Analyzing Musical Characteristics of National Anthems in Relation to Global Indices

Abstract

Music plays a huge part in shaping peoples' psychology and behavioral patterns. This paper investigates the connection between national anthems and different global indices with computational music analysis and statistical correlation analysis. We analyze national anthem musical data to determine whether certain musical characteristics are associated with peace, happiness, suicide rate, crime rate, etc. To achieve this, we collect national anthems from 169 countries and use computational music analysis techniques to extract pitch, tempo, beat, and other pertinent audio features. We then compare these musical characteristics with data on different global indices to ascertain whether a significant correlation exists. Our findings indicate that there may be a correlation between the musical characteristics of national anthems and the indices we investigated. The implications of our findings for music psychology and policymakers interested in promoting social well-being are discussed. This paper emphasizes the potential of musical data analysis in social research and offers a novel perspective on the relationship between music and social indices. The source code and data are made open-access for reproducibility and future research endeavors. It can be accessed at http://bit.ly/na_code.