Measuring National Mood with Music: Using Machine Learning to Construct a Measure of National Valence from Audio Data
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Publisher
Journal
Behavior Research Methods
ISSN
1554-351X
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We propose a new measure of national valence based on the emotional content of a country’s most popular songs. We first trained a machine learning model using 191 different audio features embedded within music and use this model to construct a long-run valence index for the UK. This index correlates strongly and significantly with survey-based life satisfaction and outperforms an equivalent text-based measure. Our methods have the potential to be applied widely and to provide a solution to the severe lack of historical time-series data on psychological well-being.