Beyond immediate health risks, the COVID-19 pandemic poses a variety of stressors, which may require expensive or unavailable strategies during a pandemic (e.g., therapy, socialising). Here, we asked whether musical engagement is an effective strategy for socio-emotional coping. During the first lockdown period (April–May 2020), we surveyed changes in music listening and making behaviours of over 5000 people, with representative samples from three continents. More than half of respondents reported engaging with music to cope. People experiencing increased negative emotions used music for solitary emotional regulation, whereas people experiencing increased positive emotions used music as a proxy for social interaction. Light gradient-boosted regressor models were used to identify the most important predictors of an individual’s use of music to cope, the foremost of which was, intriguingly, their interest in “coronamusic.” Overall, our results emphasise the importance of real-time musical responses to societal crises, as well as individually tailored adaptations in musical behaviours to meet socio-emotional needs.

Beyond immediate health risks, the COVID-19 pandemic poses a variety of stressors, which may require expensive or unavailable strategies during a pandemic (e.g., therapy, socialising). Here we asked whether musical engagement is an effective strategy for socio-emotional coping. During the first lockdown period (April-May 2020), we surveyed changes in music listening and making behaviours of over 5000 people, with representative samples from 3 continents. More than half of respondents reported using music to cope. People experiencing increased negative emotions used music for solitary emotional regulation, whereas people experiencing increased positive emotions used music as a proxy for social interaction. Light gradient-boosted regressor models were used to identify the most important predictors of an individual’s use of music to cope, the foremost of which was, intriguingly, their interest in the novel genre of “coronamusic.” Overall, our results emphasise the importance of real-time musical responses to societal crises, as well as individually tailored adaptations in musical behaviours to meet socio-emotional needs.

What is an emotion? This question has remained unanswered since William James proposed it in 1884. Although there have been many posed theories and models of emotion, there is no consensus about the definition of an emotion. In a 2006 survey, 39 international emotion experts were asked to provide a definition of the term emotion. Of the 33 scholars who responded to the question, there was no consensus (Izard, 2007). This article explores how various theories of music and emotion compare to major psychological emotion theories. The psychological literature is governed by 4 theories of emotion: basic emotions theory, appraisal theory, psychological construction theory, and social construction theory. In this article, I will first summarize the main tenets of these psychological theories of emotion. Next, I will highlight how music scholars conform to and deviate from these psychological theories. I further create a dimensional graph of where music scholars lie on a continuum from basic emotions, appraisal theory, psychological construction, to social construction. Finally, I conclude with some ideas for future research.

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When designing a new study regarding how music can portray and elicit emotion, one of the most crucial design decisions involves choosing the best stimuli. Every researcher must find musical samples that are able to capture an emotional state, are appropriate lengths, and have minimal potential for biasing participants. Researchers have often utilized musical excerpts that have previously been used by other scholars, but the appropriate musical choices depend on the specific goals of the study in question and will likely change among various research designs. The intention of this paper is to examine how musical stimuli have been selected in a sample of 306 research articles dating from 1928 through 2018. Analyses are presented regarding the designated emotions, how the stimuli were selected, the durations of the stimuli, whether the stimuli are excerpts from a longer work, and whether the passages have been used in studies about perceived or induced emotion. The results suggest that the literature relies on nine emotional terms, focuses more on perceived emotion than on induced emotion, and contains mostly short musical stimuli. I suggest that some of the inconclusive results from previous reviews may be due to the inconsistent use of emotion terms throughout the music community.

Two behavioral studies are reported that ask whether listeners experience different emotions in response to melancholic and grieving musical passages. In the first study, listeners were asked to rate the extent that musical passages made them feel positive and negative, as well as to identify which emotion(s) they felt from a list of 24 emotions. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that listeners experience different emotions when listening to melancholic and grieving music. The second study asked listeners to spontaneously describe their emotional states while listening to music. Content analysis was conducted in order to find any underlying dimensions of the identified responses. The analysis replicated the finding that melancholic and grieving music led to different feelings states, with melancholic music leading to feelings of Sad/Melancholy/Depressed, Reflective/Nostalgic, Rain/Dreary Weather, and Relaxed/Calm, while grieving music led to feelings of Anticipation/Uneasy, Tension/Intensity, Crying/Distraught/Turmoil, Death/Loss, and Epic/Dramatic/Cinematic.

A corpus of Previously-Used Musical Stimuli (PUMS) is presented. The PUMS database is an online, publicly-available database where researchers can find a list of 22,417 musical stimuli that have been previously used in the literature on how music can convey or evoke emotions in listeners. A total of 306 studies on music and emotion are included in the database. Each musical stimulus used in these studies was coded according to various criteria: its designated emotion and how it was operationalized, its length, whether it is an excerpt from a longer work, and its style or genre. In the PUMS corpus, there is also information regarding the familiarity of the original participants with each musical sample, as well as information regarding whether each passage was used in a study about perceived or induced emotion. The name of the passage, composer, track number, and specific measure numbers or track location were noted when they were identified in the original paper. The database offers insight into how music has been used in psychological studies over a period of 90 years and provides a resource for scholars wishing to use music in future behavioral or psychophysical research. The PUMS database can be accessed online at https://osf.io/p4ta9.

Although speech and language biomarker (SLB) research studies have shown methodological and clinical promise, some common limitations of these studies include small sample sizes, limited longitudinal data, and a lack of a standardized survey protocol. Here, we introduce the Voiceome Protocol and the corresponding Voiceome Dataset as standards which can be utilized and adapted by other SLB researchers. The Voiceome Protocol includes 12 types of voice tasks, along with health and demographic questions that have been shown to affect speech. The longitudinal Voiceome Dataset consisted of the Voiceome Protocol survey taken on (up to) four occasions, each separated by roughly three weeks (22.80 +/- 20.91 days). Of 6,650 total participants, 1,382 completed at least two Voiceome surveys. The results of the Voiceome Dataset are largely consistent with results from standard clinical literature, suggesting that the Voiceome Study is a high-fidelity, normative dataset and scalable protocol that can be used to advance SLB research.