Music can reduce stress and anxiety, enhance positive mood, and facilitate social bonding. However, little is known about the role of music and related personal or cultural (individualistic vs. collectivistic) variables in maintaining wellbeing during times of stress and social isolation as imposed by the COVID-19 crisis. In an online questionnaire, administered in 11 countries (Argentina, Brazil, China, Colombia, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the UK, and USA, N = 5,619), participants rated the relevance of wellbeing goals during the pandemic, and the effectiveness of different activities in obtaining these goals. Music was found to be the most effective activity for three out of five wellbeing goals: enjoyment, venting negative emotions, and self-connection. For diversion, music was equally good as entertainment, while it was second best to create a sense of togetherness, after socialization. This result was evident across different countries and gender, with minor effects of age on specific goals, and a clear effect of the importance of music in people's lives. Cultural effects were generally small and surfaced mainly in the use of music to obtain a sense of togetherness. Interestingly, culture moderated the use of negatively valenced and nostalgic music for those higher in distress.

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When a sweeping COVID-19 pandemic forced cultural venues, schools, and social hangouts into hibernation in early 2020, music life relocated to the digital world. On social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, sofas and balconies took center stage for musical performances presented as live-streamed concerts and recorded videos. Amateurs and professional musicians alike embraced digital formats and innovated novel genres of corona-themed music. We will refer to the products of this musical phenomenon collectively as "coronamusic." Adapting a well-known term from cultural musicology (Small, 1999), the diverse practices of listening, playing, dancing, composing, rehearsing, improvising, discussing, exploring, and innovating within this domain will be characterized as "corona-musicking." This study aims to establish the CORONAMUSIC DATABASE–a crowdsourced corpus of links to coronamusic videos and news media reports (https://osf.io/y7z28/). This constitutes the first readily accessible and searchable resource for researchers from all disciplines with an interest in documenting and investigating the musical dynamics underlying the pandemic.

A recent study reported an asymmetry between subjective estimates of future and past distances with passive estimation and virtual movement. The temporal Doppler effect refers to the contraction of future distance judgments relative to past ones. We aimed to replicate the effect using real and imagined motion in both directions as well as different temporal perspectives. To avoid the problem of subjective anchoring, we compared real- and imagined-, ego- and time-moving conditions to a control group. Generally, Doppler-like distortion was only observed in conditions in which the distance between the participant and a frontal target increased. No effects of temporal perspective were observed. The "past-directed temporal Doppler effect" presents a challenge for the current theories of temporal cognition by demonstrating absence of psychological movement into the future. The effect could open new avenues in memory research and serve as a starting point in a systematic examination of how the humans construct future.