SuperWeed

My lengthy silence has had some people saying the title of one of my favorite mp3 blogs: Honey, Where You Been So Long?

I’ve been stuck at the intersection of Deadline and Nothing to Say on the writer’s block of a particularly bad neighborhood. I managed to slog through one overdue anthology chapter but then became immobilized in the middle of another. Like a fool, I stayed there, even though I ought to know by now that saying “no blog, no email, no writing anything else at all until this gets written” is a certain recipe for days and days of staring discontentedly at sentence fragments and jagged paragraphs as I fall further and further behind not only on the project in question but also on all of my other obligations other than teaching and animal care. Like Wiley sings in Treddin on Thin Ice, “it seems I don’t learn because I make the same mistake more than twice.”

Luckily, somebody called me and reminded me of something else I’ve been promising to write. The next morning I burst out of bed and began monomaniacally writing that other thing, the words pouring out like a cloudburst breaking a drought and the ideas flowing faster than I could get them down. Two days and twenty pages later, I’m ready to get back to that chapter and start making a dent in all of the things I’ve neglected while trying to write it.

We’ve just had a cloudburst at the sanctuary too, a lovely deluge that washed the pent-up pollen out of the air, which now carries the delicate scent of the rampaging wild roses just starting to bloom. The ducks were delirious during the downpour and continue to be thrilled by the swelled ponds. Now that the sun’s back out, the chickens are running around excitedly, catching up on the foraging they forwent while waiting out the rain.

I can’t spend long on this post because I’ve got literally thousands of spam messages to wade through in order to find my true email messages and heaven-knows-what-else to do to get back on track. But, before I go, let me tell you one thing that sometimes gets the words going and almost always keeps them flowing: The right music. If I can find the right music to match the mood of what I’m trying to write, then I’m halfway there, I guess because of the way it stimulates my brain. That means, sometimes, listening to the same song 25 times while writing one paragraph or, more often, listening to a cycle of songs that collectively capture the feel of what I’m trying to say.

Let me share with you three tools that help me to do that, also helping me to discover new music and make the most of the music I have:

1. MusicIP Mixer
I learned about this software in New Scientist magazine a few years ago and have happily used it ever since. Basically, the program constructs playlists based on the structural features of music. The version for individual use is free. After installation, it analyzes your mp3s (or AACs or whatever). Be patient. This takes a looooong time. Once it’s ready to go, you specify one or more tunes as the starting point of a playlist, choosing whether you want the list to have high or low variety in terms of kinds of music and whether or not the overall style of the artist(s) of the seed song(s) should be favored. The program then constructs a playlist of any length you choose, based on the structural features of the music. If you like, you can tinker with the the playlist before exporting it to your player of choice or listening directly from the mixer.

The very first time I used MusicIP Mixer I was amazed by the song it chose to follow the seed tune, which followed it perfectly although they were in two very different genres and I never would have thought to put them together. Besides regularly supplying surprises like that, this software helps me to make the most of my music by keeping me from slipping into ruts. Songs that I otherwise might have downloaded and forgotten pop up in playlists all the time. And it’s great at generating playlists that capture and reiterate the mood of an instrumental track, which is exactly what I need to keep the words flowing when I’m writing.

2. Pandora
Pandora is an online stream server associated with the Music Genome Project. Again, the emphasis is on the structural features of music but here these are used to create personalized “radio stations” based on one or more songs or artists. So, if you’ve got a song in your head and would like to hear music like that, you can start a station with it. Or, if you’d like to hear songs of a certain type, such as bebop in a minor key, you can seed the station with a few songs that fit the profile. Either way, once the music starts playing, you can give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to each song so that, over time, the station more and more closely matches what you want to hear. (I’ve got one station that plays nothing but Thelonious Monk or other artists playing Monk compositions, another that plays Parliament/Funkadelic-style funk, one that plays jazz-inflected hip hop, another that plays Delta blues, etc., etc.) You can choose to share your stations or keep them to yourself. Either way, you’re bound to discover new (to you) music along the way.

3. Last.FM
LastFM is a hybrid music discovery and social networking service. Unlike MusicIP Mixer and Pandora, both of which I’ve been happily using for years, LastFM is relatively new to me but I’m pretty pleased with it so far. Once you sign up, you can choose to “scrobble” the record of your listening to the LastFM server (obviously, not for you if you want to keep your listening habits private) which then maintains tallys of your top songs and artists. These are used to identify your musical “neighbors” (people with similar tastes) and generate personalized radio stations such as one that plays what your neighbors are listening to. Another great way to discover new music! Even if you don’t choose to scrobble your songs and get personalized stations, you can listen to stations of artists similar to your favorite artists and listen to tracks by individual artists.

I had to mention LastFM because there you will find the track that supplied the title for this post: Freddie Hubbard’s brilliant Up Jumped Spring. Since today’s another rainy day (I started this post yesterday) you might also want to check out his version of Here’s the Rainy Day.

May 10th, 2008 | Category: Music, Writing | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL