MuPsych research

We are a team of music researchers from the University of Jyväskylä, in Finland.

Our project - MuPsych - aims to discover exactly how listening to music influences emotions in everyday life.

We want to use music to support the emotional health of people of all ages.

Find out more in our introduction video:

If you listen to music on an Android phone, you can take part in the study right now.

By taking part you can receive:

• Personalised feedback on how you listen to music, and how it influences your emotions

• A personal music recommender, which will create playlists based on your mood, what you are doing, and your reason for listening, while supporting your emotional health (this will be available once we have collected data from enough people)

• The chance to win 6 months of Spotify subscription (or equivalent on other streaming services)

To take part in the study, download the MuPsych app to your Android phone:

If you have been given a study code, you must select this on the study selection screen.

If you haven't been given a code, select 'MuPsych Basic' for a simple version of the study, or 'MuPsych Full' for a complete version.

Once a study is loaded, you simply need to continue listening to your own music in your regular music player for one week.

It is important that you don't change your listening habits in any way.

Music questions

When you start listening to music, we will ask some questions about your mood, and what you are doing. After 5 minutes of listening, we will ask some more questions about your mood, and also your reasons for listening.

Once you complete these questions, you won't receive any more for at least a few hours.

This collection continues for one week.

NOTE: If you don't receive any music questions, you may have to change some settings on your phone. Check the 'Help' menu in the app for the latest troubleshooting solutions.

Surveys

The app also includes some surveys that measure things such as your personality traits, emotional health, and musical experience.

These will be used to develop your listener profile, and can be completed at any time that is convenient for you.

Please answer all questions and surveys as honestly as you can, as this will improve the quality of your personalised listener feedback and music recommender.

Participation in this research is voluntary and you are not obliged to submit any data. Your participation can be cancelled at any time.

We don't collect data that can directly identify you, and all data will be analysed anonymously, and published results will be for groups of participants, rather than individuals.

We will never divulge or sell your personal information to other individuals or organisations.

When using the app, you can link it to the account of your music player (such as Spotify), but we only use this to collect information on the music you listen to, and not any identifying information.

You may also provide your postcode, which will be used for linking your listening data to the weather at the time (this is optional).

Your responses will be sent directly from your phone to a secure web server, which only our research team has access to.

We take your privacy seriously. Read more about it here.

Research team:

Will M Randall, Postdoctoral researcher: Principal Investigator; ESM design and data collection

Margarida Baltazar, Postdoctoral researcher: healthy listening expert system

Fabi Prezja, PhD student: Machine learning

Tasos Mavrolampados, PhD student: Music Information Retrieval

Professor Suvi Saarikallio: senior academic advisor

For more information on our previous OmaMusa project, please see our project home page.

If you would like to contact us, please email mupsych.research@gmail.com

If you are a researcher who would like to collect data using MuPsych, see our research page.