Measuring National Life Satisfaction with Music

Arbeitspapier

National life satisfaction is an important way to measure societal well-being and since 2011 has been used to judge the effectiveness of government policy across the world. However, there is a paucity of historical data making limiting long-run comparisons with other data. We construct a new measure based on the emotional content of music. We first trained a machine learning model using 191 different audio features embedded within music and use this model to construct a long-run Music Valence Index derived from chart-topping songs. This index correlates strongly and significantly with survey-based life satisfaction and outperforms an equivalent text-based measure. Our results have implications for the role of music in society, and validate a new use of music as a long-run measure of public sentiment.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 14258

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft
• Thema: historical subjective wellbeing ; life satisfaction ; music ; sound data ; language ; big data

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Benetos, Emmanouil ; Ragano, Alessandro ; Sgroi, Daniel ; Tuckwell, Anthony
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (wo): Bonn
• (wann): 2021

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/236289
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:43 MEZ