Pepmusic: motivational qualities of songs for daily activities


Description

Music has a wide range of motivational qualities. It can capture attention, raise spirits, trigger and regulate emotions, and increase work output. That's why music enriches our experience of many daily activities, from workout to relaxation. We intuitively feel when a piece of music is right for an activity, but it is hard to quantify what are the musical properties that make a song motivational in a certain context.

The Brunel Music Rating Inventory (BMRI) is the only inventory that lists motivational qualities of music. Yet, it is focused on the domain of sport activities and it is fully manual: it requires people listening to music and subjectively estimate the presence of these properties.

Pepmusic is a tool that makes the BMRI assessment automatic and general to all activities. It uses an audio processing pipeline to measure the motivational qualities of music and a machine learning core that, based on knowledge learned from Youtube and Spotify music, maps songs into three music archetypes (calm, vibrant, and intense) according to the family of activities they are best for. Pepmusic can instantly make the perfect playlist for any activity out of your set of favorite songs.


Data

Data Visualization by Tobias Kauer.

Publications

  • Motivational Qualities of Songs for Daily Activities. EPJ Data Science 2020 PDF

Code and data


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