Surprise, Surprise: Science From Apple And Sonos Says Music Makes You Happier

We live in an increasingly trackable world. Between fitness bands, smartwatches,beacons, and the rest of the whozits and whatnots that make up our built world, it’sbecoming possible to use data to piece together a surprisingly complete pictureabout who we are, what we do, and even how hard our hearts are pumping bloodthrough our veins.

Now, I’m not here to talk about the privacy or security implications of this newworld (there’s plenty of chatter on that elsewhere). Instead, I’d like to put forward apositive take: It could be a real boon to science and research.

Studying people and their habits is always tricky. We humans don’t live our lives inlabs, and conducting experiments in these sterile settings—where subjects knowthey are being watched—has the potential to really mess with researchers’ results.

Assuming the data these devices collect is lab-quality (if it isn’t now, the never-ending march of technological advancement essentially ensures that it will besoon), the ability to track and measure test subjects with low-cost consumerelectronics could allow researchers the sort of 24/7 look at our lives they have longsought. And while test subjects will still know they are being watched (assumingnobody is in serious breach of basic research protocols), there’s a big differencebetween casually having this knowledge in the back of your mind, and staring intothe abyss of a lab’s one-way mirror while somebody tells you to act normal.

“Just like in physics, the act of observation can change the behavior of theobserved, whether it’s a subatomic particle or a fourteen year old listening to AppleAAPL +0.02% Music out loud,” says Daniel Levitin, Ph.D., a neuroscientist andmusician who oversaw a just-released study conducted by Apple and Sonos thatsought to measure how actively listening to music changes how people live theirlives.

And while this study has an obvious marketing purpose in that it shows thatstreaming songs from services such as Apple Music and hardware partner Sonoscan be good for you, what’s really interesting is how it was conducted: AppleWatches, iPhones, and iBeacons were used to track participants’ heart rate,physical activity, and position in the house. “What this study has shown us is thatwith a relatively small investment in lightweight, easy-to-install equipment, we canobtain a level of experimental rigor we get in the lab, without having to leavepeople’s home,” Levitin says. 

The Apple and Sonos study only entered the homes of 30 families (nosurprise: they seemed to be more active and happy when they were able to listeningto music), but it’s not hard to imagine a world in which researchers use thistechnology to efficiently conduct the sort of large-scale studies that oftenprove prohibitively expensive. In other words, being able to measure thousands—or even millions—of subjects ensures that a researcher’s sample size is waybeyond statistically significant.