Aesthetic Playlists
I was reading Bull’s piece from this week, “The Audio-Visual iPod”, and I was thinking a lot about the “aesthetic playlists” that I make on Spotify. I’m hoping you’re all familiar with this as a trend because I'm definitely not original in doing it, but essentially I choose a really specific vibe or situation and I curate a playlist based around this. I’ll link my Spotify down below if anyone wants to check it out, but some examples I’ve done are “impromptu road trip in 35-degree heat” or “looking in the bathroom mirror when you’re drunk at a house party”.
The reason I was thinking about this in terms of the Bull article is that there was a lot of emphasis placed on the aestheticization of urban space using technology, specifically the iPod and by extension, music or privatized sound. Bull says that “iPod culture…concerns the seamless joining together of experience in a flow, unifying the complex, contradictory and contingent nature of the world…” (Sterne, 2012) and that this is dependant on the ubiquitous sound that flows from the iPod itself.
I believe that aesthetic playlists are somewhat connected to this, insofar as the situation or vibe chosen for the playlist is imposed on the sound print as opposed to the sound print being imposed on the situation, as with the case of the iPod. Sound, in this case, is aestheticized. This is because it is still unifying all the complexities of the world; each individual song has specific ideas that are conveyed through the lyrics or the composition of the notes. However, in the case of the aesthetic playlist, they are chosen specifically to relate to a single situation or vibe instead of just being applied to whatever is going on in reality at that moment. The situation/vibe of the playlist requires a certain amount of creativity as well as relatability to the world around the creator (i.e. sometimes the playlists are imaginary situations, but sometimes they are created because if that specific situation/vibe were to come into reality, it’s nice to have something to listen to that matches).
I really liked this comparison because it also exemplifies the idea we talked about in class a week or two ago about how sound creates space instead of just filling a space (I think it was Schaefer or McLuhan who said something similar to this?). The sound of these playlists creates maybe not a physical space if you’re listening through headphones, but kind of an immaterial/imaginative space in which that is the situation or the vibe; like when you’re in the car on a long road trip and you’ve got on some melancholic music because you’re staring out the window like the main character in the sad part of your movie.
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/user/j0b8oz9eee0aujrulthc2y57a?si=0aab7ea7ca494b59
Bull, M. (2012). The Audio-Visual iPod. In J. Sterne (Ed.), The Sound Studies Reader (pp. 197–
208). essay, Routledge.
Hi Darcy,
ReplyDeleteThis is a very creative connection to this week's readings! My Spotify account (@lanzmacdonald) is quite similar to yours where I make extremely specific and aesthetic playlists to match the various moods or trances I may be in.
I love that you emphasize how these playlists operate not only as an extension to our lived experiences but are also a useful tool to manipulate or change our realities by using sound (music) to enhance or alter our mood regardless of our surroundings. To further add to your point, this reminded me of Bull's emphasis on how the iPod allows users to enter into their own personalized "imaginary realm" (p. 198), and as such, we feel a sense of power in this autonomy; Hosokawa also touches on a similar idea in "The Walkman Effect" article. For example, I feel this when I am waiting outside of a lecture hall before a major final exam. The students around me may be talking with one another, stressing over potential content that may be on the exam. In order to not allow their stress to impact my sense of readiness and calm before the exam, I use my noise cancelling Beats headphones as an escape to play a calming playlist and therefore control my reality regardless of the high anxiety, external reality imposed on me by the crowd of nervous students. This is a small example from my own lived experiences of how I have felt this sense of power that Bull and Hosokawa emphasize in their articles through using the iPod/Walkman (in this case, Spotify on my iPhone with Beats) as a tool to indulge in my own personalized, aesthetic reality through sound and technology.
Hey Darcy,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post and, like Alanna, I also resonated to the connection of creating personal aesthetic playlists to fit a specific mood or environment I may be in. I also agree with you and Bull that this idea of creating these personal playlists really help to transport us to our own world, our own sound space and thus creates and adds to our own personal soundscapes which we also discussed in class this week. An example of this that I recently experienced is when I went to the library the other week, the library was silent as there was no background music playing throughout the building and not many people were in the library either, but as soon as I put my headphones in and played my specific studying and focus playlist, I was instantly transported away from to silent and awkward library to my own personal privet listening soundscape. This similarly relates to the feelings Alanna described in her comment above about how personal music devices, streaming services, and personal playlists work together to enhance and alter feelings and surrounding environments.
