Forplay’s educational post

Spotify launched as a platform for apps this week. The enhancements are pretty smooth. It hasn’t quite nailed down recommendations for me, and Sean Parker is definitely not creating top playlists near me, but that’s okay. The release is a neat integration of a lot of elements.

One such element is the apps - more specifically Mood Agent. With a preference for Mood Agent’s spotify app over its iPhone version, I decided to settle my long fought battle between the merits of algorithmic and hand-crafted mood regulating recommendations. And here’s a little about how that went:

Theories on Music as a Mood Regulator reason that the concept of mood and emotional regulation is rooted in psychoanalytical defense mechanisms and coping traditions. Using music as an agent then has two main goals: mood enhancement or mood regulation. Strategies to affect mood using music are broken out as so:

Entertainment is creating a nice atmosphere and happy feeling to maintain or enhance current mood.
Revival represents personal renewal: relaxing and getting new energy when feeling stressed or tired.
Strong Sensation is about searching for intense emotional experiences.
Diversion means forgetting unwanted thoughts and feelings with the help of pleasant music.
Discharge is about emotional disclosure, releasing anger or sadness through music that expresses these emotions.
Mental Work includes using music as a framework for mental contemplation and reappraisal of emotional preoccupations.
Solace is about searching for feelings of being accepted and understood by music when feeling sad or troubled.

Since forplay’s raison d’etre has always been to catalog mood inspired music, it only makes sense to categorize music by mood regulating strategies. Which brings us back to Mood Agent - and their categorization of Patrick Watson’s Fireweed. They had no category for it and I took that as my impetus for putting together similarly regulating tracks.

Nine tracks, 36 minutes, and one spotify subscriber to the playlist later, I present to you what Solace might sound like.

Mood Agent’s categorization of this mood