Words Planted by Music
Do music help us to form narratives in our head? Do some music make us think about conflicts while others about compassion? Do our brains have the ability to translate the signals from music into more structured words, sentences and stories? Recently I have been inspired to think and write about topics that I feel are strongly inspired by the music I was listening at that moment. The ranges of topics were so diverse that it got me wondering are my thoughts scattered all over the place or is there a source of this pattern? As I randomly scrolled through my playlist I saw that there's a diverse set of music that might've triggered these patterns. The music might've planted the words like revolution, serenity, injustice, authenticity, sorrow, death, progress to name a few and these are more or less the themes I have written about in recent past. My hypothesis - I was influenced by my playlist to come up with these topic areas. I did test my hypothesis last few days. I have tried to limit my music to a very specific genre - Japanese LoFi Hip Hop and I can see my brain is throwing me a very skewed set of words to expand upon as writing topics.
Now the thing that intrigued me is - if we can manipulate people's playlists at a mass level (which is easy through the streaming services suggesting us personalized playlist) we could influence public discourse towards a certain topic or direction. Can the people in power by accessing our personal playlist data influence public opinion to advance their agenda? Maybe we are already being manipulated by the playlist suggested by our streaming app and we just don't know it yet.