Music and COVID-19

In the early days of the pandemic, we wanted to understand the role of musical engagement in helping people to cope with the first lockdown (~ April-May 2020).

In short, we found that:

During the COVID-19 lockdown, people turned to music for regulating their emotions.

People experiencing different degrees of emotional changes showed different patterns of musical engagement.

Listening to music vs. making music may provide different coping potentials.

“Coronamusic” played a key role in socio-emotional coping.

**Read more in our paper in published in Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. **

All code and figures related to the project can be found on our Github page: https://github.com/lkfink/CMQ.



You can watch a short conference talk about our results, presented by co-first author Lindsay Warrenburg here.



Some of our co-authors also started an international research network related to music and COVID-19. Learn more here.

Forbes: Coronamusic gives people a sense of belonging.

Times of India: The year Beethove returned, Opera came home, & Baba bounced back

Nachrichten: Music in the time of Corona

RTE: Viral tunes: how we used music to get through the pandemic

Deutschlandfunk Nova: Musikhören hilft im Lockdown

SRF: Wie Musik uns durch den Lockdown brachte

t-online: Gegen diese Folgen der Pandemie hilft Musik

NTV: Musik hilft durch Krisenzeiten