His backyard rocket program, which he called Bob's Space Program, sounds playful indeed, but its purpose was serious.
"Who hasn't been a voyeur in certain situations?" From an older man, these words might sound sleazy, but coming from this fuzzy-faced 28-year-old, it sounds playful.
But Henderson sounded playful and glum as he acknowledged that "they said I had to be retired to go into the Hall of Fame".
Other rappers have used a similar mushmouth style to suggest aw-shucks humility, but 50 Cent delivers every word with a grimace, to let you know that while he may sound playful, he's not playing.
Influenced by Latin freestyle ("my guilty pleasure"), early house and Technicolor 80s pop, we reckon it sounds vibrant, playful and inventive.
Dominic Maker and Kai Campos make serious music sound playful, stripping the overly academic electronic scene of pretense with plinking drums and stargazing notes that evoke a baby genius sampling toy pianos.
The shuffle-beat pioneer Wolfgang Voigt, who appears here under the name Wassermann, makes the pattern sound playful: his track starts sleekly, then turns raucous with a buzzy keyboard line.
While the synth and drum samples of "Jersey Anthem" sound playful and lighthearted, there's a complex geometry internal to the way Jayhood and Joker marshall them about with nimbleness and acuity.
His denunciations of the "haters" arrayed against him have come to sound less playful.
The Flaming Lips capture the album title's mood on the stunning Pink Floydy Revenge, although elsewhere – especially on Pop's gloriously vamped-up Pain – things sound more playful than haunted.
"Hush your mouth," she said, trying to sound more playful than disgusted, and was relieved when he stopped jiggling and laid both his hands on the table, his face suddenly quite solemn.
