I’m joining many others this week in contributing to Nick Southall’s annual Music Diary Project.  The premise is easy: you keep a daily diary of your weekly music listening habits for the week of May 7th to 13th.

I’ve started this week on a relatively quiet note.  On Sunday, the girl and I both ran Philadelphia’s Broad Street Run, and I didn’t run with headphones, ear buds, or a boombox propped up on my shoulder, so it was relatively free of music for me most of the day.  I spent Monday visiting with my parents and working/writing, so there was no music there either since I was working at my parents house.

Maybe it’s just where I am in my life right now, but some days I listen to very little music, other days music plays throughout all the moments of the day.  It’s a far cry from the past, particularly when I (co-)owned a record store, where music was playing – quite literally – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

I’m currently in the middle of the never-ending project called organizing my digital music library.  Trying to keep up with new releases and advance promos as well as sort through two terrabytes of music stored on my computer.  Digital music listening takes place through my desktop computer, my laptop, and mainly through my iphone.  All listening not at home takes place through headphones.

Most of my home listening takes place in the form of LP records.  I do listen to CDs, but as I have mentioned before, I haven’t purchased a CD in more than 12 years.

On my iphone during my walking commute to work I usually listen to my local affiliate NPR newscast or newish music from the past few months.  I cycle through new music on my iphone and usually try to listen to everything at least once.  Some new releases get more attention than others.  The releases that get the most attention are posted in my end of list favorites (2010 and 2011).

When I’m at work – and I’m rarely able to listen to music there – I listen on headphones to not disturb my co-workers with my unpopular musical tastes.  Typically I am concentrating on working or writing at work, so I listen to ambient, jazz, or classical (usually modern-ish).  Some work favorites for the last few weeks have been old and newer favorites: Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Virus Series, The Necks, early Steve Reich & Philip Glass pieces, Tape, Tortoise, The Caretaker/Leyland Kirby, The Cinematic Orchestra, Jon Gibson’s Two Solo Pieces LP, The KLF’s Chill Out, Porter Rick’s Biokinetics LP, and Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer’s Re:ECM.