Before you read the rest of this post, just click play on the video below of the video game Minecraft’s soundtrack, and either leave it to play, or click somewhere randomly on the length of the track to play some of its music. It would be appropriate because this post is about how I came upon this music by chance, and fell in love with it for my future writing!

Before the delightful and insightful 20,000 Hz podcast episode about the music and sounds in the video game Minecraft linked here, I knew next to nothing about the game other than that it was addictive to many people, especially kids. I had a vague idea of why for all the Lego style “building” one could do in it, but it wasn’t anything I’d have bet money on for being correct. I still don’t know, but I have less confidence I was right after listening to some of the game’s original music, as composed by Daniel Rosenfeld, or C418 as he is better known.

To sum it up, there’s not thing extraordinary about the music. But that’s exactly its charm to me! It’s just hypnotic and entrancing in the most subtle of ways. Those kids never had a chance against addiction to Minecraft just on the music, never mind anything else! It’s great background and life soundtrack sort of music for working through something bits at a time, totally appropriate for what is done in Minecraft, so I hear. For me, my current “Minecraft” like activity is writing, and it has proven perfect for that after just a few days of testing!

The music’s lack of distinguishing features also means it’s not distracting, the way a familiar song is where you notice certain parts whether you are trying to or not. That holds true for me with classical music that has no vocals to interfere with the word processing function in my brain as I write, but still is distracting to me because can easily hum along, or wait till a certain point or phrase. That includes, both, the good parts I enjoy, and the bad parts I don’t. With the Minecraft soundtrack, the music is the perfect balance between changing to keep from being boring, and distinguishable enough to know what’s about to come.

Finally, that lack of identifiable feature means I can play something over and over many times without getting bored of repetitively catching the same pieces, phrases, or even just points in the music pieces all the time. That is absolutely critical to being able to use it a lot for a lot of writing over time! For the 3.5 hours or so of soundtrack, I feel I can probably listen for months, or even years, without feeling like I’m listening to the same thing over and over again! However, in case I am a bit wrong, or you have doubts, there is the more up to date version below on YouTube that is over 11 hours long! That’d be hard to remember it all even if you could remember Minecraft’s music style like songs or classical music pieces! It’s also a lot of writing time before I get through the music even once! And I don’t have to worry about getting through it all because YouTube can remember where I left off each time I play it to make sure I don’t repeat anything any more often than I have to other replaying the entire track each time done!

 

Now, this is the music online, which requires streaming. That’s fine so long as you can stream and don’t have data limitations, or aren’t needing bandwidth for other reasons, of course. However, if streaming were an obstacle, you can download about 3.5 hours of the original music in mp3 format for free here.

All in all, I am super excited about having found what could be the “perfect” writing music for me! A random “discovery” for free that’s a life changer! I’m just going to sit back, listen, and appreciate the moment for all its worth because such moments and events are super, super rare in life!

 

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