The past few decades have seen a huge growth in recognition of music's role in determining a film's dramatic and emotional structure. The composer Arnold Schoenberg, once asked to compose music for a film, even seemed surprised that this task wouldn't accord him overall control of the movie - he wanted the scenes to be constructed around the music. The man had a point: everything about music - pace, volume, emotion, structure - changes the way you see what you see.
I have been curious to discover, then, the extent to which my recent acquisition of an iPod would change the way I see what I see during the more run-of-the-mill parts of my day. I've never had a Walkman before and have often wondered what strange imaginings occupied the minds of those who, eyes locked onto some middle-distance haze and ears tin-tin-tinning and trailing tell-tale white leads, seem the most unplugged of all reality's inhabitants.
As my CD collection arrives on my iPod only in instalments, my first day's soundtrack was limited to composers from Allegri to Beethoven, a misfiled Gluck Alceste and a few sundry things already on my computer. The day in question was a freezing Wednesday some weeks back, when a Siberian wind hit upon the idea of a city break in London and snow, or rather slush, lay all about. Not the day for suede shoes, then, ever ready to turn a winter pavement into a combined ice-rink and hypothermic foot-spa. But did I care? Allegri's much-played Miserere Mei, though mournful in subject matter, pursues the medieval trick of leading the mind away from tawdry mundanity and toward the contemplation of heaven. And, sure enough, despite my soggy, halting progress toward the bus stop, the high- and low-rise vistas of Battersea acquired a luminous, incandescent hue, glimmering through the falling snow and reflecting, faithfully, the Creator's universal love.
The Miserere is but a short foray into divine benevolence and, aping my shuffling gait as I boarded the bus without delay (a genuine miracle, clearly), my iPod randomly took me to the more malevolent gods at work in Alceste. The tragic, leaden tones of the overture and plaintive desperation of the opening chorus - illustrative of a city's awakening to Apollo's decree that their beloved king must forfeit his life - accompanied the sight of citizens huddled in groups to watch my already crammed-full bus drive on by, faces upturned just long enough to register the fading of disgust into hopelessness. My heart reached out to them, but, unlike for Alceste and the people of Pherae, there was no ultimate sacrifice for me to make.
Eschewing the Styx ferry, I chose the more congested entrance to the underworld at Vauxhall. But compassion, which oozes from Alceste, will get you literally nowhere in the underground at rush hour, and I decided to bolster my good-humoured efforts to board with the rather enforced, conquer-all jollity of Beethoven's 8th Symphony. The ride was a breeze. I even got a seat, before offering it to someone else.
Back on the street at King's Cross, now at one with the nameless crowds whose spirits are the mere plaything of the gods of the London bus network, my director of music shuffled me in the direction of Dar Williams's song It Happens Every Day, a wonderful example of the way American songwriters excel in the art of peddling the nostalgic beauty lurking behind daily routines and an able accompaniment to my untroubled decision to walk, or rather skate, the last portion of my journey to work. And, in the lift, where the iPodder's glaze is at its most opaque, I glazed back, my indifferent focus resting on the evidently superior headphones of a colleague.
There the music stopped, leaving me with the day's first chance to reflect on the meaning of my hi-tech acquisition. Since when, as I've crammed my elegant machine full everything from Xenakis to instalments of the excellent Vintage Toon video podcast and discovered first-hand why cycling with earphones is a mug's game, I've begun to wonder. Is this good for us? I don't mean for the ears or for cycling safety, so much as whether it's really so fine for us to withdraw thus from an engagement with our surroundings to the extent that we can be unaware of the joys and sufferings of others except for when they happen to coincide vaguely with what we're listening to.
For the humdrum, hunkered-down survival of London's public transport, I suppose it may be the best thing after all. But the city also has its own music, something I'll hope to remember to listen to now and again, for it is a music more in tune with the lives of those around me than my director of music would prefer. The thunder of passing lorries and buzz of scooters, interspersed with the occasional singing of birds and road-sweepers - it's not always so pretty, but it is a music that we all share and make and in which we all belong. My iPod, on the other hand, is all about me.
