Slashdot Mirror
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."
Who would have thought that shuffle would be popular? You know, like the radio?
From the article:
"Temporal order is an important element of how a work unfolds dynamically over time, an important factor underlying the aesthetic effect."
Well, sure it is within a song, but saying that the order of songs within an album is important to the "aesthetic effect", is like saying that if I read a book by J. Random Author without reading all of his other books, in the order they were written, that I'm missing the effect.
A song, like a book (or book series), is a discrete unit of art. Sure it's similar to the other songs on that album, and sure it can be nice to listen to an entire album, in order, but where on earth does he find evidence for the claim that random shuffle appeals to "brain damaged" kids with short attention span.
I like a good random mix as anyone. However, I am also rather fond of the "rock opera" format. You lose something if the songs of "The Wall" or "Tommy" or "Greendale" are scrambled and mixed in with other tracks: a lot of the enjoyment is in the "story" and sequence. I suppose you can get around this by making sure that these albums are encoded as one single audio file.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The expert quoted in the article was a professor of marketing, hardly the go to guy as far as neuroscience is involved.
Thalasar
It's common for people to fear what they don't understand. When a person doesn't understand that I happen to enjoy a wide variety of music, from techno, to classical, to the beatles. The fact that I enjoy a surprise when I encounter something unexpected, and the fact that I don't like hearing the same song on repeat for weeks on end, ala a radio station. Just because you don't don't understand, doesn't make you smarter or better, just different.
Probably "Authority==Orderliness Nazi" Music has for the most part been shuffled on radio for years, except those stations that just play loops. Gotta slow down on reading up on such "authroities" I'm developing a sodium problem.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Winamp has had that feature for years. People were shuffling mp3s that way before ipod was a sparkle in an apple execs eye.
I used to be a huge fan of shuffling (this isn't a new feature - every mp3 player ever has had the ability) until I started appreciating the album as a cohesive work. I never really enjoyed the music of the Beatles, for example, until I listened to Abbey Road the whole way through and realized that the album's genius lies at least in part in the overall construction. I feel like a lot of this is lost through random play.
Sounds to me like someone at Wired is heavily into ye olde art rock, and expects people to listen to albums that are really just collections of pop songs as if they were Dark Side of the Moon.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Strictly speaking, a shuffle play shouldn't be random. Like a dealing from a shuffled deck of cards, once it's played one song, it shouldn't play that one again until it's finished them all and reshuffles.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
ummm, you do know you can random shuffle a CD, or songs on a CD right?
Maybe back in the day an artist had a lot of say in terms of what went onto an album, and how the album unfolded as a listener worked through it. Perhaps at one point there was a larger message that could only be conveyed by an album, and couldn't be contained in a single song (I'm thinking of The Wall by Pink Floyd). But the reality is that nowadays so much of the music out there is crap that the album as an art form seems to be mostly dead. This is one of the reasons that people are more willing to buy an individual track than to buy an album. Personally, I prefer to buy an album, but ONLY after I've previewed (read: downloaded) enough enough material or I'm familiar enough with the artist to have some faith in them. I HATE being burned by buying an album based on one song and then finding out the rest of it was a load of shyte. Record companies seem less and less interested in promoting a good album, and care more about the 2 or 3 singles that they can extract and promote the hell out of. My point is that one of the reasons that the random play is preferred to an album at a time is because few entire albums are worth listening to anymore. Random play, with careful selection of what goes on the iPod in the first place, ensures that EVERYTHING that I listen to is good AND I get to be surprised. But ... it could just be the brain damage. If so, it's most likely brought on by too much commercial radio.
I am not an old fart, but love classic rock. I could not even begin to imagine listening to a live Grateful Dead or Phish concert in random. Most of these Jam bands groove from one song to another so if you listen to the concret in random you miss all the good jams! Also why would you want to listen to Pink Floyd's Animals in random or Dark Side for that matter. The entire album in its order is a complete work of art.
Cheers, Joe
Random shuffling is a byproduct of our MTV-induced brain damage, eh?
