Here comes the sun: music features of popular songs reflect prevailing weather conditions.
emotion
media consumption
mood
music preferences
seasons
weather
Journal
Royal Society open science
ISSN: 2054-5703
Titre abrégé: R Soc Open Sci
Pays: England
ID NLM: 101647528
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
May 2023
May 2023
Historique:
received:
08
11
2022
accepted:
28
02
2023
medline:
8
5
2023
pubmed:
8
5
2023
entrez:
8
5
2023
Statut:
epublish
Résumé
We examine associations between prevailing weather conditions and music features in all available songs that reached the United Kingdom weekly top charts throughout a 67-year period (1953-2019), comprising 23 859 unique entries. We found that music features reflecting high intensity and positive emotions were positively associated with daily temperatures and negatively associated with rainfall, whereas music features reflecting low intensity and negative emotions were not related to weather conditions. These results held true after controlling for the mediating effects of year (temporal patterns) and month (seasonal patterns). However, music-weather associations were more nuanced than previously assumed by linear models, becoming only meaningful in those months and seasons when changes in weather were the most notable. Importantly, the observed associations depended on the popularity of the music: while songs in the top 10 of the charts exhibited the strongest associations with weather, less popular songs showed no relationship. This suggests that a song's fit with prevailing weather may be a factor pushing a song into the top of the charts. Our work extends previous research on non-musical domains (e.g. finance, crime, mental health) by showing that large-scale population-level preferences for cultural phenomena (music) are also influenced by broad environmental factors that exist over long periods of time (weather) via mood-regulation mechanisms. We discuss these results in terms of the limited nature of correlational studies and cross-cultural generalizability.
Identifiants
pubmed: 37153367
doi: 10.1098/rsos.221443
pii: rsos221443
pmc: PMC10154925
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Pagination
221443Informations de copyright
© 2023 The Authors.
Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts
We declare we have no competing interests.
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