Hi Darcy,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed how you brought up Spotify playlists. While I was reading your post, all I could think about was the fact that the playlists I have created on Spotify are so specific to certain genres or moods. For example, I have a playlist called slow jams and one called chilled vibes. One could assume that those may have a similar tone, however, they are almost polar opposites for me as those two moods are two different things. For myself, slow jams encompasses very slow and sad songs while chill vibes consists of more mellow songs that I could do work to or hang out to with them in the background. I think platforms such as Spotify are the tools that enable both Bull and Hosokawa's ideas to tangible. In both concepts, the Walkman effect and the aestheticization of the iPod, we see how the individual has created a space of privatized sound while still being connected to their surrounding environment. On platforms such as Spotify, users create intricate playlists to match their listening desires. They predetermine the conditions they want to place themselves in by making such playlists then playing them in certain environments. Here we not only see the ideas of privatized sound but also of the individualization of these imaginary realms.
I feel that this most reminds me of Hosowaka's connection of secret theatre of the Walkman. This idea of creating various playlists for oneself based on mood or vibe brings in the concept of secrecy and secrecy towards others. The user does not refuse communication or separates from reality, but continues to listen to their private playlist while those surrounding them have no idea what they're listening to. They know that others hold secrets in what they're listening to but simply does not care as they have something different in terms of content. They are encased in their own world of sound that does not consider the other in such a sense. We hold these secrets of moods/vibes within our playlists and between our ears. We walk around with this sense of emotion that is only known to us, one that remains ambiguous to others. Whether its a slow jams playlist, a get happy playlist, or a “looking in the bathroom mirror when you’re drunk at a house party”, as you mentioned, there is element of secrecy to the music we choose.
Hi Darcy,
ReplyDeleteI do not have a Spotify but I definitely have Youtube playlists for each type of occasion, cleaning, studying, getting ready to go out, that sort of thing. I also used to be a competitive swimmer and though I did use my iPod before a race, many swimmers did. Mainly to get 'in the zone' and to make themselves less anxious. To add to your point about aestheticization of urban space using technology, during my time as a swimmer, it was seen as being 'cool' when someone utilized their iPod before a race. The 'cool' kids would walk around the stadium with their iPods and earphones to block out the reality and create their own imaginative space - which I believe has a bit of psychology behind it. Why do we find it necessary to create this imaginative space? Why do we find it necessary to create a 'vibe' during our activities? I also appreciated the fact that you mentioned that individual song has specific ideas that are conveyed through the lyrics or the composition of the notes. We can see examples of this in the music certain restaurants choose to play, certain clothing stores and certain business places? Who determines what is deemed as house music? Wine music? Shoe shopping music? All questions we can hopefully answer one day in the near future!
Hi Darcy,
ReplyDeleteI found very interesting your reflection and how you connect the readings with the personalization of our playlists. I cannot say I haven't done that too! One of the things which caught my attention was this fragment of Bull's article "an illusion of omnipotence through mediated proximity and connectedness" (Bull, 2012). I thought how simple is to put a pair of headphones on your ears and access a different reality by just playing music on your phone. Also, I think is wonderful how even when we're in our heads, hearing and interpreting our world we can access to connect with others. In other words, I think it's interesting the way we as humans can't escape social interactions, even when we're not 'interacting' in the traditional way. I feel this is a very important example of the construction of mediated reality. I would also like to link this reading to one of the firsts readings we did. In the Social World as Communicative Construction by Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, they say " the social world, put most simply is the overall outcome of our joint processes of social -specifically, communicative- construction. Through the variety of our sense-making practices, we construct our social world, as something 'common' to us from the beginning" (Couldry and Hepp, 2017). I wonder how many other 'sense-making practices' we can build through the connection and experimentation of music?