Hey all,
I've been reading for a couple of weeks and thinking this could be a good place to kick off a discussion on how digital media has affected our listening habits. I download a lot, I listen to a lot of ripped music from CDs and vinyl on my PC, and I also have a portable HDD player which I obviously use plenty when I wander about.
So here's a couple of points that come to mind, as some sort of start.
1. Being able to shuffle through a huge collection of music is like having the radio on a station where the world's most ambivalent DJ is playing only songs I've heard before.
I use shuffle plenty. Hearing individual tracks way out of context is something truly fresh ("like slang from 83"). At the same time I find it's a real relief when I hit a track from an album I like and decide to play the whole thing. It reminds me that despite loving various kinds of music that are driven by singles, what one of the benefits of the album format is for a listener.
2. Wanting to hear new music can override my ability to listen to new music.
This is one habit, not being able to listen to even a single track without wanting to skip, but surfaces in two different contexts: download addiction and simply having a big chunk of my music collection in a format that I can access really readily.
The first is pretty straightforward - it's just that obsessive collector thing.. seeing it was easy to grab some new sounds so naturally looking for more. So I'll set up downloads, come back to my PC and have about 5 albums worth of material to check out... do you think I finish even one track? Nah. 10 seconds, skip in a minute, 10 seconds, skip to next track, repeat... I was specific in saying this habit impacts on my ability to listen to new music, because naturally the more foreign the music I've downloaded is to what I'm used to, the less likely I am to get a positive impression when flicking through it like life will end if I don't hurry up and queue some more downloads. Perish the thought that a track might rely on building momentum or, really, any kind of dynamic shifts at all...
I've been trying to counter this recently. The obvious one is not downloading stuff when I know I've got things that even may be worth giving a better go. I've also tried dumping one new album on to my player at a time, and listen to the thing without skipping any track unless it's truly horrific.
On to the second point. This is pretty straightforward too. Now that I have x number of gigabytes of music I'm forever thinking about what else I could be listening to.
...I'm sure I could intellectualise this stuff a lot more. I've read an article on shuffle culture, relating it to post-modernism and the rise of collage in art and all the rest. But for now I'll just leave you with these simple experiences of mine and see what else comes up!
I've been reading for a couple of weeks and thinking this could be a good place to kick off a discussion on how digital media has affected our listening habits. I download a lot, I listen to a lot of ripped music from CDs and vinyl on my PC, and I also have a portable HDD player which I obviously use plenty when I wander about.
So here's a couple of points that come to mind, as some sort of start.
1. Being able to shuffle through a huge collection of music is like having the radio on a station where the world's most ambivalent DJ is playing only songs I've heard before.
I use shuffle plenty. Hearing individual tracks way out of context is something truly fresh ("like slang from 83"). At the same time I find it's a real relief when I hit a track from an album I like and decide to play the whole thing. It reminds me that despite loving various kinds of music that are driven by singles, what one of the benefits of the album format is for a listener.
2. Wanting to hear new music can override my ability to listen to new music.
This is one habit, not being able to listen to even a single track without wanting to skip, but surfaces in two different contexts: download addiction and simply having a big chunk of my music collection in a format that I can access really readily.
The first is pretty straightforward - it's just that obsessive collector thing.. seeing it was easy to grab some new sounds so naturally looking for more. So I'll set up downloads, come back to my PC and have about 5 albums worth of material to check out... do you think I finish even one track? Nah. 10 seconds, skip in a minute, 10 seconds, skip to next track, repeat... I was specific in saying this habit impacts on my ability to listen to new music, because naturally the more foreign the music I've downloaded is to what I'm used to, the less likely I am to get a positive impression when flicking through it like life will end if I don't hurry up and queue some more downloads. Perish the thought that a track might rely on building momentum or, really, any kind of dynamic shifts at all...
I've been trying to counter this recently. The obvious one is not downloading stuff when I know I've got things that even may be worth giving a better go. I've also tried dumping one new album on to my player at a time, and listen to the thing without skipping any track unless it's truly horrific.
On to the second point. This is pretty straightforward too. Now that I have x number of gigabytes of music I'm forever thinking about what else I could be listening to.
...I'm sure I could intellectualise this stuff a lot more. I've read an article on shuffle culture, relating it to post-modernism and the rise of collage in art and all the rest. But for now I'll just leave you with these simple experiences of mine and see what else comes up!
