Crowd sourcing your music discovery
The human recommendation is still king
While reading to my children, I came across a lovely line in one of the Lemony Snickett books, where it goes: ‘restorative’…“a word used to describe activities that clear the brain and make the heart happy”. For me, like millions of others across the globe music especially has that restorative quality about it and I love listening to it throughout my day.
But I have noticed of late I just can’t seem to listen to music with lyrics while I am working. I just thought initially this was a sign of just getting older and I needed to focus more, to reach that state of mindfulness and music with lyrics interrupted that pursuit. Mikael Cho writes more about this in a piece called ‘Listen while you work: What music does to your brain’
For specific tasks at work, that require that extended period of focus, my go to accompaniment music has mainly featured Balmorhea and the Japanese band Toe.
Balmorhea are an exceptional instrumental band and are just one of the many bands that I have discovered through Daytrotter, who have recently reached a major milestone of 4000 recorded band sessions. I wrote a longer piece about the ‘Beauty of Daytrotter’, back in 2010. Balmorhea played two excellent Daytrotter sessions that are well worth checking out, I bought their ‘Live at Saint-Elisabethkerk’ release off the back of those sessions. It has remained one of my most played albums to date, while working.
Toe, have been around since 2000 and I think I came across their music on a running shoe commercial and ended up purchasing their ‘New Sentimentality’ and ‘For Long Tomorrow’ releases. Their music has been described as “Math Rock” and “Post Rock”, not certain that either terms accurately describe them, all I know is these guys can play!
My most recent addition in the last few months, includes streaming of Dawn of Midi’s ‘Dysnomia’, which I find is just the ideal accompaniment for really zoning in on tasks. Radiolab describes it as “Dysnomia, an album filled with heavily layered rhythms that feel both mechanistic and deeply human at the same time.” (If interested in finding out more about the creation of that record, have a listen to this podcast)
While I was beginning to look for other candidates from a genre like this, to aid concentration, this timely tweet popped up in my timeline, after being re-tweeted by someone I follow.
Jason received more than 300 replies with more than 500 music stellar recommendations and thankfully, he shared the amazing list in this link .
I mean what a terrific use of the web and twitter, to crowd source your music recommendations from fellow humans, rather than rely on an algorithm.
I just thought what a great resource, it is just an incredible list. It also felt somewhat re-assuring to see how many “As long as it has no lyrics” there were in the accompanying comments on the various shared recommendations. I expected the usual suspects including Brian Eno, Air, Mogwai and various soundtracks to be present, but what I was surprised at was the amount of tremendous genuine new music finds the list presented, including bands like Explosions in the Sky, who were new to me.
What I like most about this list, is that these are music discoveries that are tried and tested, real firm favourites from people. I thought this deserved closer scrutiny, I just had to dig deeper and stick my spoon into the bottom of this music sundae.
There were so many different reply flavours, so many treats for the ears I think I have already hit my music discovery limit for 2014 for this genre/mood. And it wasn’t just post rock nuggets that were presented, but other instrumental delights such as Jonsi and Alex.
But one of the issues, was the list was a bit messy in that people being human, replied in their idiosyncratic manner using different formats, genres, twitter handle for artists, youtube links and other sources. I went through the list again and have been trying to remove duplicates and get down to a by artist/album format and break out others into resources.
Checking more on this, I wondered if there a tool to create playlists in Spotify from a text-based list of songs or albums? See http://www.ivyishere.org/ivy, thanks @Quora for that answer. I made an attempt at creating a playlist, here is that list which was a first pass, to try digest everything.
http://open.spotify.com/user/damien.joyce/playlist/77ke2Zy9IFPIGMIZAkKej3
Recommended resources from the list include the following mixes:
http://musicforprogramming.net
http://plug.dj/coding-soundtrack-lounge
But I keep thinking this should be an evolving music to work to playlist, where more favourite go to albums can be shared including for example, this recent release from Tycho.
Paul Lamere suggested at SXSW that the next step for Spotify will be contextual, personalised playlists. “Not just a wake-up playlist, but a wake-up playlist that knows that I like classical music”
For now, I am still happy relying on blogs and fellow humans for those music playlist recommendations. How about you?
