I love music. I love to listen to music, to play music, to read about music. Oftentimes, I surround myself with music so much that I forget that it’s such a huge part of my life. Recently, I’ve been taking surveys online, for both my enjoyment and to make a small sum of money and oftentimes these surveys ask similar questions. Questions like: “How many times to you shop for groceries in a month?” or “How many video game consoles do you own?”. One question seems to come up more often then not goes like this: “How many hours a week do you spend listening to music?”.

I’m never able to give a truly accurate answer to this question, not one nearly as accurate as how many trips I take to the grocery store in a month at least (it’s two). After being presented with the question several times and responding inconsistently with answers ranging from “8 hours” to “around 20?” I decided to actually measure my time spent listening to music and my hour count was a bit surprising. It turns out that I listen to around 55 hours of music a week (at least for the week that I measured it). I’m sure this data would be far more accurate if I averaged it with other weeks of recorded time listening and if my measurement were exact (I mostly rounded up or down the minutes to 5 minute intervals) but I feel like it’s in the ballpark of how much time I usually spend listening to a tune in the background somewhere.

After realizing that I spend over two days of my 7-days-in-a-week life cycle listening to roughly 100 or so artists on my iPod and (seldom) on the radio I started to think about when and why I spent so much time doing this. It’s not like I spent all these hours only listening to music. In fact, a part from listening to calming music every once in a while at night to fall asleep, I rarely just sat down to listen to music. The one exception being the hour I gave to listen through Sufjan Steven‘s new album Carrie & Lowell, which had just released several days prior to my experiment. Overall, I spent most of my time (around 35 hours of it) listening to music on the way to school, from school, or during work (I spend my weekends delivering pizzas to the friendly folk of Northeast Tacoma). I asked myself why I listened to music so much in the car, instead of listening to the outside world or just basking in the silence of being alone and at work. Habit, is my guess. I do love music but more so I love comfort and having the freedom to choose specifically what I want to hear during the course of my day is a very comfortable thing to do that, after a while, just becomes my usual response to sitting in a car and driving somewhere. While I love music, I felt like I was missing out on being present in the world and have decided to roll my window down and listen to what is outside every once in a while. I feel like that can be music too, in a cheesy what is life sort of way, and I want to see how a release from that part of technology effects my feelings.

I’m sure that I have many other habits and hobbies that take up more time that I think that they do and ,though I don’t know what they are yet, I intend to find out.

– Austin