I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between the art that we consume versus the art that we create. No art can exist in a void, and every piece of art when created becomes a part of the overall landscape of art, influencing and being influenced by everything around it. Every time I create music, my favorite form of art, I’m always trying to create it as unconsciously as possible, trying to stop my brain from getting in the way and create a direct flow between my deepest feelings and the sounds that come out of my computer. So with this, how have the albums that I listened to when I was creating my own albums creeped their way into my music? Do I tend to reflect the feelings of the music I listen to, using those emotions to help me explore my own, or do I tend more towards the opposite, using the music I consume as a comfort method to shut out my negative emotions, while giving those negative emotions a place to go through the music I create?
What Influences My Music?
A Sentiment Analysis
To examine these trends, I decided to analyze the sentiments of each of the songs I listened to the most in the months that I was recording each album. By leveraging APIs from Last.fm, Genius, and Rate Your Music, I extracted data on my most-listened-to songs during the creation of each of my six albums. Using NRCLex, I analyzed the emotional sentiments of these songs through both the lyrics from Genius and the descriptors of the music from Rate Your Music tracking eight emotions (fear, anger, anticipation, trust, joy, disgust, surprise, and sadness) and overall positive/negative sentiment. I then compared these results to the sentiments of my own album writeups that served as reflections of my emotions about each album and my mental state at the time.
Then, I compared these results to the sentiments of my own album writeups that served as reflections of my emotions about each album and my mental state at the time. I couldn’t find any easy way to analyze my music directly as a lot of it is instrumental and doesn’t exist on platforms like Genius or Rate Your Music, so it felt most practical to just analyze the music based on my own reflections on each album.
To visualize my findings, I made double bar graphs for each album, directly comparing each emotion from the songs I was listening to and the writeup of that album. Overall, I found an uplifting trend in the albums that I made. Over time, it seems like I became more willing to believe that my future could get better, and that I don’t just have to accept the life that I’m living right now. While certainly all of my albums explore elements of dark thoughts and feelings, I think that the way that I’ve handled those feelings and explored them has become a lot less helpless. It’s interesting though that the negative sentiments of the albums that I listened to had an opposite relationship, getting stronger over time. I think this reflects that I was more willing to explore my negative emotions in the moment, when I’m listening to my music, and live in them. But then, I’ve become better at letting those emotions go after the fact, and not holding onto them and making my entire album about how stuck to them I am.