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Why listen to music out loud? Apple and Sonos team up to show you.

By Marcus Wong - on 11 Feb 2016, 4:19pm

Why listen to music out loud? Apple and Sonos team up to show you.

 

Why listen to music through headphones when you can blast it out through a set of speakers? Apple and Sonos have paired up to produce an ad campaign that highlights the scientific benefits of listening to music out loud, drawing on a study of 30,000 families across different countries.

Here’s how the study/social experiment was conducted: 109 participants were deprived from listening to music in the home for one week. After the week was up, music was re-introduced to the household via Apple Music playing on a wireless Sonos system (like their new Play:5). Data was logged using a variety of devices including an Apple Watch (paired to an iPhone 6s if the user didn’t already own an iPhone 5 or higher), Apple iBeacons, and a Nest camera.

The Nest camera helped to track in-house movement, while the Apple Watch measured heart rate, motion and activity of each participant. Additionally, the Sonos system gathered data on tracks played and at what volume.

 

Unsurprisingly, there are multiple positive correlations between listening to music and the overall quality of life, and all that data is being presented in TV spots and social media posts, but here are some snippets of what the study found.

  • Survey respondents who listened to music out loud the most, spent on average 3 hours and 13 minutes more together per week compared to those who listened the least. That’s over 167 more hours together for each household each year.
     
  • Families who listened to the most music spent 3 hours and 13 minutes more time together per week than those who listened the least. And they spent more time in the same room physically closer to one another - 12% closer in proximity to one another, to be exact.
     
  • An extra dinner each week, guilt free: Households in the survey that play music out loud will share 42 meals together each year.
     
  • People listening to music out loud the most are on average 7 percent more satisfied with the relationships within their household than households without music playing.
     
  • Family members who listen to music out loud the most were 17% more likely to say "I love you" than those who didn’t listen at all.
     
  • Couples increased their active awake time in the bedroom by 37%, which you can ponder for yourself. Couples who played music out loud in the home had 66% more sex than couples who didn’t.

Sonos and Apple conclude that this confirms what many researchers and experts hypothesized: Music evolved over tens of thousands of years to help bring people together, to defuse interpersonal tensions, help people bond to one another, to feel safe together, and spark romance. Music comforts, soothes, inspires, and sets our moods.

Interesting nuggets of information for sure, but this collaborative effort also marks the start of a new partnership between the two companies as Apple Music is now an official Sonos streaming option, just three months after the partnership was officially announced. Both companies obviously have something to gain from the partnership, as Apple gets access to Sonos’ customer base of some five million households and Sonos gets an even broader exposure through the iTunes user base.

Video clips from the experiment will air in 30-second and 60-second TV spots from next Monday in the US, but you can already check out some of the clips on Sonos’ Tumblr page.

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