It's not unusual for an everyday sound to trigger a sort of musical recollection on my part, whereby the sound causes some more or less familiar record, a part of which it resembles, to begin playing in my head, usually only for a few seconds; sudden bangs of the right kind often trigger the first few bars of "Like A Rolling Stone", for example. Sometimes, one of those everyday sounds has a slightly different effect - it puts a new melody in my head, which would be damn useful if I were a songwriter and is still a source of minor happiness even given that I'm not.
So anyway, I had a visitation of the former kind this afternoon - the sound could've come from anywhere, the song was "Rebellion (Lies)" - and it got me briefly thinking about this whole 'music in the air' thing. Too lazy to unravel all of those threads and reconstruct them here, but I then jumped to the way in which I tend to have portable music with me (ie, a discman; one of these days, I'll upgrade to an mp3 player, though probably not during these money-conscious hols) wherever I go (when out of the house, at any rate).
I've wondered before what effect the constant plugged in-ness has on my experience of the world - there was a period when I often got little electric shocks delivered directly from the buds to my ears (Not Fun, needless to say - I never did get to the bottom of that, but I think it had something to do with the shoes I had at the time), which, on days when I was feeling sensitive, prompted me to sometimes go about my business sans discman, and I remember noticing how much freer and more connected to the wider world I felt at those times, neither of which was anything much of a surprise, although their pronouncedness was a bit unexpected. For any number of reasons, anyway, I suspect that there'll be less and less earphone/headphone listening while out and about in the future, at least once this summer break ends.
