In addition to relieving boredom, listening to music has been shown to improve cognitive performance by boosting your stamina and elevating your mood. It goes beyond just background noise (though that can also be beneficial for focus). Music is being used increasingly in the medical field as well, providing stress relief and promoting healing. A study from 2019 revealed what anyone who’s ever watched a film scored by John Williams already knows to be true: music can have a profound effect on our emotions. Music therapists often use a technique called the Iso Principle as a method of intervention in mood management. The idea is to start off by matching the music to the patient’s current mood and then gradually, alter the songs to achieve the desired mood state.
When I’m putting a playlist together, I often use the Iso Principle to build the track list. I’ve never been a morning person, so I need slower, calmer music in the morning. I can’t start the day with CoComelon, and I don’t want to be friends with anyone who can. My daily playlists start out slower and then build from there. I’m usually awake and fully functional around an hour into the playlist, and that’s when the BPM (beats per minute) picks up a bit, and the jams kick in. I’ll let you all in on a little secret: music sorting services. My favorite is Sort Your Music by Playlist Machinery. You connect your Spotify account and pull up the playlist you’ve put together, and then you can sort the tracks however you need. I have a playlist called Work Mix 2023 because I am a highly creative person when it comes to playlist titles. Sort Your Music allowed me to order the songs by increasing energy and, just for fun, decreasing danceability.
So now I have my original playlist and two modified versions of it. You can also choose to overwrite your playlist with the new order instead of creating a copy. Using the Energy column, you can sort the songs to get increasingly more energetic. (This is different from BPM, which you can also sort by and comes in really handy when running.)
Another website, called SongData.io, takes the URL for a Spotify playlist and then shows you the energy, Camelot, and BPM of each song. You can click on the BPM for any song and be taken to a list of popular songs with the same BPM. As I said before, this is useful when running because it helps your body stay at a consistent pace. Both times I’ve gone for a run on purpose, I made sure to have a playlist ready with higher-BPM songs. I have yet to feel the desire to do any “working out” again, but I feel very prepared with the right tools should the need arise! Now you do, too!