hi! i'm an insane person who likes music and spreadsheets enough to spend 10+ hours manually sequencing a >100 song playlist based on music theory analysis and a strong sense of artistic vision.
- read from here if you wanna hear the influences that would lead me to commit such an act of mania,
- or skip further down to just read what my process was,
- or go to the bottom to peep the resulting spreadsheet + playlist.
the "about my life" section at the top of the recipe pages that everybody skips
i am a woman of many skills. one of these is a deep appreciation of music - theory, playlist sequencing, genre blending. if you ever wonder why i named myself "melody", it runs deep.
this fascination with music developed amidst an unusual artistic environment - minecraft parodies, kevin macleod, "gamer" EDM, and brony music (hey it's fucking good ok). i still have a nostalgia for that era of my life, i will defend cringe music until the day i die.
but at some point, i was due for an awakening. it finally came in 2021 - a lot of alone time from covid, a lot of stress from junior year in college, a first (and ultimately abusive) relationship, a couple of years into transition, a couple of years into realizing my previous escape of gaming had become a problematic addiction. i went looking for alternative places to escape, and found, well, alternative rock.
the pressure cooker of those 2 years from 2020 - 2022 is a story for another time. but in this post i wanna talk about the intersection of music with another skill of mine - spreadsheets!
i've long used spreadsheets as a tool for solving information problems:
- as a TA in college I maintained the Google Sheets that served as gradesheets for multiple sections of the course I worked for. (wowie that was such a messy buggy way to do that...)
- I made my own budgeting spreadsheet during college, complete with categories, predictive vs actual spend, streamlined import from bank statements... before i switched to a paid app after college cause it was just easier
- organizing long and convoluted tasks such as the NC legal name change process
my friend jyn argues that spreadsheets are powerful and good because they blur the line between "users" and "programmers", making complex problem-solving tools accessible to a much wider audience.
personally, spreadsheets have enabled a lot of my own growth by giving me small, accessible tools with an approachable learning curve. i highly recommend learning / using them for early technologists, initial experimentation on an idea, or ... small bespoke projects, like optimizing a playlist for the perfect transitions :)
inspiration, origins
sometime in 2022 i was shuffling my ~100 song "indie potpourri" playlist, and I heard these songs one after another:
- Wax Tailor - Que Sera (ends in a pretty B minor fade-out on guitar w/ delay)
- Tally Hall - A Lady (starts with a soft B-minor arpeggio on harp + guitar)
it was fucking magical. these two songs together create a blissfully blended sonic experience. it's like discovering your two favorite drag queens are performing together, or like a new queer bookstore opened right down the street from your regular dive bar, or like the very day you decide to learn shibari you get a fortune cookie saying "you will soon develop strong ties with an unexpected new friend". ffs both of these songs even have black & white album covers!
and of course, what is A Lady if not a delicious treat from the same musical substance (and the same album) as one of Tally Hall's most popular songs, & - same key, same chords, same theme of opposites. in the album Good & Evil, they place A Lady 6 songs after that upbeat alt rock pillar of the album, but I really like taking A Lady as a gentle appetizer right before the shock-and-awe choral opening of its bigger sibling: LOOOOVE OF THE SOOOOOON* ba-da-dap bap bap bap BAP BAP BAP BAP BSSHT!!***
so two became three, and then I began wondering... what if I did this for the whole playlist?
how to sequence a playlist for smoothest transitions
well, if I'm going to make an entire playlist flow, I need to find songs that "blend well together". there are a couple important factors to make that work:
- pitches
- the 3 songs above all share the same key at their boundaries, which is the easiest transition.
- there are other "natural" key changes, e.g. relative/parallel Major/minor, change by a 4th/5th interval, etc.
- sometimes a song ends in a weird chord, or even just a vague cluster of notes; these may be less clear how to pair, but the dissonance/ambiguity also gives enough space that you don't have to worry as much about a "clean" transition
- vibes
- even if the music theory matches on paper, if you pair a light whimsical tune with a hard carnal lustful song, it'll probably sound weird.
- odd pairings may make sense for certain cases like the Tally Hall ones above, but generally a similar "intensity" helps the transition go smoothly.
I suppose, then, the task at hand is to:
- write every song name into a spreadsheet
- for each song, identify:
- key / chord / notes / "feel", for start & end
- intensity for start & end
- identify any uniquely strong pairs or sequences
- iteratively rearrange songs in the spreadsheet based on the gathered data + a manual listen test into larger and larger sections until the whole playlist flows as one
- oh and make sure the last song has a good transition into the first one too so you can play it on loop and never notice a thing
- reorder in music software to match the spreadsheet
this took me probably 10 hours in total, but it was incredibly satisfying! the resulting playlist is an absolute delight to listen to, both from the heavily curated transitions, and remembering the care and joy and love that went into sequencing each song one by one.
oh yea, then a couple years later I got the desire to do it again for my favorite ~40 songs at the top of my "retro-futuristic electronica" playlist lol. took only abt 3 hours that time.
links, closing thoughts
i present to you:
- my playlist science spreadsheet
- the result: "indie potpourri" playlist on Spotify
- the return: "retro-futuristic electronica" playlist on Spotify
i fucking love music listening and music theory and solving information problems. this is such an interesting intersection of information analysis and artistic vision, i love that this is a thing I've done.
mad respect to people who regularly assemble DJ sets; i assume this isn't exactly how you do it, but this process brings me great joy.
at this point im basically an expert on transitions :)