Beyond immediate health risks, the COVID-19 pandemic poses a variety of stressors, which may require expensive or unavailable strategies during a pandemic (e.g., therapy, socialising). Here, we asked whether musical engagement is an effective strategy for socio-emotional coping. During the first lockdown period (April–May 2020), we surveyed changes in music listening and making behaviours of over 5000 people, with representative samples from three continents. More than half of respondents reported engaging with music to cope. People experiencing increased negative emotions used music for solitary emotional regulation, whereas people experiencing increased positive emotions used music as a proxy for social interaction. Light gradient-boosted regressor models were used to identify the most important predictors of an individual’s use of music to cope, the foremost of which was, intriguingly, their interest in “coronamusic.” Overall, our results emphasise the importance of real-time musical responses to societal crises, as well as individually tailored adaptations in musical behaviours to meet socio-emotional needs.

除了直接的健康风险外，COVID-19 大流行还会带来各种压力，这可能需要在大流行期间采取昂贵或不可用的策略（例如治疗、社交）。在这里，我们询问音乐参与是否是一种有效的社会情绪应对策略。在第一次封锁期间（2020 年 4 月至 5 月），我们调查了超过 5000 人听音乐和制作行为的变化，并使用了来自三大洲的代表性样本。超过一半的受访者表示通过音乐来应对。消极情绪增加的人使用音乐来调节孤独的情绪，而积极情绪增加的人使用音乐作为社交互动的代理。使用光梯度增强回归器模型来确定个人使用音乐来应对的最重要的预测因素，有趣的是，其中最重要的是他们对“coronamusic”的兴趣。总体而言，我们的结果强调了对社会危机的实时音乐反应的重要性，以及对音乐行为进行个性化调整以满足社会情感需求的重要性。