💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2021 › 202108 › 20210820-music-and-memories.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:53:01. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-04)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
---
When i come across a piece of music I really like, I have a habit of listening to it over and over again. I'll buy a CD of it or rip it from YouTube, put a copy on all my devices, and I'll load it up in a music player on single repeat. I usually obsess over the song for a few days or weeks, until the next song blows me off my feet and I find a new obsession.
After the initial auditory binge, I start to listen to the song less and less often, until I reach the point where I hardly play it at all. Sometimes I even forget that I have a copy of the track at all.
I've noticed that this causes very strong associations to form in my mind between certain songs and certain times of my life. Of course top 40 hits almost always make us think of some year or season gone by, but my short-lived, intense obsessions with individual songs cause me to associate them with very narrow stretches of time.
For example, I have an album of production music composed by Stephen Rees titled simply "Production Music Vol. 67". The tracks on the album are forever linked to memories of going to a local renaissance fair in 2011. A song called "Three Times a Player" by the Finnish band Pepe Deluxé always reminds me of taking a red-eye flight from Chicago to Rome in 2009, while "Uprising" by Muse makes me think only about visiting an ex-girlfriend in her college dorm in 2013.
Sometimes I'm tempted to guide this memory-making mechanism by stopping myself from listening to certain songs too much. That almost always fails, though--which isn't a bad thing, because it simply gives me an opportunity to form more memories.
---
[Last updated: 2021-10-28]