About!

Hmmmm I still don't know how to word this well but I just think playlists are an interesting medium! They can get pretty ambiguous bc songs have so many aspects to them (genre, subject, personality, sound), but in a playlist a song is either included or not... a playlist is an artifact that collapses everything else! There is no other axis a song can exist on.

I think that this constraint can be part of the fun when it comes to making playlists! But sometimes I wish they that my playlists could be a little better at carrying / preserving the nuances of all the things I *intend* when I include a song. So here we are.

• on playlists and the importance of format


• some interesting history on the rise and decline of liner notes


• an online archive of old album liner notes


• article on platform pressures w.r.t. spotify


• kinda related to this article about White Noise Baby Sleep on Spotify haha


• no link for this one, but i found Jasper's anthro paper on playlists really illuminating.


• the paper traced through the history of the playlist——from the physical mix tape through the multimedia revolution (e.g. MIDI files, the mp3 format), through platforms like Winamp & iTunes to social streaming services today——showing how changing technologies recontextualize & transform the way we experience and ascribe meaning to cultural artifacts like Music, playlists, songs, etc.


• This quote picked out from Jeremy Wade Morris :“Winamp was one of the first players to realize that the disaggregation of music from its album actually opened the music commodity up for new forms of aggregation" woaahh ok yeah


• He also interviews with people who like making playlists & connects them to interesting concepts: bricolage, subcultural capital, nostalgia, etc. Ultimately it's a fun read: esp when u get that feeling of recognition like wow lol i am IN social phenomena im totally a part of this


• if this piqued ur interest too maybe you can reach out to him to read it!


• real life mag always has interesting reads: Cold Discovery by Drew Austin, All Ears by Adam Clair


• on software / platforms


• half-formed thought but although this is a simple webapp, i found the process of learning how to create one super empowering! bc i think format is magic. and software is a way of defining formats & inviting others into them.


• a tweet i saw by @kytalli that soorrta gets at this:


• an old tree that has a mature root-mycelial network which supports the germination of fresh seeds. but what does it mean to develop a mature root-mycelial network for yourself, be an institution ?


• robin sloan: "an app can be a home cooked meal." just hoping that when my friends use this app, they can feel the personal-ness of it！


• kate compton: dissertation on casual creators. it may be a stretch to call playlist-making a casual creator system, but this is just something i think about all the time.


• hannah zeavin: auto-intimacy (thanks to Prof Wing for introducing me to this!) auto primarily as in self, not auto as in automatic!


• it's explored more in the 4th chapter of "The Distance Cure" but here's a short synopsis: 'Auto-intimacy' refers to self-communication enabled through a media object, making the user both the patient and therapist at once"
  
  i just think it's a fun (and ACCURATE) framing of what playlists are to me, as i definitely tend to treat them like journals or bookmarks into the past. and i know im not the only one who sees the therapeutic / cathartic qualities of putting together a good playlist!