the next song will be? If it is on shuffle, it kind of throws me off balance when it’s not the song I thought it would be.
I have this awesome Zen 30 Gig mp3 player that can hold tons of songs, movies, photos, etc., and I have a grand total of about 30 songs on it. Pathetic. I’m going to put another song on it right now.
Not only do I still listen to music in order from the start of the album, but I make a point not to add to my music library unless I’m adding an entire album. Of course I make exceptions, the most recent being the sample track from Nada Surf’s upcoming record, but it’s kept to a minimum. It’s probably a combination of allegiance to the album format – the active decision to arrange songs in a certain order that I’ve heard some musicians still make – and obsessive compulsiveness.