Shuffled Music, Music from Up, and How To Get Up In the Morning

This guy named Matthew Irvine Brown has come up with a cool project called Music For Shuffle. He wrote a set of 18 short musical phrases (anywhere from 4 to 18 seconds long), any one of which will transition smoothly into any of the others. The idea is that you put them all in a playlist and listen on shuffle - the result is an ambient, evolving soundscape that's never the same twice (okay, fine it could pick the same order twice, but there's about 6 million billion different orderings (seriously), so for all intents and purposes it's never the same twice). He made a sample video of one ordering, but it's worth downloading the tracks from his website and doing it yourself to get the full effect. His notes on how he made it are worth reading, too; the added trick with the album art is very cool. John Cage would be proud.

(It's nice enough with iTunes's definition of shuffle, but I think it would be even more effective if each track were actually random, rather then having to go through all 18 before ever repeating one. Of course, that's a limitation of iTunes, not the actual project.)



Continuing the theme of innovative ways of making music is this song by Australian DJ Pogo, called "UPular Remix".



It's composed primarily of brief snippets of dialogue from the movie and a remix of the movie's extremely memorable theme. The snatches of dialogue are so short that (at least in the first half of the song), you can't actually tell what words they were originally saying; however, they're strung together so smoothly that it sounds as though someone is actually speaking a real language. It's a way to divorce the aesthetic effect of singing, with all its different pitches, phonemes, and inflections, from the actual meaning inherent in language. There are countless examples of this throughout musical history, such as scatting in jazz and Vonlenska (Hopelandic), the nonsense language invented by Icelandic band Sigur Rós. Sometimes I think that The Mars Volta are going for the same thing, even though their lyrics (supposedly) actually mean something.

Finally, another front has opened in the eternal struggle between my desire to get up on time and my desire to stay in bed in the morning, but this time I think it actually might be enough to end the war. My most recent strategy had been to have an alarm set on my iPod under my pillow, and another one a few minutes later on my phone down on my desk (I sleep on the top of a bunk bed). The idea was that my iPod would wake me up first, but then I'd also have to get down and turn off my phone, and going to all that effort would be enough that I'd just stay awake. Obviously, that failed, as I started simply climbing back into bed after turning off my phone. For a while, I was stymied.

My new inspiration came from this website; specifically, the cool feature where it will tell you when you should wake up if you go to sleep right now, taking into account the average time it takes to fall asleep. I've known about trying to synchronize your sleep with cycles before, but the simplicity of this website inspired me to actually make it practical. There's another important fact involved: I feel much more awake and ready to face the day when I wake up naturally than when I'm woken up by an alarm.

So, my newest strategy is to combine the natural sleep cycles with an alarm safeguard. When I'm ready to go to bed, I see when my natural wake-up time is. Accounting for some fuzziness in sleep cycles and how long it takes me to fall asleep, I set my iPod alarm for 15-30 minutes after my natural wake-up time, leave it on my desk, and put my phone under my pillow with no alarm set. In theory, I wake up in the morning at around my natural wake-up time, feeling refreshed and alert because I've lined up my sleep with my sleep cycles. Then, I can check my phone to see how long I have still to sit in bed before my desk alarm goes off. Plus, if I do oversleep, I won't oversleep my target by more than 30ish minutes, because then my desk alarm will go off.

I think this has potential to actually be a reliable way for me to get up in the morning because it doesn't rely on my willpower, which evidence shows is pretty terrible when I first wake up. It also gives me good reason not to say "oh, I'll just stay up for 5/10 more minutes" when I'm up late, because pushing it too much will ruin the cycle, so I have to go to sleep within a certain window of reasonableness.