The Music Cycle

Today I will talk about something a little less important than usual: my music listening habits.

I listen to music 2-3 hours a day. Since I spend so much of my day listening to music, I often find myself seeking new music to keep up the variety. My opinions of songs almost always go through a recurring cycle. Typically, I strongly dislike certain aspects of a song during the first couple of times listening to them. Then, after several times listening to the song, I start to appreciate them. I become almost addicted to these songs for a couple of weeks until I can practically recite the entire song in my sleep. At this point, the song loses its novelty and I stop listening to it. I rarely listen to it for the next year or so, and then once I have sufficiently forgotten it, I rediscover it for perhaps a few days, until my brain starts to remember the whole thing again.

As far as I know, part of my little cycle is reasonably common. I often observe and hear from other people that they get addicted to songs and then after a while stop liking them (or at least lose some of their interest). Sometimes, the songs make a small comeback, sometimes not.

My music library has always seen a rotating type of pattern regarding the popularity of individual songs. When I am out of music to listen to, I go onto the internet to find some more. I will immediately take a strong disliking to most of these. I will be saddened and start to think that the world is out of good music for me. I will then reconsider some songs that I previously discarded as garbage. For many of those songs that I am listening to for the 3rd or 4th time (after discarding them as trash multiple times during previous internet searching sessions), I will start to develop an appreciation for it, eventually fall in love with the song, promptly download it, and finally, place it into my music library. I will listen to these dozen or so songs almost exclusively for about two weeks (perhaps 20 times through each song).  At the end of this period I will be entirely familiar with them and search for more music in my library. I will rediscover some of the older songs that I had started to forget and refresh them in my memory for a couple days. Then when I have them memorized again, I will be out of music and will sulkily search the internet once more.

The cycle is very self-regulating. Every few weeks, I add a dozen or so more songs, and my cycle encompasses nearly 500 songs. Logically, I should be rediscovering more and more songs each cycle (because there are more songs), but this is not the case. This is due to the fact that the songs that have gone through the cycle 4-5 times, the ones that I have re-memorized over and over, tend to stick in my memory a lot better than others.

I find it greatly amusing that my cycle greatly confuses my music library on my PC. It likes to rate my music for me based on how much I listen to it. New music always starts out with a low rating, but after the 2 weeks of heavy listening, it realizes that I have been listening to them disproportionately much and puts them above all the rest. At this time, however I grow tired of them and move on. After that, however, they drop down in the rankings until they are at the bottom. This is usually when I "rediscover" them. Thus, I am always listening to the very lowest rated songs on my computer, which I find rather funny.