Personal soundtrack: sync your calendar to a personal music playlist for the ultimate “personal radio station.” Improve your productivity and punctuality!

Background:

People frequently listen to music during their day-to-day activities. In olden times, a person was limited to whatever was playing on the radio, but in the post-iPod world, it’s very straightforward to load up an entire day’s worth of personalized music ahead of time.

However, such music can’t react to the events of the day: it’s just a static playlist.

Proposal:

With the advent of computerized calendars, it is now possible for software to analyze a person’s upcoming calendar for the day and create a new “personal soundtrack for the day” that is synced to the events on the calendar.

For example, on the practical side, when the system knows that you have some sort of important event coming up, it could play a “time is running out”-style song[1] to let you know that you should prepare to (for example) run out of the house to catch a bus.

[1]: Some possible songs for this application would be the Super Mario Bros “Time is Running Out” theme or the stress-inducing “you are about to drown” music from Sonic the Hedgehog.

See Figure 1 for a mockup of the types of songs that this “un-pauseable personal radio station” might include.

Fig. 1: See the list below for the proposed music that might sync to each event on the calendar.

Cliche song proposals for each event:

  • A (“wake up”): There are at least a half-dozen Looney Tunes-style classical tracks that would work here. Apparently “Morning Mood” by Grieg is one of the more frequently used ones.
  • B (“shower”): The theme from the movie “Psycho” would provide motivation to shower quickly and not waste water.
  • C (“prepare for a meeting”): See above for the “time is running out” suggestions.
  • D (“work meeting”): We’ll just play some elevator music here, so as to not distract from the meeting.
  • E (“gym”): Gym classics include Eye of the Tiger and the Rocky training montage, but there are a ton of options here.
  • F (“go to sleep”): Here, we would depart from playing music, and instead play some recorded 1960s college lectures on how monetary policy works.

Conclusion:

This feature could actually legitimately be implemented today by any company that has all three of: 1) a calendar program 2) access to a musical catalogue, and 3) integration with phone or other music-playback device. Fortunately, this describes a wide variety of phone manufacturers today.

PROS: Unusually, there’s nothing obviously wrong with this proposal, so it could probably actually work!

CONS: Might promote hearing loss if people listen to high-volume music all day on their headphones.