Spotify Playlist: A Mix For My Good Friend Who Wants to Live in the Woods
I accumulated songs into a playlist that I thought would convey a sense of adventure. There are Irish musical ensembles, various folk music, songs dating back to the 1600s, songs from The Hobbit, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones are all found within the playlist. There are thirteen songs in total amounting to 46 minutes and 31 seconds. Creating this playlist was a very enjoyable task for me. I am always looking forward to creating playlists for specific purposes in life:
Recreating this movie scene was easy and efficient. It required the participation of only one person and low equipment needed (a door frame and door). In an iconic movie scene from the evolutionary psychology thriller written by Stephen King and directed by Stanley Kubrick, Jack Nicholson’s face covers the entirety of the camera frame as he descends more and more into madness.
Writing the Halfa Kucha was a challenging process, but I wrote mine in a similar fashion as I would an essay. I grouped scenes between “Kindred” by Octavia E. Butler and “Fun Home” by Alison Bechdel which would be the main points I would want to present. I also scripted what I would say on each slide in order to back up the several claims I made. The title and end slide would serve as an introduction and conclusion slide.
Presentation
The presentation was the most difficult part of the project. A common problem I believe we all had was condensing the information into a 20-second per slide, 10-slide presentation. Timing and practice were key when presenting. A personal problem I have is slight stuttering when flustered. I noticed that I could present the beginning slides well until I lost my train of thought, became flustered, and consequently started stuttering slightly. The embarrassment fueled this cycle until I found my groove once again.
For this playlist, I decided to find songs that struck some of the deepest chords within me, in a positive, beautiful way. However, in order for a song to have a significantly deep affect on me personally, it needs to have pensive undertones of confusing sadness. These songs are so beautiful that they are positive, yet so beautiful that they could make one contemplate in a brutally honest way: these songs shed light on the sorrows that one hides under the surface in a distracted world. They are colorful, poetic expressions of emotions, of a auditorily-captured unleashing into ones’ unapologetically shameless soul. This playlist is comprised in a chronologically progressively more intense and emotional ordering. It starts off in a subtle, magical melodic epic, then ventures into simplicity, then the spark of the fire lights up, honesty comes pouring, until an intense climax, ending on a positive optimism to wrap up the playlist. I found this playlist to be an almost circular rollercoaster of relating songs that lead to a seamless transition of emotive listening.
When I first looked at the assignment, I thought of movies I liked, such as Joker, Batman, and Star Wars. However, as these movies required extra costumes with facial makeup, I decided to choose a different one. As a result, I chose the scene from ‘The Great Gatsby’ where Leonardo DiCaprio holds his drink and smiles at the party. Even though this wasn’t my favorite movie, I chose this scene because as I was looking in my closet for clothes to wear, I saw the suit that I had only worn once this year. This made me decide to wear the suit for this project and eventually choose this scene from The Great Gatsby. I found this assignment to be very fun as I got the opportunity to wear the suit that I brought all the way from Korea.
The question that I had for myself was about how productive I am. To answer my question, I looked at the categories of hours sitting in front of the desk, actual working hours, sleep, exercise, and my motivation level. The hours sitting in front of the desk are the number of hours I sat in front of the desk, including the hours I was working/studying, watching my phone, and talking with my friends. The actual working category is when I studied and did academic work. The sleep and exercise/workout category is literally what it means. The motivation category is on a scale of 1 to 10, where ten is fully motivated.
Based on the data gathered, I could realize that I was highly productive on the weekdays, especially from Monday to Thursday. This was because most of the assignments were due these days, and I wanted to ensure that I didn’t have to do much work on the weekend. Due to such pressure, the hours of sleep from Sunday to Wednesday are shorter than Thursday to Saturday. I’m not productive on Thursday compared to other days because I don’t have any classes on Friday, which makes me want to take a break. The level of motivation had a positive correlation with my productivity, as when I was highly motivated to do my academic work, I was highly productive.
In the future, I believe that the results could be more accurate if I could track my productivity for at least three weeks to get a better average. Also, additional categories could be used to analyze my productivity and increase the reliability of the data and conclusion.
Overall, I was pretty sure that I am a person that depends a lot on the level of motivation that fuels me to be productive. After I tracked my productivity, I proved that I was a very motivation-dependent person. This made me think about the ways how I can stay motivated for a more extended period as I would need to be productive for most of the days when I work after graduating college.
In this playlist, I included songs that help me stay focused. All the songs included in the playlist are instrumental with only two exceptions: one in the middle that serves as an intermission, and one as the ending. I try to make it more diverse as possible, but most of them have a melancholic, nostalgic, and calming quality —- like the painting I used as the cover, Jean-François Millet’s The Sheepfold, Moonlight.
