The Joy of Random Shuffle

ajayvb writes "Wired has this article on how the iPod and other music players have brought random shuffling of songs to the fore. This generation seems to like their music that way, and according to one of the authorities in the article, it's because they are likely 'brain damaged' and have lower attention spans. Ouch."

Comments

Artist knows best?

[DreadSpoon]

"Personally, and I believe I speak for many old farts here, I appreciate listening to music, be it an opera or a pop album, in the sequence in which the artist decided to present it," he said.

"Temporal order is an important element of how a work unfolds dynamically over time, an important factor underlying the aesthetic effect. Random shuffle pretty much flushes that down the toilet."

He is assuming, of course, that the songs being listened have any real order. A good deal of the albums produced have no theme, no real order, and are just collections of songs. This is especially true for rock/pop/blues stuff. Listening to an album in order just means you get a preset random chunk of tracks vs a dynamic random chunk of tracks... not to mention you often find that you only like several songs on a given album.

Shuffle rules!

[graikor]

I usually use a Smart Playlist that takes all the 4 and 5 star songs I haven't heard recently, and plays them in shuffled order. That makes it like a radio station that only plays my favorite songs, with no repeats (albeit one that only plays songs I've actually heard before).

Sometimes there's no substitute for listening to an actual album in order, but shuffle is a nice way to introduce some serious variety - there's nothing like hearing Coltrane followed by Queens of the Stone Age...

Re:Give me Album Shuffle

[Darth Maul]

You can do this on an iPod.

Settings > Shuffle: Album.
Then select an artist in browse mode and hit play.

Re:brain damaged ?!?

[jeffcuscutis]

Some albums are made to be listened to in a random order. They Might Be Giants Apollo 18 is designed to be listened to on shuffle.

Re:My shuffle world random rocks

[Skater]

It could happen the first time you use it.

If you have 9 songs, then there's 9! (362,880) possible permutations, I think. (I'm a statistician, but it's my day off, so I get to be lazy and not think too hard about this.)

So, the probability of getting the exact order of the album would be 1/362880, which is about 0.0000028. Okay, it's pretty unlikely, but it could happen, especially if you listen to that album a lot. Another way to think about it: every time you play the ablum on shuffle, the chosen play order you hear only had a probability of 0.0000028 of being chosen.

Assumption: shuffle w/o replacement. If you have shuffle with replacement (as one of my CD players does), it's even less likely.

--RJ

Brain damage and order are all relative

[aswang]

Speaking as a pedantic biologist, I don't think you can objectively call it brain damage. Presumably, our shorter attention spans are the result of our homeostatic processes trying to cope with the continual bombardment of information. This will clearly cause changes to the brain. I wouldn't be surprised if you could directly correlate subtle findings on PET scan or fMRI to the slight variations in the duration of someone's attention span. I don't think we can evaluate whether these changes are in fact "damage," i.e., with negative adaptive (selective) consequences, or are in fact, positive adaptations until, as they say, more real data comes in. (Yes, I know this sounds very Lamarckian, but, you know, he was right when it comes to molecular biology as opposed to evolution of species.)

That said, I do think there is some value in listening to albums in track sequence. Like other posters have pointed out, presumably the artists put the tracks in that order for a reason (although, more likely, a marketroid put the tracks in that order, but I digress) and since the emotional effects that a lot of posters have been alluding to are cumulative, you're clearly missing out if you always listen randomly. I mean, if there were no value to listening to songs in a particular sequence, what would the point of creating playlists be?

Shuffle Extra, With Winamp

[lotsofno]

Winamp 5 and some other players (not iTunes though I think) have built in functionality that really adds some "oomph" to shuffling: enqueue

On Winamp, if your listening to a huge random playlist of songs, but you want to hear a particular song after the one your listening to, just select the song in the playlist and hit 'Q'. Winamp will finish the currently playing song, then play the song you selected, then return to randomly shuffling the tracks automatically. You can do this with multiple tracks, picking an order you want to hear those songs, and then having Winamp shuffle the rest.

Or just hit 'J' to search the list of the songs in the playlist, and select the song(s) you want to enqueue.

Awesome!

i sent an email to Mr. Kellaris.

[patrick.whitlock]

i sent an email to this guy asking him how the could make such a broad statement without taking into effect advances in technology. he responded with what he actually told the reporter. i think this guy was just mis quoted. his email is below: Patrick, Thanks for your note. The reporter misquoted me. Here is exactly what I told him (via email): "I've no particular wisdom to share on this topic - my own research does not speak to it. The only thought that occurs to me is that the feature should appeal to "variety seekers" with a "low need for control." (Random shuffle is a control freak's worst nightmare.) Also, I wonder if it could have a (deleterious) long-term effect on attention span. Adult attention span has been decreasing over time. Random shuffle may be a manifestation of this M-TV generation phenomenon." Ciao! -James

Re:Who would have thought?

[w3weasel]

I have friends who DJ for a clearchannel station. They, like 99% of clearchannel DJ's have ZERO control over the playlist... there's a computer down the hall from their booth that syncs with the 'Clearchannel Marketbuilder 3000' supercomputer that downloads the new song to the local station, sets the playlist, schedules break, commercial and announcement time slots.
Its so sad... the DJ sits infront of a monitor, reads the prompts and every few minutes the silence (in the sound booth) is broken by a mostly scripted blurb.

basically, todays DJ is the opposite of a reboot monkey in the IT industry.