"Back in my day...": A Preliminary Study on the Differences in Generational Groups Perception of Musically-evoked Emotion

Abstract

The increasingly globalized world we live in today and the wide availability of music at our fingertips have led to more diverse musical tastes within younger generations than in older generations. Moreover, these disparities are still not well understood, and the extent to which they affect listeners' preferences and perception of music. Focusing on the latter, this study explores the differences in emotional perception of music between the Millennials and Gen Z generations. Interviews were conducted with six participants equally distributed between both generations by recording their listening experience and emotion perception on two previously compiled sets of songs representing each group. Significant differences between generations and possible contributing factors were found in the analysis of the conducted interviews. Findings point to differences in the perception of energy of songs with specific messages of suffering for love, as well as a tendency from the younger group to perceive a well-defined emotion in songs representing their generation in contrast to neutral responses from the other group. These findings are preliminary, and further studies are needed to understand their extent. Nevertheless, valuable insights can be extracted to improve music recommendation systems.