All in the <head> – Ponderings and code by Drew McLellan –

Take the Weather With You

Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you – according to Crowded House at least. I don’t know about you, but I associate different types of music with different weather conditions. I noticed this particularly the other day when driving along listening to my iPod in the car. It was a really bright sunny morning, and each song selected by the iPod’s shuffle-play seemed to fit perfectly. Chirpy, upbeat music for a chirpy, upbeat morning.

This got me thinking – if I could categorise each song in my music collection with a weather type, all iTunes would need to do is grab a local weather feed in XML from weather.com (just like Dunstan does) – and a customised playlist could be constructed to match the conditions outside.

If users were able to pool this metadata for sharing, I guess that can only work so well. I would imagine that the sort of tunes I like to listen to on sunny days are different from the sort of tunes you like to listen to. However, for a lot of people and in the broadest sense, this pooled data would make for a good set of defaults. (Categorising 40Gb of songs takes a little while).

So, this begs a music question. If you had to pick three songs that typify a sunny day for you, and three songs that you’d like to hear on a stormy/raining/miserable day – what would they be?

In no particular order, here’s mine:

Sunny:

  1. Wake up Boo! – Boo Radleys
  2. Somewhere Nicer – Obi
  3. The Pop Singer’s Fear of the Pollen Count – The Divine Comedy

Rainy:

  1. Strange & Beautiful – Aqualung
  2. Karma Police – Radiohead
  3. I Stopped to Fill My Car Up – Stereophonics