COVID Getting You Down? Many Folks Turn the Music Up!
In a world of lockdown mandates, grocery store frenzy, and social isolation many people turned to music. The first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic brought intense stress and loneliness that music helped manage. An Italian community, for example, in Naples can be found singing together from their balconies in a Tweet posted by Ryan Meilak. Meilak captured a moment in which music seems to provide a sense of connection and hope that communities around the world desperately needed during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Or take a similar moment across the world in Australia, where quarantined seasonal workers from Samoa sing from their balconies. These anecdotes provide evidence of the global power of music to connect and unite us, even in the most uncertain of times.
From adolescence to late adulthood, research shows a link between music listening and our well-being assisting with emotion regulation, reminiscing, goal attainment, or creating personal meaning and social connection (Groarke & Hogan, 2016). None of this is new, really. Claims of the healing power of music can be found as early as Ancient Greece. The development of practices such as music therapy and music medicine come from this so-thought power of music and are used to treat depression, dementia, schizophrenia, and more (McDermott et al., 2013; Mössler et al. 2011; Tang et al., 2020). But it doesn’t need to be accessed in a clinical capacity to still have a beneficial impact. Just listening to music can help us process our emotions, including the feeling of loneliness (Thoma et al., 2012), experienced viscerally around the world during the earliest stages of the COVID pandemic.
Okay, so here’s what we know — Music seems to be a form of coping, and during the early stages of the pandemic each of us dealt with individual and collective concerns we needed to cope with. It follows then, to question how we might see music coming into play as a form of coping on a global stage. Well, researchers Sarah Hennessy, Matthew Sachs, Jonas Kaplan, and Assal Habibi took the opportunity to examine how people around the world used music to cope with major stress and social isolation brought on during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic (Hennessy et al., 2021).
To explore this further, the researchers developed an online survey containing a set of five previously published questionnaires measuring the severity of depressive symptoms, anxiety, emotion regulation, empathy, and music-related mood-regulation strategies. Participants also answered questions related to their music listening habits including how often they listened, what genre of music, and five songs they frequently listened to both currently and a year ago. Then, they answered several questions to assess whether they used music to feel better. After all that, participants still weren’t done, because the researchers also wanted to assess the severity of COVID’s effect on their health and well-being. Ultimately, this would give the researchers insight as to participants’ mental health and wellbeing, music listening habits, and experiences during the pandemic. Individuals living in Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, and India were recruited to participate, resulting in a total of 589 participants.
Hennessey et al. (2021) found that, across the four countries, people listened to music not only to feel better but also to regulate their mood, especially if they felt particularly affected by the pandemic or experienced greater symptoms of anxiety or depression. When people used music to improve their mood and re-assess their current situation, they felt better after listening. In general, it helped people feel better when they used strategies for regulating both positive and negative emotions with music, suggesting that music can be an effective tool for improving mood. This held true for those experiencing depressive symptoms, as the researchers found that people feeling especially sad or depressed during quarantine were able to use music to release negative feelings and feel a bit better.
Interestingly, people demonstrating greater empathy were more likely to experience improved mood and well-being after listening to music to regulate their emotions, compared to those with less empathy. That is, empathy moderated the relationship between emotion regulation strategies involving music and enhanced mood and well-being.
So what kind of coping music were people listening to? The researchers found that the acoustic quality of the music, which includes things like the music pace, loudness, and harmonic features, differed depending on the individuals’ situation or purpose of listening to music. People severely impacted by the pandemic reported listening to less loud and energetic music compared to softer, acoustic music and reported feeling better as a result, while people using music to release negative emotions preferred less soft and acoustic music to music that sounded more energetic. The latter finding is consistent with findings from Saarikallio and Erkilla’s (2007) study suggesting that rock and heavy metal were the music of choice for mood regulation.
Ultimately, the researchers’ findings support that people from countries all over the world despite differences in culture, their government’s response to COVID, and their situational environment experienced a wholesome impact of turning to music. It seemed to help them feel better during a time of immense global stress.
While it isn’t that listening to music causes an improved mood, there seems to be an important link between the experience of listening to music and how this process affects our mood. It’s important to point out that only so much can be gained from self-report as this form of data collection is often prone to bias. However, it is valuable to see that data support that music serves as a powerful tool in emotion regulation and improving the mood of individuals around the world during a time of acute stress. If you turned to music during those first few months, you weren’t alone. While the world around us became increasingly risky and unknown, together, people from all over the world found some solace by turning to music.
REFERENCES
Dritsas, A. (2017). Music therapy in Ancient Greece: Shedding light on the roots of sound as a healing agent for body and soul. Greece Is. https://www.greece-is.com/music-therapy-in-ancient-greece/
Groarke, J. M., & Hogan, M. J. (2016). Enhancing wellbeing: An emerging model of the adaptive functions of music listening. Psychology of Music, 44(4), 769–791. https://doi-org.proxy um.researchport.umd.edu/10.1177/0305735615591844
Hennessy, S., Sachs, M., Kaplan, J., & Habibi, A. (2021). Music and mood regulation during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. PloS one, 16(10), e0258027. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258027
Lackey, B. (2021). Beautiful moment 200 Samoans sing a traditional Christian hymn from their hotel quarantine balconies as a ‘thank you’ to Australia as they prepare to fly out for farm work. Daily Mail Australia. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9812427/Seasonal-workers-Samoa-sing-hotel-quarantine-balconies.html
McDermott, O., Crellin, N., Ridder, H. M., & Orrell, M. (2013). Music therapy in dementia: a narrative synthesis systematic review. International journal of geriatric psychiatry, 28(8), 781–794. https://doi.org/10.1002/gps.3895
Meilak, R. (2020, March 13). Twitter. https://twitter.com/RyanMeilak/status/1238451221851234305
Mössler, K., Chen, X., Heldal, T. O., & Gold, C. (2011). Music therapy for people with schizophrenia and schizophrenia‐like disorders. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, (12). https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD004025.pub3
Saarikallio, S., & Erkkilä, J. (2007). The role of music in adolescents’ mood regulation. Psychology of music, 35(1), 88–109. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0305735607068889
Tang, Q., Huang, Z., Zhou, H., & Ye, P. (2020). Effects of music therapy on depression: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. PloS one, 15(11), e0240862. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240862
Thoma, M. V., Scholz, U., Ehlert, U., & Nater, U. M. (2012). Listening to music and physiological and psychological functioning: The mediating role of emotion regulation and stress reactivity. Psychology & Health, 27(2), 227–241. https://doi-org.proxy um.researchport.umd.edu/10.1080/08870446.2011.575225