Should I point out to this idiot that we have something called "radio" that intermixes songs from multiple artists and albums, in an effort to provide what we call "variety"? Or that it predates xmms, winamp, and the ipod by several decades?
One would think a marketing professor would be familiar with these concepts.
Radio stations have been randomly shuffling music for a rather long time now. As a result, music is neatly compartmentalized into 2-4 minute chunks. Contemporary music is designed to be shuffled. The fact that you might enjoy your music as it was designed to be enjoyed is not a sign of brain damage. That some ivory tower mucky-muck professor of marketing seems to assign undo significance to "the sequence in which the artist decided to present it" means precisely squat. All the "hits" get re-released as "the best of"s in many cases with little or no production input from the original artists, it they're still alive, and customers promptly buy them. Artists and professors are over-rated.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Kellaris said random shuffle likely appeals to the MTV generation -- kids with short attention spans who are likely "brain damaged."
"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."
This strongly depends on the quality and length of the album in question, IMO. Some albums need to be listened to in order (Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, Led Zeppelin I, and Hybrid's Wide Angle all come immediately to mind), but with the majority of CDs having no emotional continuity between songs, I see no reason not to skip around and only listen to what you feel like hearing. Besides, this argument doesn't address the popularity of mix CDs or the random shuffling of songs from multiple albums.
And, with music or any other form or art, what the artist intends to present in a piece of work is not always how the audience interprets it. Who's to say someone won't find more meaning in a random shuffle than in the original order of the same tracks?
The only thing she's right about is the fact that she is an old fart.
On a slightly related note, wasn't this the reason the Red Hot Chili Peppers (I believe) refuse to sell their music on iTMS? They want the CD to be appreciated as a whole, while their listeners wanted only a handful of the songs.
the coolest club on
I find that randomness helps me enjoy songs for a greater number of plays -- I don't get sick of songs as quickly when they are decontextualized. In album format, each track prompts too much memory of the succeeding tracks. And if the album has "bad" songs, then I find the memory of the bad song taints my enjoyment of the preceding song.
I'm sure music people don't want tactics that increase the number of enjoyable plays. Its in the music industry's interests for customers to become tired of the music so people go buy more.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
"in which the artist decided to present it"
Well, most albums nowadays are built by marketing flacks, not artists. To suggest that I should submit my listening habits to anybody's judgements but my own is ridiculous.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
These people are on drugs.
It isn't new to mix different songs from different albums - when I was a kid the cool thing was to make "mix" tapes with a double tape deck, and trade them around. It was always more fun to listen to somebody else's mix tape than your own, because that element of unpredictability was there.
The technology has changed, but the desire to listen to an varied list of music, in an order that is surprising, has nothing to do with "the kids today" and their short attention span.
The really great thing about today's technology isn't that you can shuffle all sorts of albums, but that you can include only the songs on the album that you like in the shuffle. That is the huge advantage over putting 5 cds into the changer and hitting 'shuffle'.
Pixie
don't mess with those geekgrrls
I have two observations:
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
In an era where CDs rarely have more than one or two good songs anyway, I like to gather collections together on a single CD. Since the songs are from different CDs, different performers, etc., there is nothing to lose by telling the CD player to play them in random order.
Brain-damaged? Yeah, right...
...laura
I'll predict there will be a whole slew of similar reports from scholars amd government agencies about why enjoying your own music your own way on your own music player is either unAmerican, unhealthy, damaging to Our Way of Life, playing into the hands of terrorists, etc.
Because the music industry is horrified that the album, that high priced gold plated sacred cow of music commerce, is doomed. Artists make songs and the music labels make albums. End users listen to songs, but must buy albums to get them. The songs sell themselves, and users choke down the price of albums to get the songs.
The middle man, the record labels, touch all the money and most of it sticks to their fingers, but without the album there would be no middle man as such, and increasingly the online music stores are getting set up to cut the middle out. Since the music industry is mostly talentless marketing wonks who otherwise would have to market uncool things like vacuum cleaners, the extinction of the album as a concept would be a disaster and really cut down on the number of great parties and available women they have enjoyed up to now.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
While I do usually prefer to listen to albums as they were intended to be played, as a whole, I do occasionally like to be suprised with the random functionality.
