The first car I ever drove was my parents’ red and white EH Holden station wagon in which I started to learn to drive, with my father partly terrified in the front passenger’s seat. It had a radio which, when I could, was mostly tuned to whichever AM radio station played the music I liked (Beatles, Rolling Stones, and suchlike). My first car was a white second hand Mazda 1300 with whitewall tyres and rust in the bottom of all the doors. It had a very tinny radio (worse than that in the EH) but no cassette player. After driving up to Port Augusta in it and putting it on the train to Alice Springs, we subsequently sold it and bought a more modern, and less rusty, Mazda 323, which had a cassette player in it. As a consequence, there were a few cassettes I kept in the car to be played on my way to work or on driving many kilometres on holidays. After arriving in Canberra, we had a couple of cars with cassette players in them, but that changed when we bought another Mazda, a Mazda 6 station wagon. This had a CD player installed, and rather than playing commercial CDs from various artists, and having a limited selection in the car, I compiled playlists of my own with ‘dodgy’ MP3 formatted songs obtained from the web. I tried to use USB drives for music in a more recent vehicle, but they would always start from the first song, such that driving to and from work over a week, I’d hear the first five or so songs 10 times, so I gave that method away. Then Bluetooth arrived. Not only can I now use the car’s Bluetooth system to answer my phone without touching the latter, I also have my playlist of downloaded songs (about 400 of them) on my phone. It starts playing automatically only a few seconds after I start the car, beginning where I left off on the previous trip. Many people I know do not listen to anything while driving, while others listen to podcasts, talking books and suchlike, but music is my preferred content. In fact, listening to music while driving may make the driving safer. Research by someone I know has found that listening to an auditory stimulus (e.g. music) while performing a visual task (i.e. driving) can actually improve visual awareness. Specifically, listening to “lyrical music increases the likelihood that an observer will detect an unexpected stimulus”1, such as a car or truck coming at you, a pedestrian about to jump out in front of you or a Mamil* about to swerve into your path.
*Mamil: Middle Aged Man In Lycra2.
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