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Re: Internal Walkman

Posted by Scott P. on September 12, 1999, at 1:47:09

In reply to can't stop the music, posted by Stuuvert on November 18, 1998, at 13:32:13

> The problem that has been disturbing my life since childhood is that there is always a song or music of some kind playing in my head. Sometimes I am tormented by the same tune or snip of song for days on end. Can you imagine listening to Connie Francis sing "Lipstick on your collar" for two weeks, 24 hrs. a day? Needless to say, I stay away from handguns.

I feel for you, brother. You're not alone. I have always had the same problem. Imagine occasionally being IMPOTENT because I sometimes just can't get a sad, mushy, erection-killing song OUT OF MY F***ING HEAD!!!!!!! I finally learned how to deal with it when I came across this article from "Project Galactic Guide", a funny website based on Douglas Adams' book _The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy_ (located at http://anubis.science.unitn.it/services/sf/DA/adams.html ) Here is the full article.

**********
Entry in The Project by Roel van der Meulen (vdmeulen@strw.Leidenuniv.nl)

There is a phenomenon known to everyone which has never been exploited to its full use. You all know that sometimes, when you hear a song on the
radio in the morning, it keeps going round your head all day long. This is the Internal Walkman functioning, yet without direction or aim. It is too wonderful a treat of evolution not to make full use of it, so I will give some tips on how it works and what you should remember about it.

How to make good use of it? Well, we know that only one or two tunes are in our heads at any one time, mostly silly tunes that have a high potential for settling in our memories. Unfortunately, the sillier the tune, the more
settling potential it has. This can not be avoided, so choose your tunes well. To record the songs you want to listen to, you have to play them on your CD or tape recorder several times in the morning. Be careful, though; your memory does not have a large capacity for readily available tunes, so don't try to store too much. The last song heard is often the one best
remembered.

This storing process has some aspects to it that make it different from ordinary (hardware) ways of recording. The quality of the recording varies
from song to song, and from time to time. Bits of music get lost and only a rough idea of the song remains. Fortunately, that does not matter, because our brains make us believe that we *do* hear every detail of it, and mostly of the bits we like best! Parts of the song we don't like at all are easily filtered out [1]. In short, although we forget whole parts of the song, we
believe it is reproduced perfectly. That gives a feeling of satisfaction every time we use the Internal Walkman. When we get home again, however, and we listen to the original, we notice that we forgot lots of interesting details. Again we are happy, this time because we hear those parts again and appreciate them, because they make the song sound fuller. Twice
satisfied for the price of one!

There are a few things you have to think of if you want the Internal Walkman to work according to your wishes. You have to take care that the song doesn't get polluted, or replaced altogether, by a song with much more
potential for settling and annoying you. Just make sure that you don't hear any other music anywhere, and especially no annoying whistling people. They are capable of whistling a nursery rhyme that will stick with you for weeks.

Another thing you need to practise is to shut the Walkman off. It happens a lot that during exams a song gets stuck on a single word, which keeps
repeating over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, keeping you from your concentration and making you fail the test completely. Little does mankind realize that black-outs during
exams are *always* due to failing Internal Walkmans. I'm afraid I haven't found a cure for that yet, so guess you'll just have to practise.

You may think that this Internal Walkman is far outperformed by a real Walkman, because with it you can listen to the original music, and so much
of it too! That may be so, but there are numerous situations where the fact that the Internal Walkman doesn't take up space, doesn't use batteries, is not annoying to everyone because they hear nothing (unless you sing along
with your thoughts), and can be used everywhere [2] make it a far superiour apparatus.

So start using the Internal Walkman [3] sensibly from now on. It is far too wonderful not to.

[1] Unless, of course, the storage potential of the annoying bit is very high, which it usually is.
[2] Except of course where other music plays; in that case the original track is lost immediately, and can only be regained in complete silence.
[3] [Editors Note:]
It is of course noted that "Walkman" is a trademark of the Sony corporation. No breach of trademark is intended. Of course we don't mean to say that someone has actually built a miniature personal stereo and inserted it into your skull. If you think that then you just may
have missed the point.


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poster:Scott P. thread:1295
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/19990829/msgs/11468.html