Emotions Through My Favorite Songs and Decades
I just want to start off by saying that: Music is the best therapy there is. Whether you are feeling sad, happy, or any emotion, there is definitely a song for it. I can listen to a song from my childhood and be immediately transported back to a memory. Music has a way of preserving memories and emotions that can last a lifetime.
I’ve always loved listening to music. My love for music grew mostly in middle school. No matter what I am doing other than being in class, I will be listening to music. I’m actually listening to music as I write this. I mainly like pop music and listen to artists like Harry Styles, Ariana Grande, and others. Since I have been commuting to school, I listen to music more often. The data I collected was on what emotions the songs were portraying and what decade they are from. I chose this because I am always listening to music and I wanted to see if my music taste can affect my emotions.
I basically did some of Spotify’s job for them.
I commute to school on Tuesdays-Fridays and have to drive around 25–30 minutes. I used a counter on my phone to record what emotion I believed the songs portrayed like Happy/Pumped/Uplifting, Calm/Relaxing, Sad/Reminiscent, and Angry/Frustrated/Disappointed as categories. I also wanted to see how broad my music is, decade-wise, so the decades I chose are the 2020s, 2010s, and 2000s or older. Most songs I fully played but there were others that were skipped. In these four days, I listened to a total of 65 songs in my car.
I learned that I listened to 29 happy/pumped/uplifting songs. What really surprised me was that both sad and angry were almost tied, with sad being at 16 and angry at 15. Am I the only one who likes to listen to or sing sad songs even if I am happiest? I find it to be so relaxing. I genuinely enjoy slow melodies with like a little bit of a beat. Calm/relaxing came up short with only 5 songs.
As for the decades, the 2020s and 2010s were just one apart. I listened to 30 songs released in the 2020s and 29 songs released in the 2010s. Only 6 of the 65 songs were released in the 2000s or older.
Besides recording these two, I noticed that the emotions the songs portrayed didn’t affect my mood as much as I thought they would. I would arrive at school in a neutral mood, ready to go to class.
