A Genre a Week; An Experiment
It was New Year’s day, a Friday this year, and I was listening to a Simon and Garfunkel playlist while washing dishes, the aftermath of my wife’s cooking that day when she remarked on the oldies I’ve been listening to. My instinctive response was, “yeah, I try to vary what plays so that the music doesn’t get stale.” It’s easy to fall into the trap of listening to the same kind of music week in and out, especially now that we have semi-intelligent curation like Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist. We’re at a weird technological place where it’s easy to curate new music that fits our taste, but not so simple to push beyond that, exploring new genres altogether.
I then had a simple idea: what if for the next year I focused on a single genre for an entire week? I’m always by a computer streaming music as I work; wouldn’t it be perfect to make an experiment out of something I already do?
I think it would.
Here’s my plan: If this effort is going to stick, I need to keep the effort part down to a minimum. Throughout each week I’ll add noteworthy tracks to a dedicated Spotify playlist, and sometime after the week ends I’ll post an update right here on Medium. I’ll also integrate this into my already-running Hebrew Type project, and create that week’s playlist cover art in Hebrew.
I have no hypotheses or other formal plans. I’m just going to listen to new music, draw, and write down my thoughts, if any.
