Using music to self-identify

In cinematography and game design, it is no stranger that music composers may use musical pieces whenever a certain character appears on screen; these musical pieces are often dubbed "themes". Usually these contain no lyrics, and a well composed theme gives away some air about the very nature of what makes the character, as these are core components of story telling. Old monks for instance usually have their themes written with notes that give a feeling of wisdom, experience and strength, evil dictators on the other hand may have their villainous and menacing themes.

The practice of making and organizing playlists is something that I have been doing for quite some time. Whenever I end up detecting patterns in a set of songs, I group them together with the hopes of finding more that meets their abstraction. I have for example a playlist titled "Comeback!", which contains songs portraying the miraculous moments that enable the protagonists to reach their goals after all the struggles they went through, which is also known as plot armor.

One summer ago, I happened to have encountered a person who proposed the idea of making a playlist that expresses my personification, allowing me to use it as a way to introduce myself. As neat as the idea may sound like. Such playlist is meant to be special, as it should describe who am I using nothing but music. Spotify was my platform of choice for the task since it much easier and compact; YouTube would however be superior but I don't want to deal with the potential threat of having some of my entries deleted, which is often the case across many of my old playlists. Spotify's library of available songs is not as vast as YouTube's yet I would still trade security for content. Not so say that this caveat does not occur on the former, but the frequency on YouTube is quite high that I may sometimes end up finding an old song, enjoy it and wake up the next morning to see it being deleted due to copyright shenanigans.

Adding elements to this set had me tinker a lot to see if I can come up with objective criteria. Although music tastes are subjective, I made sure to see if I can use the entire produced song; and by that I mean that I would then care not only about the composition, but also observe the lyrics and title of the song, let's not forget that songs usually come coupled with their album art but that's no hard constraint. Usually these song titles are not just thrown there, as they may sometimes allow the listener to draw a better picture of what the song conveys.

I see myself as a problem solver, an artist and a mage with motifs that are out of the ordinary's scope. I can't sadly stay consistent and have a unique cosplay but I believe the mixture of chosen songs definitely would create the "Theme of Saad". The process of deciding for a song often happens when I would resonate with the song through its melodies or lyrics and say "Yeah, this is me!". I believe one way to make this playlist a bit more consistent is to see if I can sort these songs, but I still have not found the proper configuration for that.

The playlist is and will always be a work-in-progress as long as I keep discovering songs. I may end up purging or replacing some of the songs there. I liked this exercise and I hope to meet others who worked on such a small idea. The playlist in question can be viewed here downwards, enjoy: