Will this piece still be funny now that pennies are no longer being produced?

In short — I made a new webpage to chronicle my listening history. Woohoo!

In the distant past of 2010, I distinctly remember two things:

1. Reading headlines on LifeHacker about a neat new service making a splash across the pond called Spotify — where you can legally stream a seemingly infinite library of music.
2. From that same evening: ripping Plastic Beach by the Gorillaz onto my computer, loading it into my iTunes library, and transferring it to my iPod.

A year later, I was shocked by the instantaneousness of having access to all music ever recorded.

15+ years later, I find my relationship with listening to music vastly different from those days. Teen-specific sentiments aside! I'm listening to a broader range of music, going deeper into sub-genres, and have heard international artists I otherwise would have never been exposed to. That's all good and well!

At the same time, I find myself not listening as deeply, not listening to whole albums, and allowing a large portion of my listening to be guided by unseen forces. Perhaps the pace of life has changed this, perhaps age, perhaps the coming and going of fascinations and interests.

Whatever the reason, I had a moment ripe for reconsidering my listening habits and the technology that supports them.

CDs

Visiting my childhood home, I found stowed away a bunch of physical CDs that I hadn't thought of, let alone heard, in ages. Tucked in jewel cases, some in plastic sleeves from friends who burned playlists for me, nostalgia ensued. I popped several into a physical CD player. (One of those big 2000s era boomboxes was available. After that, I popped one into my car. Being built in 2016, it still has a CD player.) I felt the nearly forgotten anticipation of waiting for the music to start, the tactile satisfaction of placing media into it's reciever.

Seeing a natural trail of my listening history in physical form, I realized this sort of thing was too important to me to leave it to chance, tech companies that come and go, etc. I enjoyed being curious about what caught my ear, collecting it as a source of inspiration, and saving it in a way that it can serve as a time capsule later. There's a seeming urban legend about how Andy Warhol would wear a different perfume daily for a couple of months so that he could then remember that point in time. Music has a similar effect; it's a great memory maker.

Unfortunately, physical CDs are not the answer. I found out all too soon that my favorite Japanese City Pop CD's would be $30 each + international shipping. Too many recent favorites don't do print runs of their music. Even so, the practical reality is that most of my listening is done through apps. A physical purchase would be reserved for special albums, not for the entire collection.

It begged the question — what was I really trying to accomplish? If it were to be more intentional about my listening and saving my listening, the nerdiest answer I could come up with was a webpage. I had remembered those times curating my iTunes library intentionally, and I was suddenly interested in doing the same on my own domain.

The Data Wrangling

The development was largely trivial — the project's meat was in data collection and cleanup. I had to pop my physical CD's into a spreadsheet. But that only accounted for a fraction of my listening. It took crawling my iTunes library from ~2012 when I made the switch to streaming, as well as exporting my Spotify playlist data.

With that done, several rounds of lassoing data ensued. More memories came flooding back — it took considerable effort to keep good hygiene with an iTunes library. It's easy for naming conventions to get off, for the same artists to have different names based on stylization (ex: Arcade Fire and The Arcade Fire, or Tune-Yards and tUnE-yArDs), and for album art to be inconsistent. At times, it was frustrating. Now, though, it was the right amount of resistance to help me slow down and really savor the collection as a whole.

Tagging by year listened was a goal, as this was meant to reflect a timeline of listening. The 2000's required big ol' estimates, while for 2016 on I could use Spotify listening data.

While I was at it with my exported Spotify data, I decided to transfer over the top songs by year. This feature is universally beloved — I listened to my first (2016) playlist for years after the fact. Spotify doesn't cover the entire landscape of my listening, but it'll do. Those tracks were tossed into JSON and are now listed under /topsongs/{year}.

Violà! A full day's effort later, and I have 930 albums listed on my new Music Shelf page. I know that to most readers this is just a list of albums. But for the curator, this is a delightful wall of memories and favorite melodies that spans a mile long.

The page itself is simply a list with cover art, album, and artist. Of course, there's more I could do. Were I feeling particularly clever, I could whip up integrations with Spotify for further automation. BUT! The point is for this to be manually maintained. To have a process that even, ever so slightly, resembles the modern-day equivalent of getting into the car, driving to FYE, walking through the stacks, making a selection, bringing it home, and THEN putting it on the shelf. It allows time to live more deeply with the music.

Will this change my listening? It already has. Metaphorically, I've gone from only ever listening to the radio to finding my favorites and spinning them on repeat. Even without abandoning Spotify ("Yet you participate in society"), I have a reason to manually add albums, skip the MASSIVE UI encouraging I hop to the next listening destination right away, and get to know albums better. (Significant for me, since for a time I was almost exclusively listening to algorithmically suggested tracks before it got to be too much like the snake eating itself.)

