Listening In

When you go to a major league baseball game these days, it is a highly mediated affair, with video and audio woven seamlessly into the live action. Recently, players have taken to personally selecting their “at-bat” song, that booms through the stadium as they walk out of the dugout and up to the plate. Players get real specific about what they want to hear – often sending a CD up to the control room before the game with a note: “Queue up track 3, 20 seconds in.” I got to speak to some of the Boston Red Sox about their favorite walkup songs. Mike Lowell, Alex Cora, Coco Crisp and All-Star slugger David Ortiz (pictured) all weighed in on the tune that gets them psyched up to hit. Megan Kaiser, the Sox music programmer, was my guide to the soundtrack of a baseball afternoon on the fabled field at Fenway.

 

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I was watching poker on TV, and I noticed that the players, many of them, had headphones on. I was, like, “Really? You can do that? You can listen to music at the table?” And then I was wondering, “What would a professional player listen to during a high stakes game?” So I went to the Foxwood Poker Classic on the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Reservation in Ledyard, Connecticut. The Foxwoods Poker Classic is a stop on the World Poker Tour – a $10,000 ante No Limits Hold ‘Em Tournament. As the 10 hour day of play forged on, I was able to get in side the earphones of some of the pro players.

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Music seemed to play a lot of different roles for players. It’s certainly about emotional control – getting you up when your energies down, keeping you down when your energy’s too far up. It keeps you focused, like when you’re driving hundreds of miles and you need to keep mentally alert. Sometimes it’s about superstitition, sometimes its about the lyrics. Sometimes all it’s about a little humor to keep you going. “Another One Bites the Dust” – and just about anything from Queen – seemed to work well with the poker set.

 

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In this episode of Listening In, we put out a call to Weekend America listeners: “What is a good song for falling asleep to?” In the conversations that ensued, we heard about many different kinds of songs that worked – it wasn’t all Pachelbel’s Canon and whale songs. I sat with sleep specialist Dr. Gerard Lombardo of New York Methodist Hospital, and listened to your responses with him. Listening to songs as diverse as Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” the Beach Boys’ “Whistle In” and Mettalica’s “Master of Puppets,” Dr. Lombardo and I concluded that, when it comes to sleepworthy songs, it is less about the song itself than each person’s relationship to it.

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I will be giving a talk at Xerox PARC next week:
Active Listening: Social Identity in the New Music Economy

BayCHI: March 13, 2007, 7:30PM, George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA , USA
The line between music consumer and music maker is blurring; in this middle space are design opportunities to improve the ways we discover, share and use music in our day-to-day lives. The practice of call and response between audience and performer, long an attribute of musical experience, is finding its way back into our interactions with digital music. In this talk, I am going to look at the impact new music technologies are having on our listening behavior. I will take a look at how trends in listening and sharing point to the greater role that music fans will play in the new economy of music.

Also speaking that night, talking about their awesome music discovery site:

Pandora’s Experience: Learning from Users, Designing for Users
Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, & Dan Lythcott-Haims, Pandora’s Creative Director

Sketch by Bill Verplank

A piece I produced for Studio 360’s Design for the Real World series airs this week: Thinking Outside the Mouse. It features Bill Verplank, a seminal interaction designer who comes out of the tradition of human factors engineering. Bill worked at Xerox in the seventies as part of the team that brought the Xerox Star, the world’s first commercial personal computer, to market. After periods at IDEO and Interval Research, he is now at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA, or “Karma”) working on new interfaces for musical expression. Verplank has a special focus on haptics, or force-feedback systems that “push back on you when you push on them.” He believes this is a promising direction for musical interfaces that will give greater expressive control to the performer of computer-mediated music.

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