Blogs like this are counterintuitive – the more hectic and energetic life is, the quieter they are, despite the fact they’re supposed to be records of activity. I wonder if diaries suffered from the same problems.

Well, life has been full and interesting these past few months. Plenty of things happening at work, but today I’m posting about my own new personal writing project which got underway last week. It’s called A Month In Music. I have all my MP3s in iTunes, and at first it tells you how many hours worth of music you have, and then how many days. I recently realised I had 30.3 days of music in my collection – a whole month. I was fascinated with the idea that I had, over 15 years, accumulated so much music that I could listen to it non stop for a whole month and never hear the same track repeated.

So that’s what I decided to do, writing about it as I went.The were rules of course: I was allowed to pick only the first song, and that after that, iTunes played randomly through the collection, and there would no skipping or pausing. Not at night, not during the day. Not at all. It was a really fascinating project, and I think it comes at an interesting time, as, thanks to Spotify and Youtube, the idea of a music collection with a definite border, an in/out, us/them split, becomes increasingly antiquated, despite music being such a key part of identity and pop culture. It was also a really good opportunity for me to revisit songs that once meant a lot to me, and go through some memories, because really, your music collection is a self-portrait in audio.

In addition to all the original writing, there’s a series of photos too. It’s going live once a day as a blog on monthinmusic.tumblr.com. I would, of course, be very happy if you checked it out.