Sites and Sounds: campus playlist
lily storer
There is no question that most people spend a significant amount of time listening to music. Music undoubtedly means a lot to us. Americans listen to four and a half hours of music every day; another source says two hours. Many people, including myself, spend between two and four hours listening to music. So, what is the significance of music in our lives as college students?
Nobody experiences music in the same way. With this in mind, one may claim that each individual is uniquely driven to listen to music.
People will listen to music for a variety of reasons. Some typical explanations include:
1. Pleasure
2. A unique emotion
3. Preferred song structural elements (chorus, rhythm, etc.)
4. To avoid boredom (after all, music stimulates the entire brain).
5. Interpersonal/social connection
We listen to music to divert ourselves from difficult conditions. It allows us to escape and soothe ourselves. We feel that music can help us manage our anxiety and calm ourselves. Sometimes this is accomplished by raising good feelings, matching anxiety to music, diverting and reassuring us, or even re-evaluating our ideas. Music has the ability to soothe and even legitimize our feelings. We listen to music because we feel it helps us control our emotions.
Music can help us cope with the emotions of loneliness. We occasionally concentrate on anxious and gloomy thoughts because music allows us to do so in an unusual way. We recall our former experiences, whether positive or negative and plunge into them with a slight sensation of recreating those recollections. Through music, we seek powerful emotional experiences. Sometimes just listening to music is enough to appreciate its beauty. Some of us listen to music to help us concentrate and focus when studying or working. This involves things like simplifying attention, buffering against sensory stimuli, altering the sensory environment, and so on.
Music allows us to express ourselves and form identities. This also includes a social identity shared by a broader number of individuals (subcultures, genre lovers, musicians, and so on). It serves as a social glue and a link to others. Many of us sleep with music (songs, noise, and auditory podcasts).
Some psychologists refer to this type of self-regulation through music as a “self-soothing” process. For example, when people are worried, they may begin humming a melody or temporarily put on headphones in a social gathering to listen to a portion of a song they enjoy in order to improve their mood.
As a college student that finds it hard to connect with others on a daily basis, I’ve learned to pull at the only string I have to get a conversation started…
“What’s your favorite song”
or
“What are you listening to?”
Nine times out of ten it’s successful.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that someone's music tastes speak volumes. It's such an intimate way to learn about someone. Connections are so important as a college student. I found myself feeling intimidated by others and self-isolating due to anxiety. Never in a million years would I think I could confidently walk up to strangers and ask them what song they were listening to. Music has this powerful aura that draws people to it. You may not like the same song or even the same genre, but we can all agree that music plays a significant part in our lives.
This is how I came up with the idea to create a campus-wide playlist.
I knew taking on this project was going to be challenging. I wanted to step outside my comfort zone.
I first decided what areas of campus I wanted to focus on. I choose the Chat, the gym, and the library. I felt as if these three places would contrast nicely with each other. I knew I’d get some similar answers and a few “outside the box” replies.
The graphic below shows what artists were being listened to and where when interviewing.
I tried to make predictions prior to the actual interviews but what the diagram shows us is that music isn’t predictable. People aren’t predictable. It’s incredibly hard to categorize music to a place. A lot harder than I initially thought.
We start off in the Chat, a popular dining option here on campus. All walks of life congregate here. Usually, the busiest is around 11 am — 1 pm, this was a great starting place. When I went to interview, the chat was filled with mostly athletes. I got a lot of responses than I had previously predicted. This was one of the places that I considered baseline. The responses were easily predicted and “cookie cutter”. I wasn’t able to interview a lot of people because surprisingly, not a lot of people enjoy a random coming up to them with a microphone and asking them questions when their eating.
We then went to the library.
I had a few reservations about going here. I hate interrupting people when they're busy. It’s also a very quiet space. The chat kind of discouraged me at first when I faced a lot of rejection. I figured that even fewer people would want to talk to me in the library.
I was right.
I ended up running into some friends who were comfortable with being interviewed so that helped a lot. Other than that, almost nobody else wanted to be interviewed. This put a bit of a damper on this project and I felt a bit defeated. I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew. I was already stressed about this whole thing and now I was doubting how much I would actually be able to complete. I eventually told myself just to take it one step at a time and it would all come together.
After that minor meltdown, I moved on to the gym.
I had high hopes for the gym. I went to the athlete gym downstairs in Kuch rather than upstairs because I was more confident in myself and the responses I would get. Unfortunately, a lot of the answers were very unpredictable. They were almost nothing I predicted but it made the process more fun. As you probably heard in the podcast, some of the choices were very “left field”. This messed up my data a bit but I think added some diversity to the types of music people had said so far.
I ended up cutting some of the interviews out of the final podcast because they were jokes that people said. Songs that they were in fact not actually listening to. While I did have some unusual songs, I did verify that they were in fact listening to them.
To sum everything up, the Chat was the only place that stuck pretty close to my predictions and the library gave me the most curveballs.
This project as a whole had its ups and downs. In the beginning, I thought this was the best idea I've ever had. I realize now that I was either delusional or chronically online. I did enjoy the process overall though. I found that everything I needed to complete this project had been gone over in class. I never felt lost when it came to formatting or the actual production of this project. I learned a lot over the past few months and grew a lot as a student.
