SongSister

Collect and Connect with Music

News
2025-05-15 To register as a user of this website, please fill this form. This is required because Spotify does not allow convenient access to Spotify API for applications any longer when these applications have less than 250,000 monthly active users. Yes, you did read that right.

Songs

Checking Spotify connection ...

And look for sisters. Welcome {{state.spotify_user_display_name}}!

Please create a public Spotify playlist with name SongSister (uppercase is important) because such a playlist does not exist yet.

The song metadata of your playlist SongSister SongSister is provided by

Synchronisation

Your data will be saved in Google Drive in a file called SongSister.json. You have to allow SongSister to read and write its song data.


Explicitly grant permissions to edit files!

State of sync: {{state.google_sync_info.last_message}}

Last backup: {{state.google_backup_info.last_message}}

FAQ

Purpose and usage

Q. What is the purpose of this website?

The website connects us with people, locations, stories. Via music. It is like a diary but every entry in the diary is connected to a song. Thus, in comparison to a normal diary, we can listen to our diary every day.

Q. How do I use the website?

Note: There will be a video to explain it ... at some point of time. But for now the explanation is the text below.

There are multiple ways to use the website. Here we describe one way.

Whenever we attend a gathering that is worth remembering, we ask an attendant to share a song with us, and a small story that belongs it. The story can be really long or as simple as "it is one of my current favorite songs."

Such a gathering can be for example a birthday party, a meeting with some friends or some club event. We don't add anonymous sisters to the diary. So the first name of the song sister, the song contributor, should be known. A weekly work meeting does not count, unless there is something special to remember, like a promotion or a farewell.

A single song per gathering is enough.

We manually add new songs to the playlist SongSister, via Spotify. After this, we go to the SongSister website to add the context, the sister's name, the event, the location and the story.

We listen to the playlist during our daily life, via Spotify. If the list becomes too long, songs of the previous month are moved to a new playlist. The name of the new playlist contains that month and some keywords that belong to the gatherings of that month. Example: 2023 June - Future Friday Fusion.

Q. A collected song is not in Spotify. What to do?

We add a similar song instead. And we note down the name of the original song in the field 'story'.

Q. When are Spotify alternatives like SoundCloud and Apple Music supported?

If you want to help us to create a variant for SoundCloud, let us know. We don't have any plans to create a variant for Apple music until Apple starts to pay taxes.

Data storage and privacy

Q. How safe is my data, with respect to data privacy? Where is my data stored?

First, SongSister does not store any of your data. Your data is NOT transferred to the SongSister server, not even to logs. Your data lives in three spaces:

  1. In your browser on your device
  2. In your public Spotify SongSister playlist (only the songs, not the diary entries)
  3. In your Google Drive (only when you synchronize the browser's data)

Q. Why is the data stored in Google Drive? I have privacy concerns.

We understand your concern. Google Drive was chosen because many people have a Google account and can use it here to store their data. Saving your data in Google Drive is entirely optional.

If you have alternative suggestions for a data storage, please let us know.

Q. Why does SongSister not store its users' data?

Storing data comes with a lot of responsibilities, legal and technical. The best way to protect data from being stolen and to prevent abuse is to not store it.

Additionally, SongSister is an independent service without financial sources, especially it will stay free of commercial advertisements. Having no storage cost minimizes the cost of the service.

