The human mind is an incredible machine.
I’m endlessly impressed by the amount of knowledge we can store and retrieve. I can’t remember telling a friend the same joke two days earlier, but I can rattle off from memory every Radiohead album and its track titles in order.
Recently, I was struck by the way in which we know things intuitively or cosmically, but we grab a piece of information that drives it home.
I know on an intellectual level that there’s more music in the world than any one person could possibly hear. It’s a numbers game and the odds are stacked against us from birth.
If we live 75 years, that’s more than 39 million minutes. That sounds like a lot, but let’s wash away one-third of that for sleeping and another third for school and work. Right there, we’re down to 13 million minutes to do everything else – television, take out the trash, wash dishes, wait for YouTube ads to finish, ride on Bay Area Rapid Transit to concerts and read about “39 Ordinary Household Items You’ll Never Believe Are Edible!” on Buzzfeed.
Let’s assume an hour of music listening per day in that 75-year lifetime. That seems ambitious for some and too little for others, but it adds up to 1.64 million minutes, but a drop in the bucket of our 39 million.
Put another way, it was almost one year ago when Spotify announced that more than 4 million of the service’s tracks had not been heard once – and they all aren’t one minute long. It would take a lifetime to plow through all of those tracks.
These numbers do a poor job at demonstrating the wealth of music in the world, but it was driven home to me in a decidedly different way this week.
BeeHype, a collection of music journalists, bloggers and DJs from around the globe, released earlier this week its Best of 2014, but did it in a way unlike nearly anything I’ve seen before.
Divided into 44 countries or regions, BeeHype’s scribes scoured the world for the best music last year and present an impressive portrait of what mankind did musically in 2014. (The United States is noticeably and perhaps intentionally missing.)
As a music connoisseur, I dove in with glee, clicking on one nation after another, checking out Chinese post-rockers Wangwen, before bouncing over to the Middle East to find an unlikely team up between Chile-based rapper Ana Tijoux and British-Palestinian MC Shadia Mansour on “Somos Sur.”
It’s not a perfect collection, but there are some sounds and styles I never would’ve heard without this and it brought me back to what I’ve known instinctively but never felt in my bones – there’s just more music in the world than I could ever possibly hear.
It’s awesome and I mean that in the truest sense of that word – I am awed by the creativity of mankind as a species. Our incredible machines between our ears are capable of so much across the emotional spectrum and hearing that directed into an auditory realm is just one of the powerful ways to communicate.
Once you realize that there’s more music and more sounds and more breathtaking, creative talent out there than we have time to hear, I’m also touched with a twinge of sadness. It’s sobering to think that there’s beautiful music being created right this second that, because of where and when I was born, I will simply never hear.
I hope I never stop seeking out the Wangwens, Ana Tijouxs and Shadia Mansours of the world, discovering fresh and vibrant sounds that move me. I worry that my hearing will survive into my old age to be able to keep listening.
But it does make me appreciate the music that I do get to hear and that I love just a little bit more.
In fact, I’m going to go and spin a few of my favorites now, while holding this thought. I encourage you to do the same.
See you again when the needle lifts.