I almost always listen to music while I work. It breaks the silence and blocks out white noise. If I'm alone, it makes me feel not so. If I can't get away from other people, it makes me feel not so crowded. It's the best aid I've found for my wandering focus (that gets worse whenever I'm near anything electronic).
I have many study playlists in my iTunes that fit different needs. Only specific types of music go into each. Here are some incomplete lists of the artists I listen to (it would take me a helluva lot more time to write down everything) in certain scenarios. My hope is that a) you'll see new music and b) be inspired to try adding some new music to your routine. If neither (a) or (b) happens, then I've still done another Wednesday post, and all is not lost.
1.
Reading/Writing -
Soft music without words.
Artist Examples: Arms and Sleepers, The American Dollar, Tycho, Boards of Canada, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions in the Sky, Sparrows Swarm and Sing, Instrumental Soundtracks (e.g. Heavy Rain, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, The Incredibles, UP, ), anything covered by Vitamin String Quartet, Apocalyptica, and some classical music (Delius and Gerswhin make appearances).
Specific Songs: "Blue Orb" from W <3 Katamari.
2.
Editing -
Soft music with words.
Artist Examples: The Fray, Little Dragon, Iron & Wine, Fleet Foxes,
Specific Songs: "Tea Leaf Dancers" - Flying Lotus, "Aqueous Transmission" - Incubus, "Duvet" - Boa, "The Rat" - Dead Confederate, "Disintegration" - Lewis and Clarke (cover of The Cure).
3.
Composing (gathering sources, outlining, etc) -
a mix of soft/hard music without words.
Artist Examples (in addition to everything listed under #1): Flying Lotus,
Loné. Specific Songs: "Make Love" - Daft Punk.
4.
Time Crunch - h
ard, fast, or trance-inducing music without words or with repetitive word sounds.
Artist Examples: Daft Punk, MSTRKRFT, Flying Lotus, Junk Culture.
Song Examples: "Pjanoo" - Eric Prydz, "The Falling" - Sparo.
5.
Creative Work -
a mix of genres that follows no particular rhyme or reason, but has a lot of intense creativity in the music (the philosophy being that that creativity inspires creativity).
Artist Examples: Broken Social Scene, Coheed and Cambria, Passion Pit, Florence + the Machine, Tokyo Police Club, Drive-By Truckers, Hold Steady, Fleetwood Mac, Michael Jackson, RJD2, Panic! at the Disco, Frou Frou, Imogen Heap, Radiohead, Phoenix, Sufjan Stevens, The Dear Hunter, The Wombats, The Felice Brothers, Mos Def, Matchbox Twenty.
Specific Songs: "Kingdom of Rust" - Doves.
6.
Repetitive Mindless Work - Set to random and hope for the best.
I listen to music a lot. I am one of those people who does not consider a day successful without music, and I constantly have something going in the background or (when I can) full blast. I have diverse tastes, but I have a tendency to listen to songs over and over again that I love or hit that part of the brain that loves addiction. I thought I would show a window into that part of my brain and show you the 13 songs in my entire library that are rated five stars (through an external program that rates on frequency and number of plays) and have more than 75 plays since July 2009 (which makes most of these songs recent discoveries, which in turn actually skews these results a lot). Each song is listed in ascending order.
As is everyday with me, this is apparently Opposite Day. Of course I don't feel like staying away after I say so! Don't you know any better by now?
Anyway, I've been listening to the craptastic single "Damaged" by the craptastic "singing group" Danity Kane (I suppose they are called so because it is somewhat bad marketing to call them the "engineered sound bite group").
Moving on, I thought we could have fun with the music, and make it as fun and educational as possible - for you and the kids! Here's how it works: take the lyrics of "Damaged" and replace one word with a sound. Yes, that's right. Just replace the word "heart", which appears in the song twelve times (not counting when it's spelled), with the sound "unh." If that's not your style, you can say "mm", too. It helps to wiggle your eyebrows a little bit. With such placement, you can get classic phrase like this:
Do, Do you got a first aid kit handy?
Do, Do you know how to patch up a wound?
Tell me,
are you patient,
understanding?
Cause I might need some time to clear the hole in my unh/mm and I
I've tried every remedy
And nothing seems to work for me
Baby, (baby)
this situation is driving me crazy
And I really wanna be your lady
But the one before you left me so
Damaged, damaged
Damaged, damaged
I thought that I should let you know
That my unh/mm is
Damaged, damaged
So Damaged
And you can blame the one before
So how you gonna fix it, fix it, fix it [cont. ad nauseum.]
Later on in the song, there's this gem:
My unh/mm is missing some pieces
I need this puzzle put together again.
That's right! Change one word, and you've got a song about sex safety! Why tell the kids that it's unsafe to have unprotected sex with multiple partners? Let this song tell them for you. Suddenly a horrible and unrelateable song about a first aid kit fixing heart ache is now about getting a hole in your "unh" from a particular horrible former sex partner, and how you'll have to tell every future partner about the hole in your "unh" forever - because it's not curable.
Thanks, Danity Kane, for making those parent-child conversations so much easier!
Just thought I'd announce the addition on the sidebar. One of my friends got me interested in Last.FM again, so I thought I'd expose myself to the potential embarassment of revealing my music tastes.
For those who are native, hope you've enjoyed the three day weekend (yay snow in March!). For those of you who aren't, sucks that you didn't have snow.