I bought some cheap radio that would play mp3 cds from WalMart, for use at work, and apparently the random play feature rerandomizes after every play, or it just hav a poor randomization algorithm. I noticed that occasionally it will repeat songs throughout the sequence. It will play a song go to a different song then repeat the first, quite annoying.
Also it would be nice to bundle certain mp3s without merging them. Some songs are just supposed to be heard in the album sequence. Examples include: The Beatles - Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight / The End; Queen - We Will Rock You / We Are The Champions along with many others. They just don't sound the same when not played in sequence. Yes I do realize I should merge the mp3s into one file but I like to keep the the tracks ripped just the way they were. Just a general bitch that I have.
When I listen through an album, I absolutely hate shuffle. I like to know exactly what is next. Usually the album is on repeat too.
I think though, it has to do with my style of music as well. I like techno and classical quite a bit, both of which are highly repetative and predictable. I often use music as a way to keep my mind focused while working, and so it has to follow a steady pattern. If it were to jump around, I'd probably get distracted by it. Sometimes I even pick a single song and leave it on repeat for hours. Rarely ever do I create playlists with mixed artists or albums, its either 1 song on repeat, or a full album on repeat.
no comment
Decrying shuffle play is like complaining about remakes, when the original movie is still out there. I can listen to an album in its original order, or I can switch it around. Or I can mix it in with other albums, even by other artists.
And saying it gives light to hidden gems is absolutely right. When I play an album straight through, I'm often lulled into learning it as one monolithic composition. Shuffle play breaks that up and allows individual tracks to shine. I've discovered some wonderful tracks that way, tracks that I never noticed until I broke up the album's original order.
My name's Larry, and I've been using shuffle play on CD players for fifteen years. (Hi, Larry!)
I like shuffle. Especially when dealing with (ahem) downloaded music, it's a nice way to discover music I didn't even know I had, or liked.
I agree with you.
It takes me just about 30 minuets to drive to work, which is a little more than half of a CD. If I listen to it in order, than everytime I play the CD I am going to here the same 6 to 7 songs, I could choose what I wanted to hear and program in a play list, but why bother when with a single button I get an assortment?
The above is even more true for MP3s, when you have a folder with 500 songs in it, it is tiresome to listen to it in te same order everytime, and it is a pointless bother to program it. Turn on random and I can go the whole afternoon without hearing any of the same songs that I heard the day before.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Some albums are designed to be listened to as a whole (The Wall, stuff by Yes) and some pieces often cover several CD tracks (symphonies and in fact most "classical" music). Overall, as many have pointed out, this is a small portion of the total music most people have in their collection.
In addition, I think that the majority of us, the majority of the time, put music on as an accompaniment to other activities (I'm listening to DJ Shadow as I read the news and type this response). So, this is a normal musical experience, where I'm not so much "staring with my ears," as I am enjoying the musical atmosphere like a nice scent: it's there, I check in, and I enjoy it off and on. Order is not important as I'm not there for the deeper meanings and the bigger structures.
Like many in this forum, I like the idea of having a set of music I like, but no idea what's next.
Finally, here's where shuffle improves things: with playlists. I have my "top 100" and "top rated" and many other playlists that are auto-generated by iTunes. I find that if the songs are in a set order, I bore quickly of the playlist. However, if they're shuffled, I keep going back (this is probably because I don't get through my top 100, and so if I always start the playlist would hear the same 3-10 songs every time).
So, for most people, most of the time, shuffle is a great enhancement.
How did you do your research? How do you know how most artists put their albums together? Over 20,000 albums (mostly in CD format) were released in the US alone last year. How many have you listened to? What percentage of the artists did you speak with to arrive at this conclusion? As a recording artist myself, I can tell you that I (and every other artist I know) put a great deal of thought into the sequence of songs on an album. And I don't make concept albums. It's just important to me that the overall work has a nice pace. How you listen to the work is your business. In other words, the sequence of every album is probably meaningful, but perhaps just not to you.
Well... I AM the old fart. Funny that there is no coments about the radio. How often do radio stations broadcast full albums in sequence?
