Music Interfaces

January 8th, 2007 11:44 PM

It occurred to me that I associate certain music with the interface through which I played it.

For example, when I think of most recent music, I think of it in iTunes. Some particulars, though, I think of as being played on my iPod nano. Half of Him by the Beautiful South is an iPod example — I always listen to it while flying.

For some older selections, things I listened to a lot during college, I think of the somewhat clunky but always reliable interface of XMMS. Staples such as Social Distortion and Tom Waits fall into this category.

Finally, there are a couple of outliers that I remember in a CD player (Buck-o-nine in my discman as I backpacked through Europe) or the dated interfaces of Musearc (Oasis unplugged) and MacAMP (assorted hour-long electronic and hip-hop mixes). Some of them even in the early releases of MacAMP that didn’t have any interface to speak of (Santana, Blackstreet).

I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise (something akin to muscle memory), but I wonder if other people ever experience this?