Science

  • Emotional connection to music peaks at age 17 (life periods from which these songs originate), with men peaking earlier with a stable reminiscence bump into older age, while women showed a later peak and a stronger recency effect with age.
    Burunat, I., Mavrolampados, A., Duman, D., Koehler, F., Saarikallio, S. H., Luck, G., & Toiviainen, P. (2025).
    Memory bumps across the lifespan in personally meaningful music.
    Memory, 1–21. doi:10.1080/09658211.2025.2557960
  • Positive effects (low or very low evidence) of music therapy on depression, anxiety and quality of life were not maintained at follow-up (meta-review).
    Lassner A, Siafis S, Wiese E, Leucht S, Metzner S, Wagner E, Hasan A.
    Evidence for music therapy and music medicine in psychiatry: transdiagnostic meta-review of meta-analyses.
    BJPsych Open. 2024 Dec 13;11(1):e4. doi:10.1192/bjo.2024.826
  • Music therapy significantly improves standard care in depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms and general functioning at 3-month follow-up (randomized controlled trial).
    Erkkilä J, Punkanen M, Fachner J, Ala-Ruona E, Pöntiö I, Tervaniemi M, Vanhala M, Gold C.
    Individual music therapy for depression: randomised controlled trial.
    Br J Psychiatry. 2011 Aug;199(2):132-9. doi:10.1192/bjp.bp.110.085431
  • Perceptual (but not acoustic) features predict singing voice preferences.
    Bruder, C., Poeppel, D. & Larrouy-Maestri, P.
    Perceptual (but not acoustic) features predict singing voice preferences.
    Sci Rep 14, 8977 (2024). doi:10.1038/s41598-024-58924-9
  • Regarding pitch and rhythmic structure of 366 popular US melodies spanning from 1950 to 2023, changepoints ("melodic revolutions") were detected in 1975 and 2000 and one smaller revolution in 1996, characterized by significant decreases in complexity. In general, complexity decreases and note density increases in popular melodies over time, especially since 2000.
    Hamilton, M., Pearce, M. Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on U.S. charts from 1950 to 2023.
    Rep 14, 14749 (2024). doi:10.1038/s41598-024-64571-x
  • The purposedly composed "work flow" music (emotional trajectory called “anxious-to-energized”, strong rhythm, simple tonality, broadly distributed <6000 Hz, moderate dynamism) improved mood and performance (i.e., faster responses over time, with similar accuracy) [only for repetitive tasks?]. Now positive effect for "deep focus" music.
    Joan Orpella, Daniel Liu Bowling, Concetta Tomaino, Pablo Ripollés
    Effects of music advertised to support focus on mood and processing speed
    PLOS, Published: February 12, 2025 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0316047
  • Genetic effects contribute up to 54% of the variability in music reward sensitivity (2K+ Swedish twin pairs studied). Music reward comes from various sources: evocation (emotional reactions to music), mood regulation (the impact of music on individuals’ moods), music seeking (the tendency to seek out new music), sensory motor (deriving pleasure from movements evoked by music), and social reward (deriving pleasure from social bonding through music).
    Bignardi, G., Wesseldijk, L.W., Mas-Herrero, E. et al.
    Twin modelling reveals partly distinct genetic pathways to music enjoyment.
    Nat Commun 16, 2904 (2025). doi:10.1038/s41467-025-58123-8
  • The joy of music is connected to learning through predictions and surprises.
    B.P. Gold, E. Mas-Herrero, Y. Zeighami, M. Benovoy, A. Dagher, & R.J. Zatorre,
    Musical reward prediction errors engage the nucleus accumbens and motivate learning
    Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116 (8) 3310-3315 (2019) doi:10.1073/pnas.1809855116
  • Snippets from a familiar and unfamiliar song are differentiated rapidly in the brain. Differences between responses were revealed from ~100–300 ms from sound onset.
    Jagiello, R., Pomper, U., Yoneya, M. et al.
    Rapid Brain Responses to Familiar vs. Unfamiliar Music – an EEG and Pupillometry study.
    Sci Rep 9, 15570 (2019). doi:10.1038/s41598-019-51759-9
  • [PAYWALL] Individual dance movements can serve as fingerprint - across genres.
    Carlson, E., Saari, P., Burger, B., & Toiviainen, P. (2020).
    Dance to your own drum: Identification of musical genre and individual dancer from motion capture using machine learning.
    Journal of New Music Research, 49(2), 162–177. doi:10.1080/09298215.2020.1711778
  • Northern mockingbird variates themes as humans: timbre change, pitch change, squeeze, stretch. Transitions are gradual ("morphing").
    Roeske Tina C. , Rothenberg David , Gammon David E.
    Mockingbird Morphing Music: Structured Transitions in a Complex Bird Song
    Frontiers in Psychology. Volume 12 - 2021. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.630115
  • Globally(!) the Big Five personality traits are correlated with preferred musical styles. Openness: jazz, avant-garde. Extraversion: upbeat tempo, like rap, Europop, electronic music. Agreeableness: gentle, slower pop songs, like soft rock, blues. Conscientiousness: no interest in metal, punk. Neuroticism: intense music styles, like metal, punk.
    Greenberg, D. M., Wride, S. J., Snowden, D. A., Spathis, D., Potter, J., & Rentfrow, P. J.
    Universals and variations in musical preferences: A study of preferential reactions to Western music in 53 countries.
    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(2), 286–309. 2022 doi:10.1037/pspp0000397
  • Piano training (one-hour session per week for 11 weeks) improves the detection of audio-visual temporal discrepancies and reduce the levels of depression, stress and anxiety compared to baseline.
    Che, Y., Jicol, C., Ashwin, C. et al.
    An RCT study showing few weeks of music lessons enhance audio-visual temporal processing.
    Sci Rep 12, 20087 (2022). doi:10.1038/s41598-022-23340-4
  • Native speakers of tonal languages (like Chinese) are better at discriminating musical melodies, relative to speakers of non-tonal languages (like English). But they are worse at processing the musical beat. [CORRECTION AVAILABLE]
    Jingxuan Liu, Courtney B. Hilton, Elika Bergelson, Samuel A. Mehr
    Language experience predicts music processing in a half-million speakers of fifty-four languages
    Volume 33, Issue 10, P1916-1925.E4, May 22, 2023 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2023.03.067
  • Higher levels of music engagement (number of courses, especially instrumental music compared to vocal music) was related to higher exam scores on all subjects (Math, Science, English). Highly engaged instrumental music students were, on average, academically over 1 year ahead of their peers.
    Guhn, M., Emerson, S. D., & Gouzouasis, P.
    A population-level analysis of associations between school music participation and academic achievement.
    Journal of Educational Psychology, 112(2), 308–328. (2020) doi:10.1037/edu0000376