Affective Idiosyncratic Responses to Music
This work addresses the problem of understanding personalized emotional reactions to music for researchers in music psychology and computational social science, though it appears incremental by building on existing studies.
The researchers tackled the challenge of measuring personal factors in emotional responses to music by analyzing over 403 million listener comments from a Chinese social music platform, identifying effects from musical, lyrical, contextual, demographic, and mental health variables.
Affective responses to music are highly personal. Despite consensus that idiosyncratic factors play a key role in regulating how listeners emotionally respond to music, precisely measuring the marginal effects of these variables has proved challenging. To address this gap, we develop computational methods to measure affective responses to music from over 403M listener comments on a Chinese social music platform. Building on studies from music psychology in systematic and quasi-causal analyses, we test for musical, lyrical, contextual, demographic, and mental health effects that drive listener affective responses. Finally, motivated by the social phenomenon known as wǎng-yì-yún, we identify influencing factors of platform user self-disclosures, the social support they receive, and notable differences in discloser user activity.