Does the time of day impact your music taste?
In an age of endless streaming and the ever-evolving ubiquity of music’s presence in our lives, one’s typical day could be mapped out by the tunes they’re playing. Take the archetypal UK metalhead. Soundtracking their pre-commute cornflakes might be Faith No More‘s energising zest to start the day on a productive note. Slipping a sly earbud in and watching the clock during their afternoon shift, some Anthrax thrash is required to speed up those ticking hands.
Back home and pizza in the oven, a chance to truly unwind demands Nightwish’s symphonic metal while no one’s looking, and later, dusting off Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast to while away the latter hours catching up on life admin. Relaxing before bed, a dash of Sunn O)))’s Seattle drone ambient to wind down after a long day.
While it’s widely understood that one’s choice of music is overwhelmingly contextual—the tunes pumped into your headphones at the gym are likely to differ wildly from the playlist cobbled for your yoga retreat—the daily circadian rhythms may also play a part in informing the playlist that’s winking at you the most. There’s a reason why lullabies are played at night: soothing, gentle pieces to encourage the heavy slumber of sleep in a young child. However, many adults also search for appropriate background pieces to help nod off at night.
Beyond mere tradition or cultural convention, the new age of listening data collated by today’s biggest streaming platforms now provides ample opportunity to explore musical habits and their possible relationship with society’s daily behaviours.
So, how does the time of day impact your music taste?
According to research published in 2021, the time of day is closely tied to music preference. Conducted in Denmark’s Aarhus University and The Royal Academy of Music Aarhus/Aalborg by scientists Ole Adrian Heggli, Jan Stupacher and Peter Vuust, an analysis of over two billion Spotify streaming data points across eight weeks demonstrated five chunks of the day that generally held differing listening trends: morning, afternoon, evening, night, and late night/early morning.
Supporting each stream is a bunch of surrounding data detailing tempo, vocal levels, and its ‘danceability’ to further hone in on what we’re all playing during the day’s five segments. Correlating with humanity’s typical diurnal cycle, the research found that Spotify streaming patterns “follow the same order throughout the week, but differ in length and starting time when comparing workdays and weekends”.
“Our results demonstrate how music intertwines with our daily lives and highlight how even something as individual as musical preference is influenced by underlying diurnal patterns,” the researchers state in the published paper.
It’s a study that reflects the era of music consumption. Virtually since the dawn of time, one had little say in the music they were exposed to. Following the dawn of recorded audio and the birth of the music industry, as we know it today, in the 1950s, the radio could be switched on at various points of the day, but it was still programmed by the station. The endless content and algorithmically assembled playlists point to a closer relationship with music on a somatic level outside of creative expression, an arguably disconcerting proximity between the industry and the body that could cross paths in ways one cannot begin to envision.
