#digital randomness

Two and a half years ago, my laptop died. When I got a new one, I opened up the old one, took out the hard drive, and transferred its contents onto the new one, where they have mostly sat patiently, unbrowsed-through and unreflected-on.

When I moved to Chicago three months ago, I decided not to bring the external hard drive with all my music on it, partly because I was short on room as it was, and partly because of a vague untested theory about "starting fresh" or words to that effect. So when, about a month in, I broke down and let iTunes search my computer for music, there was a bunch that I had forgotten about from the old hard drive, mixes I barely remembered making, albums I had mysteriously downloaded at some point and never listened to, radio shows of ancient lineage and long-dead interest.

Earlier today when I participated in Maura's "4 4:11 songs for 4/11," I naturally organized my songs by length before scrolling down to the four-elevenses, making a quick playlist, and cherrypicking. About an hour ago, I went back into iTunes to find something to listen to, and realized they were still organized by length. There were a lot of under-a-minute songs. I hadn't realized I had so many intros and outros and interludes... wait a minute, that's not thirty seconds long.

Maybe my old hard drive had started to eat itself before I transferred everything over, maybe some of those old, eccentrically-sourced mp3s had been poorly transcoded and several copyings-over had loosed some bolts somewhere, maybe I had never properly listened to some of those mixes... but I ended up finding thirteen songs that had somehow been cut down to snippets between 0:25 and 0:53 in length.

I've threaded them all together in Audacity, organized by length, and tried to keep the levels decent, and you can listen to the resulting file above, in a nearly eight-minute slab. Some of them include some of the most famous records ever made, some of them are a little more obscure. Perhaps coincidentally, they're all from purely-instrumental songs. (There are a couple of human voices on a few of them, but they're wordless.) I can identify the songs if you want, but I thought it might be more fun for you to listen to it without knowing what's coming up. Though if anyone can name all the songs without resorting to Shazam, I'd be impressed. (I couldn't.)

I can't say it's a brilliant mix -- it's essentially random, an artifact of digital happenstance. But I kind of like it anyway.