Environmental factors, such as weather conditions and seasonal trends, can play a significant role in the choices of artists listened to.
- Songs that were energetic, danceable and evoking positive emotions were associated with warm, sunny weather.
- Music reflecting low intensity and negative emotions, such as sadness, were not related to weather conditions.
- The authors stress the importance of taking environmental factors into account when analyzing the success of songs in the music market.
What if the weather dictated our musical preferences? This is what an international team of researchers suggested in a recent study. As part of the work, the latter wanted to examine the associations between weather conditions and musical characteristics of all available songs that reached the top of the UK weekly charts over a period of 67 years (1953-2019). For this, the scientists analyzed more than 23,000 songs and used machine learning techniques to extract musical characteristics from the audio of all the songs.
Our musical choices are influenced by environmental factors
According to the results, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, musical characteristics reflecting high intensity and positive emotions, such as happiness and joy, were positively associated with high temperatures, i.e. hot sunny weather, and negatively related with rainy months. In contrast, musical characteristics reflecting low intensity and negative emotions, such as sadness, were not related to weather conditions.
“Music-weather associations were more nuanced than assumed by the linear models, only becoming significant for months and seasons when weather changes were most notable. It is important to note that the observed associations depended on the popularity of Music: While songs in the top 10 charts had the strongest associations with the weather, less popular songs had no relationship.This suggests that a song’s adequacy with the weather he can be a factor pushing a song to the top of the charts”, can we read in the searches.
Weather: “favorable conditions induce positive emotional states in listeners”
According to Manuel Anglada-Tort, lead author of the work, these results challenge the notion that success in the music market is based solely on the quality of the music itself. “Our study instead suggests that favorable environmental conditions, such as warm and sunny weather, induce positive emotional states in listeners, leading them to choose to listen to energetic and positive music, potentially in line with their mood of the moment, he continued in a statement.
