Socio-emotional learning
by Impressions & Ideas
April 2021
by Impressions & Ideas
April 2021
This socio-emotional learning playlist emerged from reflections on themes that our class engaged with across the twelve weeks of our course Critical Data and Education. Our socio-emotional lives play a significant role when we are learning: they’re a strong source of intrinsic motivation, driving curiosity, for example, and are closely bound up with our aesthetic relationship to the work we’re reading and producing. No two people have exactly the same feelings about the sounds that they hear; maybe that partly explains the delight we often feel when we meet someone who likes similar music to ourselves.
We experience our socio-emotional lives multimodally. I made nine data visualisations for our course. One visualisation represents (among other things) emotional responses to the readings; another, 'social butterflies’, represents conversations with people on our course. But music in particular wields this enormous power over our emotions, including when we’re learning, affecting the way we feel in all sorts of ways and that’s why I’ve chosen a playlist as a sonic representation of socio-emotional learning across our course. It allows an escape-route from what James Joyce once referred to as ‘the ineluctable modality of the visible’, and frees up an alternative way to explore the dynamics of the connections between music, emotion, data, and socio-emotional learning. You might also interpret this playlist's 'musical data' as telling a story about the different ways our social and emotional lives engage when we read, when we write, when we converse together online, and when we think alone.
The musical energy of the opening track, Goldfrapp’s ‘Oh La La’, conveys some of the excitement of starting a new course, of encountering new topics, and of meeting new people virtually. Bardot and Gainsbourg’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ is a tongue-in-cheek choice to go along with the collaborative character of our initial discussions on the class forum. (Don’t worry: I’m not advocating bank robbery as a collaborative learning activity for our class!). ‘Lido’, from the album Isles, by Bicep, is just a really beautiful track: minimal, meditative, reflective, and great for writing late at night. (I actually stumbled upon Isles by accident when I decided to email someone out of the blue to ask what music they were listening to in an experiment comparing that way of discovering new music with Spotify’s recommendation algorithm.) Other tracks, like ‘Illusion of Time’ by Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini, and ‘IZ-US’ by Aphex Twin, play a similar meditative, reflective role. Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) by Arcade Fire is a joyful burst of sound that fits the transition from finishing a piece of writing to reading about a new topic. The Orb’s ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ is for daydreaming - an often overlooked but significant dimension of creative thinking and learning and not easily captured by data. Sasha’s ‘View 2’ remixed by Colin Benders is a deeply social piece of music that really needs to be played at a massive dance party with hundreds of people. That’s not something we’re allowed right now during the pandemic. ‘Dancing with a Ghost’ by St. Vincent is an oblique reference to the way that, in the strangely shrunken worlds we now inhabit, our encounters with people we only ever meet online sometimes seem to have this immaterial, otherworldly, ghostly quality to them. I see your words bubble up on the screen, or hear your voice cracking and breaking when we talk online. I’d like to meet you in person.
I mentioned at the start that you might interpret this playlist's 'musical data' as telling a story about the different ways our social and emotional lives engage when we read, when we write, when we converse together online, and when we think alone. But I wasn’t telling you the full story. You see, alternatively, you might also repurpose these musical data, interpret them in a different way, and tell a different, but equally true story about their meaning. But I’m not going to tell you that second story here because it's private, and my choice not to disclose it is just that - an exercise and assertion of choice, of control, of agency, of autonomy, and, ultimately, of power. Enjoy.
We experience our socio-emotional lives multimodally. I made nine data visualisations for our course. One visualisation represents (among other things) emotional responses to the readings; another, 'social butterflies’, represents conversations with people on our course. But music in particular wields this enormous power over our emotions, including when we’re learning, affecting the way we feel in all sorts of ways and that’s why I’ve chosen a playlist as a sonic representation of socio-emotional learning across our course. It allows an escape-route from what James Joyce once referred to as ‘the ineluctable modality of the visible’, and frees up an alternative way to explore the dynamics of the connections between music, emotion, data, and socio-emotional learning. You might also interpret this playlist's 'musical data' as telling a story about the different ways our social and emotional lives engage when we read, when we write, when we converse together online, and when we think alone.
- Ooh La La by Goldfrapp
- Bonnie and Clyde by Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg
- Lido by Bicep
- Time is Now by Moloko
- To Here Knows When by My Bloody Valentine
- Illusion of Time by Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini
- Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) by Arcade Fire
- IZ-US by Aphex Twin
- Pi by Kate Bush
- Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb
- View 2 by Sasha (Colin Benders Remix)
- Dancing with a Ghost by St. Vincent
The musical energy of the opening track, Goldfrapp’s ‘Oh La La’, conveys some of the excitement of starting a new course, of encountering new topics, and of meeting new people virtually. Bardot and Gainsbourg’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ is a tongue-in-cheek choice to go along with the collaborative character of our initial discussions on the class forum. (Don’t worry: I’m not advocating bank robbery as a collaborative learning activity for our class!). ‘Lido’, from the album Isles, by Bicep, is just a really beautiful track: minimal, meditative, reflective, and great for writing late at night. (I actually stumbled upon Isles by accident when I decided to email someone out of the blue to ask what music they were listening to in an experiment comparing that way of discovering new music with Spotify’s recommendation algorithm.) Other tracks, like ‘Illusion of Time’ by Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini, and ‘IZ-US’ by Aphex Twin, play a similar meditative, reflective role. Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) by Arcade Fire is a joyful burst of sound that fits the transition from finishing a piece of writing to reading about a new topic. The Orb’s ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ is for daydreaming - an often overlooked but significant dimension of creative thinking and learning and not easily captured by data. Sasha’s ‘View 2’ remixed by Colin Benders is a deeply social piece of music that really needs to be played at a massive dance party with hundreds of people. That’s not something we’re allowed right now during the pandemic. ‘Dancing with a Ghost’ by St. Vincent is an oblique reference to the way that, in the strangely shrunken worlds we now inhabit, our encounters with people we only ever meet online sometimes seem to have this immaterial, otherworldly, ghostly quality to them. I see your words bubble up on the screen, or hear your voice cracking and breaking when we talk online. I’d like to meet you in person.
I mentioned at the start that you might interpret this playlist's 'musical data' as telling a story about the different ways our social and emotional lives engage when we read, when we write, when we converse together online, and when we think alone. But I wasn’t telling you the full story. You see, alternatively, you might also repurpose these musical data, interpret them in a different way, and tell a different, but equally true story about their meaning. But I’m not going to tell you that second story here because it's private, and my choice not to disclose it is just that - an exercise and assertion of choice, of control, of agency, of autonomy, and, ultimately, of power. Enjoy.
