Research

Abstract (Partial) This study investigated the effect of music on mental health through quantitative and qualitative analysis with a natural language processing approach. For the quantitative analysis, a public dataset about music and a mental health survey is used. 75.1% of respondents self-reported that music improved their mental symptoms such as depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and insomnia. These positive effects of music were observed across genres, with gospel and lofi listeners most frequently reporting the positive effect of music, followed by Hip hop, EDM, and others. However, listening hours were not found to have a significant correlation with relieving mental health symptoms. For the qualitative analysis, the survey with open ended questions were collected from children in one Filipino church who regularly play violin. Using the NLP approach, word-frequency and sentiment analysis showed that the most frequent words were significantly positive —happy, relaxed, calm, confident, proud, excited—and suggest that music is strongly associated with positive effect and stress relief. Further, sentiment analysis indicated that responses to questions related to emotion and stress were predominantly positive, while confidence-related question responses were relatively neutral and focus-related questions responses showed a balanced distribution of positive and negative sentiments. The findings highlight the music’s robust effect in enhancing positive emotions and improving mental health, and reducing stress, which aligns with previous studies that showed that music therapy can enhance releasing of dopamine and endorphins, while reducing cortisol level.