Collaborative Playlist-Making: Musical Interaction via Digitally Mediated Co-Curation

Abstract

Collaborative playlist-making (CPM), a form of music co-curation where two or more people select and order recorded music together, is a form of group musical engagement that has recently risen to prominence among musicians and nonmusicians in the general population. This paper presents CPM as a form of technologically mediated group musical engagement and informs researchers as to how CPM and its constituent behaviors may be studied in relation to other forms of musical engagement, particularly group music-making. In addition, specific psychological processes expected to be elicited by CPM—self-other merging, cognitive perspective-taking, and shared intentionality—are explicated in an effort to evince how CPM may give rise to socio-cognitive transfer effects in line with Goldman's reconstructive route to empathy. The main purpose of this paper is to promote music psychologists’ study of CPM to probe how musical interaction occurring within everyday contexts can harness music's potential to facilitate communication and bring about social benefits.