If your commute involves packed subway cars, chances are your headphones are piping something rather different from your seatmate's. A new study analysing individuals listening patterns suggests that urban living not only exposes people to a wider array of sounds, but also pulls listeners apart, taste-wise, from those sitting right beside them.
An international team, including scientists from Cornell University, Deezer Research in Paris and Max Planck Institutes in Germany, sifted through 250 million listening logs from 2.5 million users in France, Brazil and Germany and determined that living in a metropolis broadens our musical horizons, and makes our playlists less alike. Their study, "Mechanisms of Cultural Diversity in Urban Populations," published June 4 in Nature Communications.
The work was done in collaboration with Deezer Research in Paris. Deezer is a global music streaming platform available in 187 countries featuring over 90 million tracks.
"This paper is particularly special as it represents a rare collaboration between academia and industry, giving us access to individual-level interaction data from millions of users. We used this unique dataset to investigate what makes cities culturally diverse," said co-author Nori Jacoby, assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts & Sciences and group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics.
Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.
