As a capstone project for my 2019 Flow Genome Project Coaching Certification, I was tasked to do some, "citizen science" and come up with a research project related to the topics we studied that year.
Being a melomaniac with music a top flow trigger in my life and a couple hundred Spotify playlists deep, I came up with the concept of, "Flow Jams".
The basic idea was to do research involving music and it's ability to impact or shift our emotional states. The hypothesis was that if I came up with playlists which influenced my own emotional valence and energetic arousal levels, I could use them to match state to task and optimize my daily life with music.
I came across some fascinating research along this journey, and perhaps I'll dive into it at a later date, but I thought I would simply make the playlists available for now. Over the course of 1 month, myself and 2 other friends recruited these playlists throughout the day, and the results were promising. A vast majority of the time, simply listening to a playlist to shift our emotional state into a desired place had a profound effect. Why not see if it works for you!?
Original Playlists:
*Originally, I simply chose 9 emotional states that I felt comprised a spectrum of desired emotions. After some feedback, I added 4 additional playlists to cover emotions some felt were missed. The idea was that even sadness or tension were states that sometimes need to be felt to be cleared from the system. These aren't as full as the originals, but might be worth a listen.
Additional Playlists:
After further research, I decided to create another set of playlists based on identifying the previously researched 9 Geneva Emotional Music Scales (GEMS). Here's a cool image displaying the 9 main scales & 45 emotional states used to describe.
Source: https://www.uibk.ac.at/psychologie/fachbereiche/pdd/personality_assessment/gems/about-the-gems/index.html.en
I'll post these playlists in an additional post if there is interest, and hope to create some new playlists for 2022. As we all know, we can only stay stimulated by a playlist for so long until it's time for a new one. However, 9 playlists for a wide range of emotional states did seem to last me for a while, plus, I've enjoyed rediscovering them after 2+ years!