Radio programmers mark certain slow-paced songs as "do not play in the morning drive" because nobody wants to be put back to sleep while driving to work.
I ocasionally work as a DJ, and this reminds me of something similar I was taught. I don't think radios do this as much - or at least, it's maybe not noticable from being interrupted with commercials and station id's - but it's something I do all the time listening to music at home.
Basically, play music in sets. You play a slow or downish song, and slowly build up into more energy over say 3-8 songs, and then drop back down again, basically going in waves. If you're going to jump genres, use connecting songs to switch (ie, going from rock to hiphop, you might play a fairly hard-rock song (at the top of the wave), move to something in the middle, play something of a rock-hiphop cross (Kazzer - When it rains it pours, off the top of my head), then play slow hiphop, and move up.
It makes the music 'flow', and, to me at least, makes a nicer listening experience.
I also don't really use random, but I pick semi-randomly from my collection and order them as I go. Something this article doesn't really point out is that while random CAN make interesting and good song orders, it can also (and IMO, more often) make bad selections, and play songs that don't sound good together. Maybe this is more important when you listen with crossfading (as I usually do), but it still bothers me anyways.
Speak before you think
Ah, but it's only going to be as random as the player's random number generator.
Judging by the history of random number generators on cheap/small computers, that's probably not going to be all that very random.
Anyway, I did a quick search and it's lack of randomness has been discussed before.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Personally, as far as the "attention span" and the idea of temporal oder, kellaris misses a few important ponts:
1) The majority of albums these days are not like many of the albums of old where the song order really is important in telling a "story". They're simply a collection of songs stand-alone songs.
2) One artist/producer/marketeer/whoever' idea of the best song order is not going to be the same as anyone else's. Furthermore, I'm not going to credit that individual (or individuals) with being any more competent than I am at deciding what order I would like to listen to the songs on an album. Sorry for the rant, but I'm tired of "artists" insinuating that their vision is the only correct vision (ie Madonna thinking its an assault on her artistic vision and integrity for someone to want to buy only a single song from one of her albums).
3) We've been subjected to the "random" shuffle for decades -its called the radio (the DJ's I know are about as random as you can get).
Actually, the shuffling of music is probably due to the increasing popularity of singles compared to albums. People seem to rather hear single songs by themselves rather than a whole album.
Maybe I am classifying myself as an "old fart" here, but I seem to recall a revolution where a bunch of guys and gals with guitars and basic talent created raw albums because the recording industry was littered with art bands making long, boring rock opera albums! This happened 25+ years ago. Artists and critics stuck on requiring the listeners to "appreciate" music in a particular way have not learned the lesson from punk (and jazz and rock and grunge and blues and ...).
I don't recall Elvis Presley creating rock opera albums (or even ones that required being listened to in order). I don't recall having to listen to great blues tunes in order to get that special feeling. I don't recall even the record companies demanding this ... after all, the record companies have released "singles" for radio play for decades (although singles used to have tunes not on albums).
If artists or critics want to demand that listeners only hear albums in a particular order, then they will watch on the sidelines as the next "punk" revolution happens. I personally think that there are two "punk" aspects happening right now:
1. It is very easy for a single person or bunch of friends to fire up instruments, fire up a computer, and create songs and albums themselves. It may not be as polished as a studio album, but blues, punk and garage bands never were polished yet offered some of the music with the most intense feelings. Music distribution for these band "start-ups" is still tricky, but it is much much easier now with the Internet than before. Hopefully this will have an impact on music as a whole (much as "college bands" in the 80s, who got distribution on college radio stations, forced their own way into the U.S. music scene).
2. The ability to have large digital music compilations (legal or not) is letting listeners dictate how they want to buy and hear music. I think the cost of the technology is still a little high to truly infect all corners of music, but that will happen over time as costs come down and digitally-stored music (on hard disks) becomes ubiquitous. Hopefully this will also have a big impact on the music industry.
It will be interesting to see how music will be created and listened to 10 years down the line. Rock, punk, college rock, grunge (and many other minor revolutions) changed popular music. Given how stale pop music once again seems these days, seems like we are ripe for another revolution.
ChrisL