What’s the best way to sort, wade through and make sense of the oceans of digital media that’s stored on our hard drives? Inspired by musician Bill Drummond’s experiment of only listening to music starting with B for a year, Russell Davies is testing out the same filtering strategy on a compressed scale. In order to deeply engage with new music, and learn to pay attention in a new way, Davies is only listening to music starting with the same letter of the alphabet, one letter a week.
He explains:
I find that unless I trick myself into paying attention to music that I either just revert to tried and trusted favourites or let all sorts of new stuff drift by me an in ambient haze. Not really listening.
So I thought I’d try a 26 week experiment; listening to a new letter every week. Just to see what I notice. This is week A.
Projects for paying attention to attention. Those seem interesting now.
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I play a similar game. I have a playlist that I set to add only songs with a play count of zero. As I listen to it, any time I play a song all the way through it disappears from my playlist. Eventually, I’ll have listened to everything on my hard drive if I listen to nothing but that playlist.
January 26th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
The solution to our growing paradox of choice – arbitrary rules. Ahhh the burden of surplus…
January 26th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
bit like cooking by color, day for eating all things orange, or programming the mobile alarm with a mission for the day… today is peachy butt day… tone and squeeze with regular reminders in case one forgets it’s peachy butt day.
Big YES for back to the basics.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:32 pm