For my birthday a while back, various lovely family members gave me a minidisc player walkman thingy. I am now, for the first time in my life, equipped for sound.
It’s kind of strange, really. I’m so used to having no sound when I’m out on the move but whatever’s bouncing through my head and the ambient whateverness around me. Now I suddenly have a soundtrack.
Also – it’s true what T told me, when you’re hooked up to your own soundmachine you notice other people hooked up the same. It’s like we’re all in the Freemasons or something.
Today I listened to Karen Hunter‘s ‘The Private Life of Clowns’ as I walked in the sunshine. That’s part of living in the future*, right there. Awesome.
I just hope I don’t walk in front of a bus or into a hole or something.
* just because you’ve all had walkmans since 1983 or whenever doesn’t make it any less future. Its a thematic sort of future I’m talking about. Don’t distract me with your petty ‘facts’ and ‘logic’.
12 thoughts on “My Days Get A Soundtrack”
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Dude, it’s a FACT that the coolest, hippest and most future savy of us waited until 2005 before getting a ‘personal music device’ thingy.
To clarify, I don’t want to hear any ‘facts’. But if you can tell me a FACT – well, hell yeah, that’s the balls-out a flaming wildboy madcap truth!
Well, call me old-fashioned, but I think distracting yourself from the world happens easily and often enough that doing it at times when you are otherwise encouraged to be aware of the world, and yourself in it, is no good thing.
I also think the world would be a much different place if people spent an hour a day sitting on the floor in an unfurnished room with nothing to do, so I’m probably not the mainstream.
Morgue, ‘walkman’ is very passé 🙂
Jamie – point. I am a long way from becoming addicted to the device, and much of the time I much prefer to be in the world unmediated.
What I hadn’t anticipated, though, was that sound has a transformative effect on the experience of being in a physical environment and in a moment of time. I find that it sharpens attention, rather than reduces it.
Yeah, it can do both. Certainly it can add a layer of information which while in familiar places can provoke new insights, but it can also remove you from your surroundings.
I think I had a similar curve to M when I got one a few months ago, and it made me trip out on stuff I’d already written about. That said, now my portable player thing is bunged, I don’t miss it.
I missed mine when it was bunged, but more because I couldn’t listen to it at work and thus tune out the random chatter that was distracting me from the mountains of paperwork I needed to get through.
But when it comes to walking around, as I live & work in the inner city most of the ambient sounds are ugly – traffic noises, endless construction “improvements” and the like. I’d much rather provide my own choice of sounds.
As for distracting my from the world – I agree that it often sharpens my attention. For example I’m much more cautious about crossing the road when I know that my ability to hear approaching traffic is impaired.
Isn’t “sitting on the floor in an unfurnished room with nothing to do” distracting yourself from the world? I’d also ask “isn’t music part of the world?” as well, but then I guess the floor of an unfurnished room is also part of the world, as is having nothing to do – yeah, there’s my thought: if the world is everything in it, it wouldn’t be “the world” that you’re being distracted from, so it would be something more specific. Or should I be looking at a different ontology?
I have never had portable music, it seeming an unjustifiable expense. But I do have an intrinsic soundtrack… At the moment it sings a lot of nursery rhymes and chants modified A.A. Milne
“What am I doing? I don’t know,
Using reagents up all in one go,
Wasting my samples with nothing to show,
Anything, anything, I don’t know.
If I were a manager way up there,
I’d sit on chairs as soft as air,
And I’d look at me here in the lab and say,
Doesn’t that science look fun today!
Where am I going? The green leaves rustle,
Racing around all in a bustle,
Where am I going? The cultures clink,
I don’t know, but I need a drink!”
… and so on! I wonder when James will realise he has a mad mummy for a scientist…
Of course one can pay attention to music, can meditate on an activity. But I think it is in the silences that awareness tends to be easiest.
One of the keys, for me, is being aware of yourself in the world – it’s easy to get lost in music, or in books, or indeed in day dreams (which I’m guessing would be what most people would do faced with the unadorned room).
Much though I’m a fan of developing ontologies and thinking about stuff, this is something where thinking and categorising isn’t going to help much. I think certain environments are conducive to certain activities and ways of being, and my entire point was that I don’t think it’s a good idea to reduce the occasions in which we might be forced to confront ourselves. I mean, how often is a walkman or similar used because you are intent on listening to that particular music, that you will concentrate your whole attention on it, rather than because you might otherwise be bored, or not like where you are and what you are doing? One, to my mind, is distraction, the other not.
I guess it depends on what you’re looking for.
In my world, silence is nigh-on impossible to achieve. There are always many background noises at work, at home, at play, and everywhere in between.
I need something close to silence to write. I cannot write with people chattering away, but in my writing space there are always people doing just that. When I am in my room typig fervently away, I am writing. But when I am walking the street lost in thought – I am writing then too.
Some writers are able to get away to somewhere genuinely quiet, away from the bustle of city life. There are other writers who can afford their own place, where they can control the levels of noise surrounding them. I do not have these luxuries. I live in the city, near my job; and I live with other people.
For me, music is as close to silence as I can usually get.
So when I am in my room writing, there is always music because that way there is no talk. When I am walking the streets writing, there is always music because that way there is no sound of machines.
This is all in direct contradiction to what you yourself are looking for. When I write, if I do not tune out the world and lose myself in the story and the characters, my writing does not work.
If there is something more important to me in my life than my writing, I do not know what it is.
Pearce: Fair enough!
(Actually, it’s interesting what I consider silence to be – ‘natural’ noises, to a large extent, are part of silence, even when they are sometimes loud.)