Thursday, May 17, 2007

Excessive obsession: music.

While sitting down to do some work, I fired up iTunes and dug up some music. I noticed the play count for a particular song I wanted to listen to; it was really high (in the hundreds). Seeing this reminded me of other play counts for other songs I hammer on. It also reminded me of a conversation that my wife and I have from time to time. Every now and then she points out how my music listening can be rather excessive, both in terms of just raw listening time, as well as obsession around particular songs.

As with many people, music is part of me. It motivates me, drives me, influences me, makes me happy, sad, angry, ecstatic, etc. I'm not sure what I would do without it; can humans exist without music? You get my point.

Anyway, why don't I get sick of certain songs? There are songs I have listened to literally thousands of times, and often hundreds of times in a row ("repeat one") for hours on end.

I'll never stop loving and listening to some songs, but I do wonder sometimes what that says about me.

I'm currently saturating, and blowing my mind with Heartbeats by José Gonzáles.

I'm also reminded of a question I asked my mom as a child. I vividly remember the scene. We were driving out of our neighborhood, turning left on 75th St. Something was playing on the radio and I asked "mom, when does the music run out?" Obviously she didn't get the question initially so she inquired about what I meant. "When are all the songs invented, and there are no more?" She tried to explain that music doesn't bottom out that way. I spent the afternoon churning on the question I'd asked. While eventually nature/science could exhaust all sound wave combinations, you can always change the duration of the combos which essentially gives you an infinitely variable set of music.

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