The aim is to balance the best of both modernity and older practices. Like any choice around modern technology, our approach informs the tools we use and how we use them, not vice versa.

✌️

[phone rings]

Hey!!

I'm calling to let you know I have new music out — Phone Lines! It's a little Shibuya-Kei-inspired party. Enjoy some cutesy melodies and whimsey!

Anyway, my dog is calling me on the other line. Gotta go — talk to you later!

[hangs up]

• Listen on 🌎 this site
• Support the album on 🤘 Bandcamp.
• Listen on 📺 Youtube.
• Listen on 🙉 Spotify.

Merry Christmas, everyone! ❄️

It didn't feel very POSSE of me to have so much on this site as a source of truth, except for my own albums!

All the major players have their baggage in the music hosting/streaming space, unfortunately. Even previously humble Bandcamp has traded parent companies twice in the past few years.

And besides — I have to say there's a little something special in having music play on this lil' site — in the same way that a hand rolled pizza at home is different from a frozen one, eh?

So I whipped a solution up this morning! See an example on the ol' Bird Box OST page.

Tech

For the technically curious —

The base html audio element, like so many others, comes out of the box with plenty of helpful attributes. There's some extra work to get a playlist style interface, but this is handled through those attributes. Namely: onEnded, which allows the player to continue to the next track, onTimeUpdate to visually show track place, and onLoadedMetadata for keeping tabs on the track length (helpful for visual slider for track time position)

const PlaylistPlayer = ({ tracks }) => {
  const [currentIndex, setCurrentIndex] = useState(null);
  const [isPlaying, setIsPlaying] = useState(false);
  const [currentTime, setCurrentTime] = useState(0);
  const [duration, setDuration] = useState(0);
  const audioRef = useRef(null);

  const handleTimeUpdate = () => {
    setCurrentTime(audioRef.current.currentTime);
  };

  const handleLoadedMetadata = () => {
    setDuration(audioRef.current.duration);
  };

  const handleEnded = () => {
    if (currentIndex < tracks.length - 1) {
      play(currentIndex + 1);
    } else {
      setIsPlaying(false);
    }
  };

  // . . .

  // part of the return:
  <audio
    ref={audioRef}
    onEnded={handleEnded}
    onTimeUpdate={handleTimeUpdate}
    onLoadedMetadata={handleLoadedMetadata}
  />;
};

export default PlaylistPlayer;

Funnily enough, the range input element works well for showing and adjusting the track position:

const handleSeek = (e) => {
  const time = parseFloat(e.target.value);
  audioRef.current.currentTime = time;
  setCurrentTime(time);
};

// . . .

<input
  type="range"
  min={0}
  max={duration || 0}
  value={currentTime}
  onChange={handleSeek}
  aria-label="Seek"
/>;

The rest is styling and a few more handlers in the React component.

Files are stored on AWS through S3. I had to whip up a script to upload and adjust my albums.js file en masse, a somewhat tedious task since many older albums were not quite as organized as my newer ones. Left plenty of time to get nostalgic!

Give it a whirl! Visit any of the albums on my music page.

Very cool tune.

Thanks to Let's Talk About Math Rock for the tabs and curated licks.

~☀️🏝️🐧~.

Thanks to Let's Talk About Math Rock for the tabs and curated licks.

A huge milestone in developing proprioception! One of a handful of pieces performed with eyes off the hands and on the sheet music. You can hear me "sounding-out" the next few syllables when a sizable leap is involved. But! All around not too shabby. Progress!

Diving back into the Faber books to get practice on proprioception!

For the past year and a half, I've been working on and off on improving an underdeveloped skill on piano. Proprioception is a ten-dollar word for playing without looking at your hands. Broken down, it's the feeling of knowing where your hands are in relationship to the keyboard and knowing the distance you need to move for the next note or chord shape.

If you read only one bit of this as a fellow pianist, take this advice: Start developing it early. It's something that was not emphasized enough when I was taking lessons and class piano, and I certainly wish it were!

Why It Matters

Sight-reading and proprioception are intertwined. They are technically different skills, though. Sight-reading is decoding what is on the page and playing it without prior rehearsal. Proprioception is not sight reading, but it makes sight-reading much easier.

Why does sight-reading matter? Maybe it doesn't to every player. But to me, sight-reading and playing more technical pieces are intertwined. The more you can play without much effort, the better off you are at being able to focus on the new challenge in a denser piece.

