Happy Birthday iPod!

source: The New York Times

Happy Birthday iPod!

By DANIEL J. LEVITIN
Published: October 22, 2011 
Daniel J. Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill University, is the author of “This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.” 
Oct. 23 is the 10th anniversary of the

iPod

. Daniel Levitin reflects on the little gizmo and the many ways it has changed our lives — and the way we listen. 
Has the iPod brought more music — more rhythm — into our lives? 
Yes. The average 12-year-old can hold in her hand more songs than my great-grandfather would have heard in his entire lifetime. Also, digital music is a great democratizing force for musicians. They no longer have to go through the narrow turnstile of record companies. 
Does listening to music through headphones — rather than loudspeakers — affect what we hear? 
Headphones potentially offer greater clarity, but at the loss of power and low bass response. Another difference with headphones — a team of researchers in Britain just reported that using headphones reduces your sense of personal space on subways: you’re willing to let someone stand closer to you if you’ve got your tunes playing. 
Does listening to an iPod affect your hearing? 
Adolescents routinely listen to their iPods at levels exceeding 95 to 100 decibels. That’s about the same loudness you’d hear standing near the tarmac as a 747 takes off. The

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health

allows only eight hours a day of 85 decibels in the workplace; more than that, you’re going to damage your hearing. The hair cells in the ear are very delicate. once damaged, they usually don’t recover. 
Is iPod sound quality better or worse than a basic home stereo system? 
Worse. The MP3 standard ruined high fidelity. It’s possible to upload CD-quality onto the iPod. But most people opt for the default, lousy quality of MP3 and M4A compression. An entire generation has grown up never knowing high fidelity, never hearing what the artists heard in the studio when they were recording. This is a real shame. 
In your book “This Is Your Brain on Music,” you say music works like a drug. Say more. 
Listening to music with others causes the release of oxytocin, a chemical associated with feelings of trust and bonding. That’s partly why music listeners become so connected to the artists they like. Plus, the nucleus accumbens — the brain’s well-known pleasure center — modulates levels of dopamine, the so-called feel-good hormone. (This same brain structure is active when people have sex, or when cocaine addicts take cocaine.) 
Can music have mood-altering effects? 
Lots of people use music for emotional regulation. It’s similar to the way people use drugs such as caffeine and alcohol: they play a certain kind of music to help get them going in the morning, another kind to unwind after work. Brain surgeons perform their most concentration-intensive procedures while music plays in the background. 
iPods change the way we “share” music. For one thing, we don’t listen together. So? 
Music listening used to be an activity that we did with great ceremony. We’d invite friends over and sit down, pass the album cover around, study the artwork. And when the record started, we’d listen intently together and do nothing else. In short: music listening was deeply social. The iPod has turned music listening into a mostly solitary experience.

iPod Shuffle

lets us listen to music in more or less random order. Does this make any difference in how we listen? 
Shuffle has given us a new way of listening: mashes, or songs that we might not otherwise put together. When it works, it’s fabulous — we hear Billie Holiday followed by Jimi Hendrix and we can hear the connection between them. But when it doesn’t work it’s disorienting, pulling us out of the hypnotic reverie that good music programming induces. 
iPod owners tend to download singles instead of albums. What is the effect of that? 
An obvious loss: the album. For decades, artists assembled and sequenced songs to make a larger musical statement, the height of which resulted in concept albums, from Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” to Green Day’s “American Idiot.” Breaking an album up into singles disrupts the artists’ original intention for the work. Also, we tend to lose the opportunity to discover songs that don’t jump out at first. 
Any science on why certain songs get stuck in our heads? 
Scientists call them earworms. We don’t really know anything about the why of them, but we know something about the what. Usually they’re songs that are melodically and rhythmically simple — most people don’t have the “Ring” cycle stuck up there — and it’s usually just a short loop. 
How do we get rid of those songs? 
The tried-and-true way is to think of another song and hope that pushes out the first one. Here: think of “It’s a Small World After All.”