%0 Report
        %A Benetos, Emmanouil
%A Ragano, Alessandro
%A Sgroi, Daniel
%A Tuckwell, Anthony
        %T Measuring National Life Satisfaction  with Music
        %D 2021
        %8 2021 Apr
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 14258
        %U https://www.iza.org/publications/dp14258
        %X National life satisfaction is an important way to measure societal well-being and since 2011 has been used to judge the effectiveness of government policy across the world. However, there is a paucity of historical data making limiting long-run comparisons with other data. We construct a new measure based on the emotional content of music. We first trained a machine learning model using 191 different audio features embedded within music and use this model to construct a long-run Music Valence Index derived from chart-topping songs. This index correlates strongly and significantly with survey-based life satisfaction and outperforms an equivalent text-based measure. Our results have implications for the role of music in society, and validate a new use of music as a long-run measure of public sentiment.
        %K historical subjective wellbeing
%K life satisfaction
%K music
%K sound data
%K language
%K big data