█
▓
▒
░
▓
▒
░
I posted about the "Sound Files of Summer" episode of Never Post back at the end of June. If you have not listened to that episode yet, please do so now. The show recently did a Mailbag follow-up where listeners chime in about how streaming music vs curating a library of files has impacted them. This is some nerdy subject matter I can greatly appreciate.
They tackle the music library topic at the top of the show but hop to 7:45 to get directly into the discussion about "the materiality of sound files." Specifically, how listening to sound files differs from streaming, particularly in regards to encoded errors that create. The second response gets even further into this idea and I'm transcribing the quote exactly here so there's a means of preserving it:
"I accept that my copy of Akira is a little folded up in the corner after I sat on it without looking. Or that my vinyl copy of that one Sufjan Stevens record has a locked groove that I need to get up and lift the tone arm over whenever I get to that part. We expect our physical media objects to have quirks of ownership. There was a very short amount of time where our digital media had these same quirks.I love that quote. It is, admittedly, a little bit of nostalgia for a nerdier time but it's also a nice sentiment that building a "Music Library" is a physical activity. Granted, the physicality of it is bits being written on a drive but there's still something there; errors and all.
Maybe that copy of Indiana Jones that's sitting on your computer just has the Hindi subtitles burned into it and you learned to live with it. Kind of grow to love it. It's yours (although depending on how you got it, it could also be someone else's). It's just not everyone else's. Digital files are funny like that.
The age of streaming has somewhat singularized the files of digital media and I find that to be a little sad."
Comments