![]() It is an interactive music experience that collects the user’s current mood state and anxiety levels through an emotional assessment grid, before and after their experience.Spotify has started the rollout of two new filters to make it easier to find and listen to your favorite songs. LUCID’s affective AI curates digital music therapy with integrated ABS (auditory beats stimulation), with the goal of decreasing anxiety and increasing valence. In this study, participants listened to either Spotify’s “Calm Vibes” playlist - the top relaxation playlist with over 750 million followers - or a personalized music experience curated by LUCID’s affective AI. So how would an affective music AI compare to popular generic playlists? We decided to run a study to find out. This approach would create more personalized functional music as opposed to the static one-size-fits-all playlists. Using intelligent, data-driven tools throughout the composition and curation process can provide an evidence-based approach to functional music. ![]() On the other hand, an affective music AI can personalize to your music preferences as well as your current mental, emotional and physiological state. Generic playlists don’t know if you’re actually feeling better, worse, happier, or angrier, or generally if you’re anywhere close to their promised emotional outcome after listening. Spotify can’t curate according to your mood because it’s missing one key piece of information - it doesn’t understand your emotional response to music. Often, these generic playlists resemble a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn’t take into consideration the variability in personal taste and context. For somebody in a melancholic mood, ‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA may not cheer them up the same way as it may if they’re in a mellowed state. So who decides that this particular song is a mood booster? And will it provide a mood boost for anyone, regardless of their personal music preferences? Of course, there’s also context - how the listener experiences different times and moods. ![]() The songs in the “Mood Booster” playlist are not necessarily composed with the intent of helping someone who’s in a funk, get out of it. When it comes to generic functional playlists, there’s a lack of rigor and objective process behind the curation process. Listeners are familiar with using music for a functional purpose, to elicit a specific emotion. On YouTube, the channel Lofi Girl who livestreams “lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to” has over 9.6 million subscribers. This can be seen in Spotify’s top 20 playlists worldwide - titled “Get Turnt”, “Peaceful Piano”, or “Mood Booster”. This has led to the rise of functional music, where more users are choosing playlists that are context-based instead of content-based. Mood and purpose are now more important to listeners than genre when it comes to music classification. In the past, we often categorized music by genre, language, or geography. The question is - if Spotify really knows us that well, are they just giving us more of what we want? Or are they able to serve us the music that we need? ![]() This statistic gave me a hard slap in the face, and led me to wonder how my music-listening habits are contributing to my mental health. In the past couple of months, I’ve actually made a conscious effort to listen to more ‘happy’ music in an attempt to boost my mood during the dreary seasonal-depression, gets-dark-at-four-PM period. The first part didn’t surprise me, since I’ve always known that I personally prefer melancholic or emotional music, but I was surprised to learn that my current taste scores even lower on the happiness scale than my average all time taste! According to Spotify, my music taste leans more towards a low happiness score, and it’s been getting even sadder/angrier. ![]()
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