Usually, I prefer to study in silence, especially when I’m working on assignments that require active engagement in thinking and “producing”, like writing essays or doing math homework. However, music becomes a necessary companion when I’m reading for a really long time or studying in a place where people are talking so I could stay focused.
List
さようならのうみー星野源 （sa yo na ra no u mi- hoshino gen)
A pop-song writer and singer, but I found this instrumental work in his first album to be particularly loathing and serves perfectly well as an intro that naturally invites the audience into a dreamy world.
Nocturnes, Op.9 -No.1 in B-Flat Minor/ Chopin, Arthur Rubinstein
Nocturnes, Op.9 -No.2 in E-Flat Major/ Chopin, Arthur Rubinstein
Consolation No.3 / Franz Liszt, Vladimir Horowitz
Some classics that always work to calm you down. I put them at the beginning of the list since it’s always much harder to transit into your working mode when you first sit down and begin to work.
年輪 - 朝川朋之（nenrin-asakawa tomouki)
Incorporating traditional eastern instruments and sounds of nature, this piece always feels like a cooling breeze. Put it here after the three western classical pieces to refresh your mind.
おかえりー岡村孝子 (okaeri- okamura takako)
Intermission—remind the audience to take a break. Nostalgic and cozy, this song always reminds me of the background music played in my kindergarten.
エトランゼ (Tanaya mix) – スピッツ (etoranza – Spitz)
My favorite band of all time. This is one of their only instrumental songs. Even though I’m not a big fan of electronic music, this experimental piece has been miraculously effective in keeping me to stay focused and become productive, so I put it here as the first song in PART II.
Vampurity – 岩井俊二 (Iwai Shunji)
One of the most famous Japanese movie directors, but also really good at composing. I realized that for me, melancholic songs are far more effective in bringing me into the mood of reading than merry ones, which is why this playlist might turn out to be quite sentimental and sorrowful.
After the Rain 日向敏文 （Hinata Toshifumi)
As its title suggests, it’s an “after the rain” song. Light-hearted yet not so exciting that will disrupt my reading. Feels like someone joyfully jumping through the water paddles alone after heavy rain.
First Step – Peter J. Malmsjo
A sad song again.
雨だれ – 坂本龙一 （Ryuichi Sakamoto)
Probably one of the most popular Japanese composers. This particular piece is less well-known but I quite like it. Especially the opening.
Reflections – 日向敏文 （Hinata Toshifumi)
A song that feels like “the last dance song before parting”.
Humming Water – 吉村弘 （Hiroshi Yoshimura)
Lots of natural sounds, in particular, various sounds of water: dripping, flowing, rippling.
I Will – The Beatles
The ending should be something cheerful and calming so that you could sum up the courage to launch another session of studying and tackle your problems.
My rhetorical situation was songs I’ll never get tired of. I chose songs that were played on loop during a certain time and that were forgotten until I listened to them again, which made me listen to them on loop again. I think that this mix conveys that things are not forgotten 100%. I had to go through my liked playlist which made me remember a lot of memories correlated with certain songs. I liked being able to see the change.
My mix is mostly comprised of songs about a subject conceiving of fantastical things, as opposed to songs about fantastical things on their own. The general theme of my mix is daydreaming, though I put special thought into how I ordered the songs. Taking a cue from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, my mix opens with The Doors’ The End which ironically represents the beginning of the day. The next several songs address themes of daydreaming or projecting a fantasy onto mundane things, as is the case for Pale Blue Eyes and Real Love Baby, or perhaps where it does not exist at all, as is the case for Manifest and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. My mix ends with George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass followed by The Beatle’s A Day in the Life representing the end of a day of daydreaming.
5. All I Do is Win, DJ Khaled, Snoop Dogg, Ludacris, T pain
6. I Took a Pill In Ibiza, Mike Posner, Seeb
7. Once I was 7 years old, Ben Schuller
8. Don’t Let Me Down, The Chainsmokers
9. Panda, Desiigner
10. Rap God, Eminem
11. This is America, Childish Gambino
12. BabyWipe, Ski mask the Slump God
13. High Hopes, Panic! At the Disco
The rhetorical situation I am engaging with is how to best capture my childhood. The playlist I linked to was a playlist I have had since 6th grade. Since then, I have added songs that I enjoyed listening to at the time. As time passed, the playlist became a record of my personality, my character, and me as a person through music.
The crudely made album cover is a bunch of “me’s” from 6th, 8th, 11th grade, and now. It is to represent my growth throughout the existence of this playlist and the defining periods of my life that were best captured by the playlist.
In reality, this playlist is two and a half hours long so I had to cut it down significantly.
