Sound and Vibration Engineering
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Background
Previous research has observed vast changes in musical preference during childhood and adolescence due to developmental processes such as the experience of aesthetic responses to music (Nieminen et al., 2012) and the formation and expression of social identity through distinct musical preferences (Hargreaves et al., 2016). Most of this research, however, is either based on the evaluation of musical pieces that have been previously selected by adult experimenters, or self-reports on preferences for different musical styles.
Aim(s)
This study presents another methodological approach by collecting and analysing music that was freely requested on a children’s radio show. The aim was to test to what extent findings from self-reports and ratings of pre-selected music apply to this kind of data.
Methods
A sample of 1412 freely and publicly expressed music requests of children between 4 and 11 years was taken from a German radio program and analysed with regard to age- and sex-specific differences. The music was categorized into genres as listed on Spotify and examined by methods of Music Information Retrieval provided by the Spotify Developer API. Additionally, the music was genre-independently classified as children’s music.
Results
Results showed that, at younger ages, the requests were generally more evenly distributed across different genres. Regarding single genres, logistic regression models revealed small positive relationships between age and the likelihood of requesting the genres Pop and Electro and small negative relationships between age and the likelihood of requesting Acapella, German songwriter, Indie, theme songs, and children's music. Furthermore, contingency table analyses showed that boys requested significantly more Rock and Hip Hop, whereas girls had a higher tendency to ask for Pop. Finally, age was negatively correlated with the Spotify features valence and liveness of the requested music, which was related to the higher preference for children’s music at younger ages.
Discussion and Conclusion
The results suggest that previous findings regarding musically expressed gender roles and increasing formation of distinct genre preferences during infancy also apply to single song requests made on a radio show.
References
Hargreaves, D. J., North, A. C., & Tarrant, M. (2016). How and why do musical preferences change in childhood adolescence. In G. McPherson (Ed.), The child as musician: A handbook of musical development (Second edition). Oxford University Press.
Nieminen, S., Istók, E., Brattico, E., & Tervaniemi, M. (2012). The development of the aesthetic experience of music: Preference, emotions, and beauty. Musicae Scientiae, 16(3), 372–391. https://doi.org/10.1177/1029864912450454
The Evolution of Song Lyrics: An NLP-Based Analysis of Popular Music in Germany from 1954 to 2022
(2025)
Music is an indispensable cultural product, reflecting changes in social, psychological, and cultural contexts. This study analyzes the historical evolution of topics and conveyed affect in popular music lyrics in Germany from 1954 to 2022, using LDA-based topic modeling and transformer-based sentiment analysis. These results show that Love & Relationships is the most referenced topic, with Dreams & Longings prominent until the mid-1960s and Society & Status rising from 2017. The sentiment analysis reveals a significant decline in positive sentiment since the mid-1960s, accompanied by increases in negative, ambiguous, and neutral sentiments. These trends may reflect broader societal changes, including shifts in cultural values, rising individualism, and increasing mental health issues. The study highlights the evolving nature of popular music and its reflection of social dynamics.
The perceived spatial impression is an important factor in the aesthetic appreciation of classical music recordings. Crucial aspects of spatial perception can be described by the attributes ensemble width, depth, envelopment, and reverberation duration. In a listening experiment, a sample of 30 experts rated 24 orchestra recordings by these attributes. To compare these ratings to signalrelated measures of spatial impression, an audio descriptor for the interaural cross-correlation coefficient in music recordings was chosen as a measure of perceived ensemble width. A second algorithm estimated the reverberation time from decay segments in the recorded music. Linear mixed-effects models were then used to test whether these two descriptors, combined with other audio features related to timbre, are suitable for predicting participants’ ratings of the perceptual attributes. Overall, results confirmed that the signal-related measures used can indeed predict perceptual attributes, with 41% of rating variance explained in the case of reverberation duration. In contrast, these objective measures turned out to be less accurate predictors of the perceived ensemble width, with a variance explanation of 21%. This study can thus be regarded as a starting point for further studies aiming to predict the perceived spatial impression in music recordings.
