A Year in the Life of My iPod

Essay

It all began with those little black 45's. It was 1968, the summer of love. I had just received my first weekly allowance-- a buck-- and I knew exactly what I was going to do with it. I raced down to my local Sam Goody and bought the single 'Fire' by Arthur Brown (along with his Crazy World). I even convinced the clerk not to charge me tax, because all I had was the dollar. I think he saw the 'Fire' in my eyes because he let me go with the stern warning to "bring the 2 cents by tomorrow morning." I did not... screw the government.

I rushed home and waited impatiently for our phonograph to be free-- my father was an opera aficionado with a vast collection of scratchy vinyl 78's and spent hours at a stretch hunched over the stereophonic console-- and when it finally came free I played my record, donning the bulbous can headphones in order to hide the primal music and shrieky warblings from my opinionated dad. After the first minute I adjusted the speed from 78 to 45 and tried again, far more satisfied with the non-cartoonish results.

And I was hooked.

And so it has continued for some forty-odd years, my rather significant investment of cash dropping into the event horizon of an endless array of new music. The medium has changed and changed again some half dozen times in my life, but the notes and rhythms have remained consistent, providing the background beat of my life from which to link experience and emotion. Moving through analog records and tapes to digital CDs and tapes and finally, to a medium of electronic Morse code, I have pursued the 'pleasure of the ear' with the fervor of obsession. My collection, even while expanding to impressive proportions, has grown smaller and far more mobile... and just in time, as my back grows weary from time and overuse. If I still owned a vinyl record for each song in my current inventory there wouldn't be a wall in my home free of sturdy shelving, not a hallway made uncomfortably narrow from the task of storage.

Thanks to modern science, I can now move through my home or in fact anywhere, carrying the whole of my entire musical archive... in my front jeans pocket! It could be argued that the radio station emanating from a transistor radio gave us that gift way back in the 50's, but at that time there was an army of people at work, each performing one aspect of the great organism allowing me to hear all that music. And I had no say in what melody would be played next, unless you believe that changing stations gave me better options, or that a careful placement of request line phone calls could allow me to hear the playlist I wanted at the time. It's not the same thing at all.

And that enormous advantage is only the first of many that technology has given me. As an example, the strain of organization is gone from my life. Alphabetization was an essential part of the music collector's life... once enough albums were in your possession it would be nearly impossible to hear the song you wanted without knowing exactly where the disc storing it was situated. Misfiling often meant the same thing as death to a song-- put an album in the wrong place in a vast collection and you might never hear it again, rendering it 'dead' to you. New methods at our disposal not only store items in correct order, but can be retrieved with no more effort than it takes to spell the name. And should you wish to reorganize your collection, say by song name or by genre, well, that is no longer a cold winter's project... it can be now accomplished in under a second.

And the excruciating care that a vinyl record needed in order to remain pristine was an exhaustive and expensive process involving protective barriers and soft cleaning tools... and sometimes temperature regulated, dust-minimized play equipment. Any less rigorous effort often ended with the LP sounding as if were being accompanied by a rain stick, or with 2 second jerks due to a forward skip or worse, re-hearing the same section repeatedly thanks to a backwards skip.

Tapes were easier to maintain but had several inherent disadvantages: The tape could stretch and distort the sound; it could unroll into the tape deck and need rescuing (with greasy fingers and the rewinding potential of a number 2 pencil); or it could just break and need to be 'fixed' with scotch tape that forevermore caused a moment of silence in playback (a moment of silence for another dead soldier, folks). And we can't ignore the initial disadvantage of tape to begin with-- the ever-present bottom end rumble heard as the tape necessarily slid over the reading head to be processed into sound.

CDs were thought to be a big step up in sound quality, and were-- many listeners were shocked to find the CD had already begun without any audible cue until the music started-- but they had the same potential for scratching as the LP, with an even weirder resulting chatter as the electronic technology attempted to find its place among the billions of shiny or flattened dots that represented the ones and zeros of modern sound. Plus, in the race to find a cool storage medium for this cool modern tech, the horribly frail 'jewel box' was chosen (initially), and millions of obsessive listeners were forced to buy shares of stock in corporations that manufactured replacement boxes. And they still took up a lot of room in the real world.

Finally, fully digitized music found its way into the computer, and the software to organize and play it was perfected. We had our homes back again! Kind of... we still kept our old music, but after we transferred them onto our hard drives they became full-time residents of Boxville, the Attic. But... we couldn't take it along with us since it was anchored to a bulky hard drive under your desk. Not easily, anyway. We were forced to reach backwards to older tech, creating playlists and burning them onto blank CDs, then carrying them in padded bags next to our CD Walkmen. Not so bad... right?

Right... until MP3 players hit the scene, revolutionizing music play forever. Now we had a portable hard drive merged with playing/organizing software, connecting to us with tiny earbud headphones and a small screen of information to keep our place in the massive file. And it fits in our pocket!

At first the total storage capacity was minimal-- about a hundred songs-- but we reasoned that we didn't need more than that for the average jog, and we could return home afterwards and dump them all, loading all new songs from our main file on the computer for the next time. But storage capacity necessarily exploded and before long our entire collection went with us, wherever we went.

Which leads me to my point. For whatever odd reason, I envisioned becoming stranded on an island, alone, and feared a lifetime of silence until I got my handy MP3 player with a solar charging station. How many songs, I wondered, would I need to own so that I wouldn't find myself dreading whatever played next, after a decade (or four) of solitary living? I'll return to this.

iTunes has a nifty piece of data prominently displayed under every playlist: The total number of playing minutes contained in the list. It's a handy number when burning CDs, to fill all the empty space on the disc. It's efficient. It has another function, though. Regardless of your musical taste, it quantifies your collection into a single data point: How long you can listen to your own collection of unique melodies before the same song passes by your ears again.

This might not be important to some, but it's crucial to me. In high school while listening to my preferred FM radio stations I found they replayed popular songs frequently, with such regularity that at times I actually changed stations when an overplayed song would begin. The business model for 'Album-Oriented' radio was actually killing my favorite songs! Burnout had a second definition for me in high school.

I differ from many of my peers, who determined their musical taste (like most of us) in high school. So did I, with one important difference: My musical tastes evolved over the years, and even though I still enjoyed the genres of my youth I found new music to be even more rewarding. But many of my friends have not followed that same musical path. Decades later, I find that they are not only still listening to the same genre... they are still listening to the same songs. I find that flabbergasting.

Thanks to iTunes and their randomizer function, I get to hear it all. All of the music from high school is there... but so are all of the choices I loved from every decade since then! This guarantees I will hear my old favorites, but at such a reduced repetition rate as to not become ponderous.

Getting back to my question... I find that every time I import a new selection, I now glance at the bottom number and mental math springs into action. In the beginning, after importing my first album, it showed minutes and seconds, approximately 40 minutes and 10 seconds if I'm not mistaken. After the second album finished importing it displayed hours, minutes and seconds (1:19:48). Now, four years later, it stopped at days and I can understand why. Weeks is rarely used to denote any passage of time longer than a month (except for that oddest description of time periods-- the 39 week pregnancy)... and months are pretty different from each other. When I reach it (and I've still got a long way to go), I'm willing to bet (a buck) the next division will be 'year'. Even though there's an extra day every four years, by and large the 'year' is a static unit of time.

And at that point, when my display reads 1:oo:oo:oo:oo (or so), only then will I feel comfortable with my banishment to the aforementioned island. Because at that time I know that it will take a full 365.25 days before I will hear a song repeated.

Unless you're counting my vast number of uncorrected duplicates.

Copyright 2011 Bruce Ian Friedman