Why is it better to forget about radio and other music channels? How do you make a playlist that sounds personal to you?
We don’t have so many channels for interacting with the world around us that we can neglect one of the most important ones: hearing. And it doesn’t matter what kind of hearing it is: musical or not, professional or philistine. It’s not about talent contests or quizzes. It’s about finding music that moves one person. You personally.
A few essential caveats. Consider only the business sphere. Behind the scenes is music for romance, sports, recreation. And since we’re talking about personal effectiveness, customer-focused music solutions for business aren’t appropriate.
Think back to the last time it was quiet in any place designed to part the public with money? About never, right? Expensive restaurants and boutiques, cheap cafes, casinos, online or land-based, all try to spur sales with audio. There’s a reason for that.
What about you? If you want to combine business with pleasure, it’s worth studying to become a DJ. The first thing that is important to clarify – the mass sources of music will not work. It’s more like a hindrance.
Radio and albums won’t help you
Almost every radio station in the world is available now. And online, with a search by name, band, genre, whatever. Tempting, but no.
Even tightly themed radio very rarely sticks to the same tempo. And that’s critical to the job, because amplitude jerks are distracting. At best, they make you squirm, and at worst, they make you catch another wave. That is, to waste time, effort, to lose momentum.
Advertising inserts, news, jingles, weather reports definitively destroy the usefulness of radio.
Albums, themed selections, and other ready-made music deposits can be a great source. But more as raw material than as ready-made solutions. Because they don’t happen to be niche enough, either, as far as your personal taste and response is concerned.
Much better are intelligent services that learn the preferences of their users. These are the ones that can make endless playlists with more and more appropriate songs. Perhaps with only one significant drawback: fashion dependence.
Remember where the word spam came from? From the abnormally intrusive musical advertising of the product of the same name, SPAM ham. Any attempt on the outside to reach hearts (or wallets) with a certain sequence of sounds inevitably rolls into low-brow advertising.
Music by popular artists can be detrimental
All services and music deposits are dominated by hits. Which makes sense, but well-known tunes drag attention to themselves. The stars shine too brightly; they don’t want to be the background. Meanwhile, the task of music for work is not to start singing along and remembering clips.
Clips, by the way, are best not watched at all. They bind open audio patterns with extremely narrow, specific visual images. Then it’s hard to abstract away from the clip plot put to music. It’s like watching a bad movie instead of rereading a good book with your own ideas of what the characters should look like.
And why performers or bands, anyway? Anything can be a suitable soundtrack. The noise of rain, other people’s conversations in cafes, the rattle of train wheels. This is one of the reasons why there are people who work well on the road and in public – that is, even where it seems noisy, uncomfortable. But there’s catching a wave that turns any place into the perfect co-working space.
If it’s difficult and expensive to walk, much less drive far, you can find live online engagements all over the planet. There’s a full range: sounds of nature, air traffic controllers talking, street voices. Any other sequence of sounds that are never repeated, but sound similar enough to each other and blend into an overall supportive background.
A personal rhythm
It is no coincidence that the galleys were equipped with drums. People are lazy, distracted. Rhythmic sounds set a physiologically understandable vector and what is even more important – help to keep it.
In fact, the music rhythm alone is enough to enter a state of flow. But the best beat will not hold the focus for long. It is too monotonous.
That’s the thing about music that variation is off the charts. You can listen to jazz or rock for years, with an extensive playlist it will never get boring. If those genres suit you, of course.
But there’s no need to pretend to be more of a music lover than you really are. Many people want to look aesthetes and subtle erudites. Keep a library of classical music, recognized masterpieces in other genres. But why, if the allegedly inappropriate songs with primitive rhythms and silly lyrics can set you on the right track?
Perhaps the lyrics themselves are superfluous. The songs are music until the temptation to listen to them arises. It’s more useful to spin something indistinguishable, without semantics. If you have good English, Spanish, French, the circle narrows. Try Korean, Arabic, or other exotics.
Similarly on novelties. It doesn’t matter as much whether it came out recently or 100 years ago. It only matters when you first heard the song. Whether it was boring or not yet.
A personal playlist shouldn’t depend on anything external at all. Music is intimate. If you’re hooked on a tune and it works, repeat it in the player, it may be enough for a few days. That’s it, got it, finally? Don’t rush to delete, put it in your finds folder.
It’s better to sort right away. And not by genre, album, artist, geography, dates. This is all empty. The main thing – the pace. For example, you can divide everything into:
- Slow
- Calm tunes
- Driving
It doesn’t matter what year the album is, who sings it, if it’s a cover or a remake. I just like the song, it doesn’t have lingering pauses in the middle, it doesn’t explode with unexpected and short-lived interludes. It’s niche, like a novel in a bookstore that is easy to put on a certain shelf – and then find exactly there.
Repeat it N times, and there’s your own phono library ready. It’s completely self-contained, it never gets interjected with ads, and you can even listen offline. It’s a real plus.
The main thing to remember when selecting a personal music library for work – that it is for work. Not like, not associated with fond memories, not topping the charts, not talking about your fine taste or erudition, not recommended by friends, a special service, the bosses.
It just helps you work.