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Comedian Martin Mull once said, "Making music is like dancing on a building."
Later, artists and critics often expressed similar opinions, trying to describe the music and how it works in complete futility. This sentence reveals the mysterious mechanism of music, why does music make us feel happy or sad?how to quantify our subjective feelings about music?how do we describe sound?
In fact, some of these questions have clear answers, and some don't. But the topic of music itself and how we perceive it is always the topic that interests us the most. Spotify's mood-oriented or "situational-based" playlists, which categorize songs based on mood or physical state, are hugely popular. These include "Rage Beats", "Happy Vibes", and "Life Sucks".
It's unclear how Spotify's playlists are categorized by mood, and whether the algorithm categorizes them based on rhythm, timbre, vocal style, pitch, or all of these criteria or more, but what is clear is that listeners are looking for experiences based on mood and even want to adjust their mood with music.
Of course, since the advent of personal listening devices, people have begun to use music to control their surroundings, which Japanese scholar Shuhei Hosokawa calls the "Walkman Effect". However, Spotify's role in matching and influencing listeners' emotions is limited.
While listening to music may feel empowering and even therapeutic, it does not qualify as music therapy, which is a well-defined, science-based form of clinical treatment.
Technology meets health
Entrepreneurs are increasingly bridging technology and health, seeking to carve out new spaces between Spotify-esque, context-based listening experiences and clinical treatments.
Humm.ly is one such product. Launched in 2017, the app is available in both free and paid versions and was created with the help and insight of board-certified music therapists.
Joanna Yu, the founder and CEO of Humm.ly, studied music therapy at the University Xi of the Pacific at San Francisco, where she met other music therapists and co-created the app. "Humm.ly is not music therapy. We wanted to make a music therapy-based tool so that people in need could use it and reap the benefits. ”