Showing posts with label Harkive. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harkive. Show all posts

Friday, 24 July 2015

Harkive 2015

Harkive is an annual, online music research project that gathers stories from people around the world about how, where and why they listened to music on a single day. 21st July 2015 was the third iteration and the third time I've taken part.

I got things off to an early listening to Spotify via my iPhone at quarter past midnight as I tried to get to sleep. Music helps me shut down and there aren't many nights I go to sleep without some form of music playing.



Despite the late night I was up before Seven the following morning and listening to BBC 6 Music via the Digital Radio in the Kitchen. This isn't something I normally do but I was motivated to do the washing up I'd failed to do the night before after getting sidetracked into watching a couple of ropey old movies.



The ever excellent Chris Hawkins ended his show with a bit off Jimi Hendrix ...



Then Craig Charles, a welcome stand-in for regular breakfast show host Shaun Keaveny, opened with the Ramones, a choice guaranteed to put me in a good mood.





21st July 2015 was also my youngest's last day at Primary school and therefore the very last time I'd ever do the familiar walk to school to drop him off. I did my best to put a brave face on for the relentless passing of time.



Jumped in the car and headed off to work with sounds provided by my iPod. I was in work by 9:30 which meant no music until lunchtime at the earliest.





Thankfully I managed to have a proper lunch hour today and dragged myself to the gym for a long overdue bit of exercise. I took my iPhone with me and listened to a playlist of new music on shuffle as I plodded along on the cross-trainer.







Then no music again until the drive home, continuing to listen to my current favourite Thee Oh Sees album.





After eating tea & washing up I did a bit of ironing and caught up with a Marc Riley show from last week. I record these on my TV Hard Drive Recorder which saves me having to rely on the BBC iPlayer and gives my ears a break from using headphones.







Had planned an early night but ended up listening to the last half hour of the Gideon Coe show live via a portable digital radio.





Squeezed in my final Harkive tweet of the day at 23:59 ...



... which turned out to be the final UK Harkive tweet too.



The Harkive website now has a data explorer section which provides all sorts of possibilities for examining what people are listening too and how they listen. My summary of facts and figures looks something like this (no visual stats yet as I've not got time but I might come back to this later as I reckon everyone loves a Pie Chart).

Devices used: iPhone, Digital Radio, iPod Nano, TiVo HDR, Portable Digital Radio
Music Sources: Spotify, BBC 6Music, my MP3 library
Music choices: Bit of a mixed bag but generally fairly recent alternative guitar based rock

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Friday, 18 July 2014

Harkive 2014

Bit of a change in tack from the usual post, here's my Harkive story recording what music I listened to on Harkive Day, 15th July 2014.

Harkive is an annual online music project intended to take a worldwide look at what it means to be a music fan in an ever-changing digital world. Harkive first ran in 2013 and was a tremendous success, the second year should allow the chance to begin to explore how music listening is evolving. On 15th July 2014 music fans across the globe contributed their stories to Harkive in many different of ways including; email, posting to social networking sites such as Twitter using the #harkive hashtag, blogging their stories, or by posting on the wall of the Harkive Facebook page.

This is my story.

I'm not really a morning person. I woke up about Seven but it took me at least half an hour to remember it was Harkive day.



Musically things didn't get off to a spectacular start, though I did have a burst of the KISS version of "God Gave Rock N Roll To You" going through my head as I got myself up and tried to convince the boys they needed to do the same.



Par for the course to be honest, Mrs T5 has long since stopped trying to understand my musical tastes and my two boys have decided it can all be categorised under the genre Weird Stuff. Tsk!

Having dropped my youngest at school though I decided I needed a blast of something to get the day underway.



Off to work, I recently succumbed to a cheap Deezer subscription (£1 for 3 months) and this lets me download music onto my phone and listen to it offline. Been trying to make the most of that whilst I can, normally I'd be listening to my iPod in the car or occasionally the radio.





Got into work and had a meeting and a few people to see so a music free start. I'm lucky enough to work in a small office though and we often stream live radio, so when I got back I logged on and caught up with the previous night's Marc Riley show.



That lasted 2 hours and helped the morning fly by.



Went to join in the regular Tuesday kickabout at lunchtime, a bit hot but we had a decent game, by the time I got back my work mate had taken control of the music.



Later in the afternoon I got the chance to do a bit of prep work for my Top 50 Debut Albums list, which will be dominating this blog over the coming weeks if I get my act together and start writing stuff down instead of trying to pick which albums are going to be on it.





We had a late night planned to get some system maintenance down and were back on live 6music for most of this, though it was pretty quiet so wasn't really registering while we worked.



Left work around Eight and returned to that Smith's album from earlier.



Another blast of Riley while I cooked my dinner, though I was also trying to get the boys to bed and managed to squeeze in reading a story to my youngest before I ate.



After a few too many late nights due to the World Cup and the Tour de France, I was happy to get to bed a little bit early.







Really should have gone straight to sleep but managed a bit more music via my iPod before my eyelids got too heavy and I finally passed out completely.





I usually go to sleep listening to music, it helps me get to sleep more quickly, but I don't think I heard many of the next album before I was comatose.



And so Harkive ended for me. A pretty typical day.

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