Affective Idiosyncratic Responses to Music

Affective responses to music are highly personal. Despite consensus that idiosyncratic factors play a key role in regulating how listeners emotionally respond to music, precisely measuring the marginal effects of these variables has proved challenging. To address this gap, we develop computational methods to measure affective responses to music from over 403M listener comments on a Chinese social music platform. Building on studies from music psychology in systematic and quasicausal analyses, we test for musical, lyrical, contextual, demographic, and mental health effects that drive listener affective responses. Finally, motivated by the social phenomenon known as 网 抑 云 (wǎng-yì-yún), we identify influencing factors of platform user selfdisclosures, the social support they receive, and notable differences in discloser user activity. 1 网抑云, pronounced as wǎng-yì-yún, is a pun on the platform name 网易云 that refers to the outpour of emotional and personal comments on the social music platform especially late at night and under sad songs. 抑, here, is the first character of the word for depression-抑郁.