Aayush Surana received his MS Dual Degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE). His research work was supervised by Dr. Vinoo Alluri. Here’s a summary of his research work on Online music consumption characterizing depression risk:
Music, an integral part of our lives, which is not only a source of entertainment but plays an important role in mental well-being by impacting moods, emotions and other affective states. In this age of Big Data, online music streaming services allow us to capture ecologically valid music listening behavior and provide a rich source of information to identify several user-specific aspects. Music preferences and listening strategies have been shown to be associated with the psychological well-being of listeners including internalized symptomatology and depression. However, till date no studies exist that examine music-related social tags, static \& time-varying audio-derived features, in terms of acoustic and emotional content, and its association with users’ well-being. The current work aims at unearthing static and dynamic patterns and trends in the individuals at risk for depression as it manifests in naturally occurring online music consumption. Mental well-being scores and listening histories of 541 Last.fm users were examined. Social tags associated with each listener’s most popular tracks were analyzed to unearth the mood/emotions and genres associated with the users. Results revealed that social tags prevalent in the users at risk for depression were predominantly related to emotions depicting
\textit{Sadness} associated with genre tags representing \textit{neo-psychedelic-, avant garde-, dream-pop}. Static and dynamic acoustic and emotion-related features were extracted from each user’s listening history and correlated with their mental well-being scores. Results revealed that individuals with greater depression risk resort to higher dependency on music with greater repetitiveness in their listening activity. Furthermore, the affinity of depressed individuals towards music that can be perceived as sad was found to be resistant to change over time. This study has large implications for future work in the area of assessing mental illness risk by exploiting digital footprints of users via online music streaming platforms. This study will open up avenues for an MIR-based approach to characterizing and predicting risk for depression which can be helpful in early detection and additionally provide bases for designing music recommendations accordingly.
