I’ve been using an iPod for nearly three years, now. What appealed to me was the sheer capacity. I’ve long used personal stereos (Walkman, and then a minidisk player) and played tapes and then CDs in the car. All that travelling time could be converted into listening time, but it always had the downside of having to keep changing the tape or CD. Of course that’s what you did at home, and these were improvements on having to keep getting up at the end of a vinyl LP side, or a vinyl single to access some more music. But when travelling one always had to carry the extra cassettes disks or CDs. I figured why not have a sizable collection on the player.
But something strange happened. I started listening to music in a completely different way.
I used to make tapes up specially for travelling. Well, I’d usually do a tape for someone else and then play it until I knew the changes off by heart (and then they could have it). And I’d think long and hard about how I’d programme it. Just like a radio programme. I even prided myself at getting to the end of the tape just at the end of a piece of music. Fading a track out was a sign of poor technical programming. The thing I enjoyed most, though, was thinking about what track to programme with which, exploring ways to make links between artists and styles of music, or the feel of one track with another.
The iPod should be ideal for this. With lots of tracks to choose from I should be able to try out permutation after permutation on my desktop iTunes and then download it to my iPod. Funny thing is I’ve only ever created two play lists. I quickly produced a stress-reducing play list of mellow listening, and one for my partner who wanted to use my iPod but wanted to make sure she never listened to anything she didn’t know.
Instead I always have the iPod on shuffle. It’s the element of surprise, and of serendipity. The thousand tracks of my 5gig iPod gives the kind of variety I look for, but now the music rolls through without predetermination on musicological grounds. I know I’ll like it (I selected the tracks for iTunes), but I don’t know which track, or mood, or juxtaposition will come up. Of course sometimes it’s awful. Miles blows that poignant melancholy last note and then some crude piece of jump up slams in (that’ll have to go!). But often two tracks just meld, or contrast beautifully, or pleasurably jar me from a muzak moment. The music is re-contextualised from the album in which it was first released to breath anew. So much so I don’t sometimes recognise something: can’t quite place it in the elaborate cannon I’ve established in my head from all that information I’ve learnt and that’s triggered y the visuals of the record art and the mine of information. Now it’s just the sound and me. But I’m going to have to look, to read the track details, or I won’t know if I’m allowed to like it so much.
Now, this all well and good because I’ve done quite a lot of pre-selecting. In my mind a thousand tracks is not that many, and I’ve chosen them as individual tracks from CDs and soon filled the available space. So of course I need more space. More desktop hard disk; more iPod capacity; and more tracks. With the capacity of a 250 gig desktop drive, 10x rip speed and a 40gig iPod I don’t need to select tracks. I can just rip the while CD and (I say to myself) clear the tracks that don’t work as I go along. Oh, and while I’m at it I’ll rip a few CDs from else where, just to get to know them. Now this is another new departure. At the moment I’m MP3ing (well AACing) the six albums I bought yesterday, and then they’ll be on my iPod. Now this is a change. When I buy something new I usually play it over and over in CD order while I read the artwork (you know what I mean), maybe read something about the artist, go back and listen to their earlier work. This is important work because I then know the tracks, their context in the CD, and their place in my mind map of music. What happens when I’m listening to music not on the cartograph? How will it make sense?
What’s more I quickly knew all the 1000 tracks on the iPod, even though I changed them regularly. After all I had selected them from that carefully mapped idea I had of music. With 8000 it is harder to learn, and I’m not sure why some of them are on there other than it was easy.
And you know, sometimes I don’t even look to see what I’m listening to.
