A Personal Record of Time

It's a common enough wish that a soundtrack accompany life's greatest moments. For our sound project I thought I would take this idea into consideration and put a spin on it by using music to make a record of time. After classes ended for the day (after having charged my iPod fully in anticipation for this homework) I turned on my iPod and started playing every song in my library in alphabetical order. By choosing to play every song rather than every artist the music would continue undisturbed for so long as the iPod was charged. Starting at one o'clock in the afternoon Monday and ending at 8 o'clock Tuesday morning when class began my iPod played a continuous two hundred and seventy two songs. Nearly all of the letter 'E' had played which surprised me. I expected that many more tracks would've been spent ; apparently I underestimated the power of almost three hundred songs that were on average two to four minutes long. Listening to music all day certainly made the time go by more quickly, but having a soundtrack to life when you can't skip songs for the posterity of an assignment isn't as glamorous as one might think. I also spent some time averaging out how many songs were in an hour by organizing twenty one, one hour playlists of songs alphabetically from my iTunes. The average was track list was sixteen. This makes sense, I suppose, as most thirteen track CD's take about forty minutes to play through completely, but still I expected them to be longer. Though I felt time was moving quickly in the moment, the illusion seemed hard to believe once I saw the data on paper.