We used the Spotify API to explore valence & arousal of songs in charts from 64 countries. We found Central & South American countries preferred more positive & arousing music than countries in other regions. Some countries' preferences didn't align with other countries in their geographic region
Almost 5 years ago now, when we were little PhD students, a group of us had a paper idea. We huddled together in our cramped office meeting room to write an early version of this paper. MANY iterations later, we're all now postdocs, and the paper is now out!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Great to see this paper out! Our team was awarded best paper last year at @ozchi-conf.bsky.social for this work, where we presented findings from focus group discussions with family caregivers of people living with dementia about AI-assisted music interventions: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
These findings suggest that listening to self-selected music has no detrimental impact on reading comprehension and may protect against the decrease in positivity students experience during study.
Finally, analysis of chosen music from participants in the music condition revealed no relationships between audio features and reading scores
Music did impact emotion – participants in the noise & silence conditions had decreased positivity after reading, those in the music condition maintained positivity. Participants in music & noise conditions experienced no change in energy, those who heard silence felt less energised after reading
There was no effect of music listening on reading comprehension - participants performed similarly whether they listened to music, background noise, or silence.
We examined whether music is detrimental or beneficial for reading comprehension. University students were randomly assigned to a condition (participant-selected music, background noise, silence) during reading. We measured reading comprehension scores, & ratings of emotional positivity and energy.
The final paper from my PhD is finally out! Huge thank you to my supervisors @genevieve132.bsky.social and @nicolenelson.bsky.social for their support with this! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
The paper I'll be discussing is available here: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Webinar link here: www.aag.asn.au/EventDetail?...
Hope to see you there!
I'm honoured to have received the runner up award for the Australian Association of Gerontology Helen Barrie National Prize! Looking forward to presenting at the webinar with the other awardees. I'll be presenting on work I did as part of the amazing MATCH team at the University of Melbourne!
This week I had the opportunity to present at @ozchi-conf.bsky.social, and I'm excited to share that our paper received the Best Paper award! Great way to wrap up the year with this paper out of my work at the University of Melbourne. Currently available here: outbox.eait.uq.edu.au/uqsville/OzC...
I've finally made it over to bluesky!