In research on the development of musical preferences, children are often asked either to evaluate musical pieces that have been previously selected by adult experimenters, or to give self-reports on preferences for different musical styles. This study involved analyzing a sample of 1,412 freely and publicly expressed music requests from children aged between 4 and 11 years taken from a German radio program, with regard to age- and sex-specific differences. The music was categorized into genres, as listed on Spotify, and examined using methods of music information retrieval provided by the Spotify Developer application programming interface. Results showed that, at younger ages, the requests were generally more evenly distributed across different genres. Regarding single genres, we observed small positive relationships between age and the likelihood of requesting the genres pop or electro and small negative relationships between age and the likelihood of requesting A capella, German songwriter, indie, theme songs, or children's music. Furthermore, we found that boys requested significantly more rock or hip-hop, whereas girls had a higher tendency to ask for pop. Finally, age- (but no sex-) related differences regarding the Spotify features of valence and liveness of the requested music were found, which were related to the preference for children's music at younger ages. The results thus suggest that previous findings regarding differences between boys and girls and an increasing formation of distinct genre preferences during infancy also apply to single song requests made on a radio show.
This study investigates loudness perception in real-world contexts using predictors related to the sound, situation, or person. In the study, 105 participants recorded 6594 sound environments in their homes, which were then evaluated based on the Experience Sampling Method. Hierarchical linear regressions using a loudness level based on ISO 532-1 allowed for obtaining the best model fits for predicting perceived loudness and explaining the highest variance. LAeq and LAF5 provided comparable results and may require less computational effort. However, the analysis shows that only one-third of the variance explained by fixed effects was attributable to the loudness level. Sixteen percent stemmed from perceived properties of the soundscape; 1% were attributable to relatively temporally stable, person-related predictors like participants' age; non-auditory situational predictors made no additional contribution. The results thus did not confirm previous findings on loudness perception under laboratory conditions, emphasizing the importance of the situational context. Along with the current paper, a comprehensive dataset, including the assessed person-related, situational, and sound-related measures as well as LAeq time-series and third-octave spectrograms, is provided to enable further research on sound perception, indoor soundscapes, and emotion.
Previous research suggests that noise sensitivity is related to inefficient auditory processing that might increase the mental load of noise and affect noise evaluation. This assumption was tested in an experiment using a dual-task paradigm with a visual primary task and an auditory secondary task. Results showed that participants' noise sensitivity was positively correlated with mental effort. Furthermore, mental effort mediated the effect of noise sensitivity on loudness and unpleasantness ratings. The results thus support the idea that noise sensitivity is related to increased mental effort and difficulties in filtering auditory information and that situational factors should be considered.
Der Aufführungsraum leistet einen substantiellen Beitrag zum Erleben von Musikdarbietungen. Zur Beschreibung der Akustik von Aufführungsräumen haben sich dabei zahlreiche Messgrößen etabliert, welche bestimmte Wahrnehmungsqualitäten, wie z. B. die Halligkeit, abbilden sollen. Dem stellt jüngere Forschung rein perzeptive Messinventare gegenüber, die den Wahrnehmungseindruck als solchen, losgelöst vom physikalischen Ursprung, beschreiben. Dieser Artikel beschreibt einen Versuch, diese beiden Forschungsrichtungen zusammenzuführen, indem Bewertungen von Aufführungsräumen nach dem perzeptiven Room Acoustical Quality Index (RAQI) durch physikalische Messgrößen modelliert wurden, welche aus einfachen Impulsantwortmessungen ermittelt werden. Dazu wurde eine Auswahl raumakustischer Messgrößen auf fünf Dimensionen reduziert und diese als Prädiktoren für die einzelnen Wahrnehmungsgrößen des RAQI getestet. Die Berechnung dieser Prädiktionsmodelle wird vorgestellt und deren Präzision diskutiert. Anschließend wird die OPRA-Webanwendung vorgestellt, die sowohl die Berechnung der raumakustischen Messgrößen als auch die Prädiktion von RAQI-Wahrnehmungsgrößen für die drei Quellsignale Sprache, Orchester und Solotrompete im Browser ermöglicht. Auch wenn die Präzision der Prädiktionsmodelle noch nicht für alle RAQI-Faktoren zuverlässige Ergebnisse liefert, erlaubt OPRA eine umfangreiche akustische Analyse und eine erste Einschätzung der perzeptiven Wirkung von Aufführungsräumen.