Music can help people in many ways. As several posts here have discussed, it can be particularly helpful when it comes to calming anxiety, providing an escape, or even helping people feel justified in moments when emotions can feel too overwhelming. Music players allow people to create their own playlists depending on their mood, or create ones for them depending on what we like. YouTube allows people to get creative, featuring not just songs, but remixes, mashups, and strange combinations that you can’t find anywhere else.
Finding new music can be difficult, though. While the internet has an infinite of music to search for, it’s just that, infinite. Even finding music that is similar to what one currently listens to and actually likes can be daunting, but the Internet is here to help, offering tools to help them find new music that’s refreshing, but also familiar.
If you or your child is looking for similar music to help with concentration and mental health, or if you just want to find new artists to listen to, here are a few websites that make the process a little bit easier:
Gnoosic The musical subset of Gnod (the Global Network of Discovery), Gnoosic has one enter three artists or bands that they like. They can be from any genre, and don’t need to match. From there, Gnoosic recommends a new artist that they predict that one would like, a song of theirs to play from Spotify, and three options: “I like it,” “I don’t like it,” and “I don’t know.” Regardless of which option is chosen, Gnoosic repeats the process, using the choices to narrow down their recommendations.
Live Plasma Live Plasma looks rather simple at first glance. It’s just a search box where you put in an artist that one likes. Once that’s completed, however, the page suddenly fills with a web, the artist searched for at the center. Though intimidating at first, Live Plasma recommends a few artists that they think are similar to the chosen artist, and then recommends ones similar to those artists, and so on. Even better? If one clicks on any of the artists, there’s a small play button that allows them to listen to one of their songs so they can see what kind of style they have.
TuneFind TuneFind is a little different than the other websites in that the person has probably heard the songs that the site is listing already. They may not know what it is though and most likely heard it on a TV show or a movie. TuneFind allows them to look up that song that they found particularly catchy that played in the background during a scene on an episode last night: they just need to simply search the TV show or movie, find the relevant episode if it’s the former, and TuneFind lists the songs that played throughout. Sometimes, TuneFind makes it even easier and will list what specific scene the song plays in too.
Do you think music can help with stress relief? How do you think you can introduce your child to music that you think will help?