Go-Go-Go Beat

From Elevator to Anywhere, There's No Stopping the Music

Roberto Cabrera is a self-professed iPod addict. On this recent weekday afternoon, Cabrera, 22, is at one of his favorite hangouts, the Atlanta Bread Company in Greenbelt, doing some artistic sketching and listening to Billy Idol and the British popsters Pulp on his 20-gigabyte iPod. He's dark-haired, dark-eyed, slightly mustachioed and built compactly. The telltale white wires, tentacling down from his earbuds to his small white digital music player, connect Cabrera to the more than 5,000 songs that he has downloaded from CDs and the Internet.

To get a sense of how much music that is: Assuming that you listen to an hour's worth of tunes a day and each song lasts an average of four minutes, you would spend about a year exhausting the playlists on Cabrera's iPod.

Music addict Cabrera, however, listens to 14 hours of music a day. He needs two iPods -- so that one can be charging at all times.

A junior international business and studio art major at the University of Maryland, the amiable Cabrera says that music is a mega-massive part of his life. "I've always been influenced by music," he says. Now he needs it "all around me, all the time."

He chooses hard-chargers (99 All Stars or Andrea Doria) to wake to, softies (Cafe del Mar) to study by, inspirational bands (Snow Patrol or Nickelback) to exercise to, and mind-massaging performers (John Mayer or Radiohead) to help him drift off at night. He says simply, "I cannot go to sleep without music."

A freestyler on the Terrapins swim team, Cabrera packs his own tunes -- with the help of a waterproof device and headphones -- while practicing at the University of Maryland pool, which already has underwater speakers piping music to swimmers.

He listens to music of his own choosing while: eating, running, painting, pumping weights, driving. He listens to music while giving directions to someone on campus. He even listens to music in the classroom. "Like if it's a history course," he says, "I really could care less. The teacher is talking in a monotone. I turn it up. I put in one earbud and turn my head a little and the teacher can't tell."

All day, every day, Cabrera sets his waking hours to music. He is, in effect, creating the soundtrack of his life.

He is a musicholic and a classic creation of our time: the Era of the Ear, the Epoch of Omnipresent Song, this miraculous Age of Ubiquitous Music.

Surrounded by Sound

It's everywhere. There's no escaping it. Via broadcast and satellite radio and TV, an ever-expanding array of recording technologies -- such as CDs and MiniDiscs -- and the Internet, music has invaded the tiniest, quietest corners of our lives. You hear it in grocery stores, dentist's chairs, on TV commercials, whenever there's a lull in the action at sporting events, in bookstores, on the telephone while on hold, in the background while disc jockeys are talking, at restaurants and health clubs and gas stations.

We can hear the percussive candombe of Uruguay, the eerie throat-singing of Mongolia, raucous bush songs of the Australian outback, Gwen Stefani belting out "Hollaback Girl," or Mississippi John Hurt fingerpicking his blues guitar at any time, any place or any volume we choose.

Online music stores such as iTunes and Napster offer hundreds of thousands of songs for the downloading. Countless new bands spring up all the time, many producing tired music. Meanwhile, old bands refuse to fade away, reuniting ad nauseam for PBS concerts and producing more tired music. And TV music shows -- like "American Idol" -- spawn even more tired music.