Additionally, improvisation requires the level of intimacy with an instrument where phrases are second-nature. Proprioception plays into it.

Lastly — It's just fun! It feels like flying, being able to play without switching your gaze between looking at your hands and the page. Playing the piano is simply more enjoyable this way.

Developing Proprioception

If you're already familiar with playing as I was, there's an unavoidable feeling of really downshifting. New neural pathways were being synthesized. It felt like playing a new instrument once I started taking my eyes off the keys. A rite of passage, a good exercise of the mind, and a hit to the ego, but worth the effort!

All that said, much of the material I worked through started very simple. That's for the best, since an entirely new skill is being learned here to great effect.

Super Sight Reading Secrets by Howard Richman came highly recommended. I dove in here first and would say that this is the "Start Here" for working on proprioception skills. Richman divides exercises between "Keyboard Orientation" (proprioception) and note-recognition skills.

The approach is very gradual and highly tactile. Some teachers would recommend focusing primarily on learning intervals, but Richman takes the long view and encourages you to gain a sense of where each 2/3 note cluster of the ebony keys is located from 0. If presented middle C on the page, the exercises encourage you to find it. Then, removing hands from the keys, doing the same with A2, F5, and so on. Very tedious, progress is slow, but this has been one of the most beneficial exercises in my learning.

There are many more great exercises, thoughtfully ordered. My one note would be that you probably don't need to wait until completing the book before you move on to reading simple music. There are a whole slew of skills that need to stack to read even elementary-grade music, and it's better to start that in tandem with these exercises.

Speaking of, a great companion is Hannah Smith's Progressive Sight Reading Exercises for Piano. This is a book of five-finger pattern 2-3 line pieces. Nice to work through since you're not worried about making leaps across the piano, instead getting a familiarity with feeling different scalar shapes under the fingers. Since there are regular key shifts, this book encourages interval recognition, first in a contained window of five fingers, which then works up to larger leaps after graduating from the book. In actuality, exact-note placement and interval measuring are two lenses that are used in tandem when reading, so it's beneficial to have both developed.

Most recently, and with great jubilation, I've been returning to earlier elementary piano methods. It's time to leave the realm of pure exercise and start applying this to music more regularly. My method series of choice has been the Faber Piano Adventure series, jumping back in at book 3A. Though any method will do, such as the Alfred method.

Progress

I started this in March of 2024, so it's been about a year and a half of gradually working on this in small bursts. Of course, the keyboard orientation exercises took the longest. It's not been until this month that I've felt comfortable enough to work with the elementary method books.

Eventually, though, there was a tipping point. One day, it went from being impossible to — well, possible! Much like a child learning a language, I'm still having to "sound out" (meaning, play really slowly) certain sections, but I can stumble my way into finding where my hands need to go.

When I was first learning piano, playing two hands separately felt like an impossible task. Until it wasn't. After some point, the skill wasn't perfected per se, but I knew that in most pieces I could climb that wall. I'm excited to be reaching a similar point with proprioception and, as a result, sight-reading!

Am I done? Nope! But I do feel that the skill can now develop more naturally as I continue to play. I've broken free from the stratosphere, and it will now be easier to cruise and let the eyes on my finger mature organically. Winston Churchill in Painting as a Pastime encourages "[planting] a garden in which you can sit when digging days are done." Digging days are just about done!

So I'll keep going — enjoying that feeling of soaring whenever my parasail catches a day of good wind!

Post Script: A few bits of very practical advice from Yeargdribble, particularly for anyone picking up Piano as a secondary instrument. Namely:

• Don't follow the "just keep going!" approach of sight reading. No need to practice with a metronome early on; you'll learn more from slowly, but successfully playing the correct notes.
• When sight-reading, avoid looking at your hands when you've read ahead a few bars. This is robbing you of the chance to develop proprioception for when you'll need it with denser music.
• Treat it like learning a language. Tackle pieces that you are 80% familiar with the patterns, or as he puts it, that you can play at half speed. Then, don't worry about perfecting every piece. Better to read more pieces quickly than to develop rote muscle memory for the particular piece you are learning.

More tapping!

Thanks to Let's Talk About Math Rock for the tabs and curated licks.

🌠

Sweet arrangement by Yoshii Alfajor on MuseScore.

Here, the future is only so near~

Miranda and I saw a rescreening of the film in theaters at the start of summer and I was NOT PREPARED for this to become a new favorite movie!

Took a few months to work at this. Definitely one of the busier pieces I've played so far, so I'm proud of that!

Still a wild song 15+ years later.

Thanks to Let's Talk About Math Rock for the tabs and curated licks.