Originally published June 28 2005
This generation's addiction: iPods
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
According to the Monterey County Herald, music addicts are living in a golden age where they can carry literally days worth of music around with them on their iPod digital media players, but, while many consumers are getting lost in their musical passions, some experts worry about the social isolation these players might cause.
Roberto Cabrera is a self-professed iPod addict.
Telltale white wires, tentacling down from his earbuds to his 20-gigabyte iPod, connect Cabrera to more than 5,000 songs that he has downloaded from CDs and the Internet.
If you listened to an hour's worth of tunes a day, with each song lasting an average four minutes, you would spend about a year exhausting the playlists on Cabrera's iPod.
He listens to music while: eating, running, painting, pumping weights, driving.
Via broadcast and satellite radio and TV, an ever-expanding array of recording technologies and the Internet, music has invaded the tiniest, quietest corners of our lives.
You hear it in grocery stores, dentist's chairs, whenever there's a lull in the action at sporting events, in bookstores, on the telephone while on hold, at restaurants and health clubs and gas stations.
Old bands refuse to fade away, reuniting ad nauseam for PBS concerts and producing more tired music.
Sound streams through the ears to the auditory cortex, which links directly to the limbic system, the emotional clearinghouse.
Neurologist Richard Restak says this pinball effect in the brain explains music's transcendence and power.
As we sift through the ever-expanding global jukebox to put together the soundtracks of our lives, Muzak -- along with firms such as DMX and Audio Environments -- is only too happy to help.
It is pushing a high-concept plan called Audio Architecture, which is emotion by design, says Muzak's director of corporate communications, Sumter Cox.
It is unmusical sounds masquerading as musical ones that wear you down, and the commercializing of musical distribution has given us a great many of these,'' he wrote in 1962.
''It has also given such currency to our classics that even these the mind grows weary of.
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