A crowd-sourced database of coronamusic: documenting online making and sharing of music during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

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.

Latent Cultural Bias in Soundtracks of Western News Coverage From Early COVID-19 Epicenters

“…As Hansen et al ( 2021 ) and Eden et al ( 2020 ) demonstrate, music can serve as a powerful agent for personal well-being and social cohesion in stressful times when selected and/or curated for those purposes . However, the sonic domain also engages the public in non-volitional contexts, such as the broadcast and online news that become crucial sources of information in crisis conditions.…”

“…Augmenting the data sources would be desirable to obtain a more robust confirmation of results. That would involve consulting a larger number of audiovisual items from a greater spread of professional news providers, as provided in the media sub-corpus from the CORONAMUSIC DATABASE (Hansen et al, 2021 ) as well as in other relevant news corpora like Coronavirus Corpus (2020-) and NOW Corpus (News on the Web, 2010).…”

“…For COVID-19 audiovisual media, researchers have constructed substantial datasets of news items from newspapers (AlAfnan, 2020 ), social media (Radwan and Radwan, 2020 ; Tayal and Bharathi, 2021 ), and television and broadcast media including streaming platforms like Spotify and YouTube (Behluli, 2020 ; Khatri et al, 2020 ; Olson et al, 2020 ). With regard to pandemic music, the Research Topic “Social Convergence in Times of Spatial Distancing” has generated the database CORONAMUSIC (Hansen et al, 2021 ), which features links to news reports and videos of online music-making and -sharing, and other contributions to the Topic document the benefits of these activities (Mak et al, 2021 ; Sarasso et al, 2021 ).…”

“…The sounds of the COVID-19 health crisis, however, are center stage in a growing body of literature in music psychology that investigates the role(s) of music creation and/or consumption in mitigating the impacts of extended lockdown restrictions on personal health and wellness (Chiu, 2020 ; Fink et al, 2021 ; Hansen et al, 2021 ). This research focuses on volitional sounds, i.e., those that people choose to create or hear, and how they function to increase social cohesion under conditions of isolation (MacDonald et al, 2021 ) or to regulate mood/affect in times of loneliness and ennui (Krause et al, 2021 ).…”

Music engagement is negatively correlated with depressive symptoms during the COVID‐19 pandemic via reward‐related mechanisms

“…One particularly well‐reported example was the “balcony singing” phenomenon seen in various locations around the globe 42,43 . While such media reports on music are almost entirely anecdotal 44 and not as important as portrayed in the media, 45 there is now accumulating evidence that music might play a prominent role among the activities used by the general population to cope with pandemic‐related psychological distress 12–18 …”