I always listen to music, but most of the time I don’t really care or pay attention. I tend to use quite random playlist and mostly let them run. Or at least, this what I thought until I recently checked.

What I discovered surprised me. Most people say their mood will be influenced by the music they listen to. This is explained in detail (and in French) by someone smarter and way more knowledgeable in music (which is easy considering my quasi-null level)

In my case, I tend to influence my playlist based on my mood. The fun thing is that I do that unconsciously and that it seems to correlate sometime surprisingly.

Let’s dig:

Renaud can be good (Molly Malone) or bad (p’tite conne in a loop is a fairly good indicator of depression).  Brel, Moustaki, Ferrat is mostly always bad: not for the singer himself but rather for the memories of a lost one they evoke. Funnily enough, Jean Yanne, which is from the same environment, is not triggered by the same feeling.

On the contrary, classical music, opera and even requiem are an indicator of good mood. I especially like listening to symphonies, Fauré or Mozart requiems as it helps me getting isolated from the rest of thew world.

My main problem now: each time I choose an album, I wonder if I’m making a conscious or unconscious choice. I have several hundreds disks in digital format but no real way or making statistics (as I use several players). Currently, this is more a feeling than hard-data backed evidence, which disturbs me. I know not to trust a feeling as it’s usually the best way to be wrong.

For the coming weeks, I’ll try to sweep the darker area of my collections, to dig into stuff I know less and see if I have the opposite effects. Anyway, I found  funny to realize after so many years and to discover such a correlation.