Blog #3: Slicing up reality

Well, pertaining to the ways of organize music, that can refer to a number of things. Perhaps this is another blaring example of reality being multi-faceted, but does organization of my music collection mean what arbitrary buzz-word categories (read: Genres) all my music fits into, or how I personally arrange and mark it for listening? I guess there are some pluralities between the two distinctions that apply to both. Like Weinberger said, we try to split things all the time. For example the terrible loaded question: "what kind of music do you listen to?" That question is essentially saying "what label can I apply to your entire musical identity?" Or Weinberger might rephrase it as "what branches is your music on?" Anyway, I'll try and discuss both here.

I generally dislike the idea of genres when it comes to music. Genres are great for movies; there's usually some kind of consensus on them: comedies seek to entertain through humor, romances focus on relationships, there's not a lot of confusing, arbitrary terminology. However when people craft such terms as "post-punk with w-bit influences" I get really confused. What is punk? What does it mean to be post-punk? What does 8-bit have to do with anything? It gets worse the more you add: post-black melodic grndcore egyptian speed death metal. I guess I don't understand why the use of arbitrary words when you can just throw down a couple adjectives and call it good? I don't see the need to say that an album is "alt-folk contemporary indie rock" when I can say that it combines modern sensibilities of  recording with laid-back acoustic melodies, upbeat singing, and some orchestral integration. And then there's the issue of artists that mix it up with a whole host of influences and do a different thing with each song or even within songs. This genre-based thinking is too compartmentalized for me; I just feel more free without deciding that I need to neatly file all 3000 songs I listen to into nicely labeled boxes.

For a little more prompt-relevance: I guess I've met a lot of people who like to organize their music this way. They do it so much that they even like to put it into the song's metadata. They use genres to arrange and listen to their music, because they have enough of it that's so incredibly similar that it fits into those boxes and they listen for the telltale signs of certain genres in their music for the sake of compartmentalizing it in that way. Whereas I just have it divided by artist, album, year, and track wherever I can to create groupings; they'll add the additional trait of genre and do that.

The other aspect of organizational is the more direct aspect of how exactly I have it stored on my hard drive and how exactly I access it. I have an XML spreadsheet of my library that stores info about where all my songs are and tags their metadata. I use a central program to read this spreadsheet and arrange my tracks based off of the metadata. When I click play, it uses the XML spreadsheet to locate the file and then plays it. I like this method but unfortunately unless I preserve the XML spreadsheet (which I've never had the foresight to do), little, it any of the metadata is stored in songs themselves so I lose most of it with each format or machine switch. One day I'll probably switch from iTunes to Foobar and just use a format that can store metadata.