Mood music

Picture: Philips

If there's one thing I know about music it's that it's there when I need it most: soothing on a Sunday morning, uplifting on a Saturday night, energising on my way to work and relaxing on my way home. Just yesterday I finally got around to playing my Record Store Day purchase of David Bowie's Welcome To The Blackout (Live London 1978), and hearing rich and previously unreleased arrangements of Heroes, TVC15, Ziggy Stardust and Alabama Song put me in an extraordinary soak of good humour.

Several years ago, when I was working at Philips, we collaborated with the Canadian neuroscientist Daniel Levitin in a PR exercise to tie together the findings of his book, This Is Your Brain on Music - a deep examination of how we humans relate to music - with our personal audio products, used by gym bunnies in their endorphin-generating, natural high-producing workouts.

Levitin's book outlined how elements of music - timbre, rhythm, pitch, harmonies and so on - influenced neural function, neurochemistry and even cognitive psychology. Music, Levitin revealed, has a profound effect on cognitive, emotional and even physical health, and from an early age, too: the auditory system of a human fetus is fully functional after just 20 weeks and year-old infants will respond to the music they’d been exposed to while still in the womb. At the other end of life, Levitin wrote, music had a beneficial part to play in the care of Alzheimer’s patients, helping them connect with the depths of their ravaged memories. Music therapy has indeed been a well known practice for almost 60 years, dating back to 1959 when American composer Paul Nordoff and special needs teacher Clive Robbins started the work that would later lead to the Nordoff-Robbins charity and the incredible work it does in helping children and adults (such as stroke victims) with cognitive skill development.

Picture: Bank of England

So, knowing that music has a profound effect on mood, what about its effect on the economy? In a speech published earlier this week by Andy Haldane (left), the very forward-thinking chief economist of the Bank of England, he outlined the role of so-called 'Big Data' in providing semantic insight into human behaviour and how, in good times and bad, that might influence the economy. "Capturing people’s true sentiments and preferences is devilishly difficult," Haldane revealed, saying that "non-traditional" methods of opening up the consumer's mood were under examination.

"To give one recent example, data on music downloads from Spotify has been used, in tandem with semantic search techniques applied to the words of songs, to provide an indicator of people's sentiment. Intriguingly, the resulting index of sentiment does at least as well in tracking consumer spending as the Michigan survey of consumer confidence," a reference to a study which interpreted key themes from lyrics in songs in the Billboard Top 100 in the US and how their popularity corresponded rises and falls on market indices like the Nasdaq, Dow Jones and the S&P 500. The study, called The Rhythm of Markets, found that even a 1% increase in the frequency of the word "anticipation" led to a 0.444% drop in the Nasdaq.

Haldane also suggested that music might not be alone: "People’s tastes in books, TV and radio may also offer a window on their soul," he said, adding that gaming , in particular, might also be useful, since some games providing virtual environments that made observing behaviour easier than in the real world. Multiplayer online games and the fantasy World of Warcraft already had "primitive" economies that economists were studying, Haldane said, adding that such games could facilitate the study of player reactions to policy intervention on monetary and regulatory issues.

Quite how all this will have a defining impact on fiscal policies remains to be seen. I'm sure Mr. Haldane's need to be tapped into every vital sign affecting economic mood gives credence to mining Spotify download statistics to see what its subscribers might be feeling, given the sometimes impulsive nature of plugging into the platform to satisfy a particular musical craving. But as someone who still prefers physical music formats (and the purchasing of it) to lift my mood, the only fiscal correlation I can draw from the mood created by musical habits is that my disposable income will be significantly less in the days and weeks immediately after Record Store Day, or when there's a decent-sized box set on the way.

Picture: Spotify