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In Anchorage, Alaska, in the dark of winter, the sun rises just after 10 am, stays near the horizon for a few hours and falls back shortly before 4 pm – in all, just five hours and 28 minutes of daylight. Around the winter solstice (just in time for Christmas), Spotify listeners from the northernmost latitudes of the world soften the intensity of their musical choices, choosing quieter and more relaxing music.
No, it's not because of casual Christmas playlists: in the southern hemisphere, it's exactly the opposite that happens, with a hint of intensity just after the summer solstice in December. A paper in Nature human behavior This week, she 's inspired data from nearly a million Spotify listeners around the world to describe daily and seasonal variations in the audience' s listening . The researchers suggest that the results suggest a universal human habit that seems likely familiar: choose your music to match your mood.
Morning music vs midi music
Minsu Park, a Cornell doctoral student, and her colleagues were interested in how mbad trends in musical choices could illustrate the rhythms of music's role in people's emotional lives. So when she's finished intern At Spotify, Park took the opportunity to work with colleagues from Spotify and her advisor to tap into the treasure of information now available on people's music choices.
Although Spotify recommends music to listeners, he said that in 2016, the year used in the study, more than 80% of the tracks were personal choices of users. The researchers also limited their attention to the songs that had played throughout the film, believing that users would ignore songs that did not interest them or that they did not like (they likely decided that Spotify's limitations on Free accounts were not valid – a big enough problem to throw away their results in a substantial way).
The researchers took data from listeners in 51 countries, ensuring that their samples matched the demographics of each country, but selected random users. Using the data provided by Spotify on the music, they followed a variable that they called "musical intensity", ranging from very relaxing (acoustic, instrumental, ambient and flat or low tempo) to very energetic (strong beat, dansable , powerful and dynamic). "
These intensity preferences followed the daily rhythms more or less exactly as expected: songs of lower intensity in the morning, increasing to normal working hours, then remaining stable before going down in the evening, the weekends seem a little different. These results perfectly match those of a previous study of the emotions expressed in the speech of Twitter users, but they differed on one point: the language showed a free-falling afternoon, but the musical choices did not make it worse. 39 were not more. The authors suggest that it is possible that people choose music that stimulates them.
The data also showed some cultural differences – more energetic music, on average, in Latin America, more relaxing music in Asia – and a gender difference that depended on the hemisphere: women listened to less intense music in the northern hemisphere and more intense in the southern hemisphere.
Seasonal intensity
But the annual variation is the time when things get really intriguing, suggesting that musical choices follow the day. The peaks of intensity corresponded to the summer solstice in each hemisphere and these fluctuations were more extreme at the most extreme latitudes. Near the equator, intensity changes have been much more uniform throughout the year, while the northernmost and southern regions (where daytime varies more) have larger changes in musical preferences. The duration of the day has better taken into account the musical intensity than a whole range of other options.
This may seem like a striking example of how humans react to factors such as temperature or sunlight, but it is also possible that a large amount of culture is bound to it. In a culture that is experiencing a long and distinct fall season, there will be many badociations with what autumn means – flavors, clothing and feelings – that could influence people's musical choices. More dancing music during the summer holidays also makes sense. These cultural factors are obviously also influenced by biological and environmental factors, but everything is linked by a knot that is difficult to disentangle.
The work comes with caveats, of course. On the one hand, researchers used IP addresses and user profiles to rank users according to their demographics and geographic areas. Users may lie or use VPNs, so it is likely that the data is unclear. And all the results are purely descriptive – they can not tell us reasons for the reasons, as if people were actually using music to intentionally change their mood. Intuition may try to fill the gaps, but different types of research, such as laboratory studies, would be needed to confirm these intuitions.
Large data sets such as this one also contain a lot of noise, which can be confused with models, especially if strange or confusing results are ignored and unreported. And of course, Spotify users are a distinct (and relatively rich) demographic group, not necessarily a precise model of all human experiences.
Nature human behavior, 2018. DOI: 10.1038 / s41562-018-0508-z (About DOIs).
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