# A Causal Model for Surveys of Exploratory Listening and Music Appreciation

## TL;DR

This paper creates a causal model to understand how people appreciate music and explore it, using surveys and combining insights from neurobiology, marketing, and musicology.

## Contribution

The novel contribution is a causal model integrating multiple disciplines to explain music appreciation and exploratory listening behavior.

## Key findings

- Listeners use different causal pathways for appreciating liked versus disliked music.
- Dissatisfaction with music is more often attributed to perceived musical qualities rather than personal experiences.
- The causal model is developed through an iterative survey methodology involving 800 participants.

## Abstract

This paper integrates concepts from neurobiology, marketing and musicology to propose a causal model of music appreciation and exploratory listening, using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) and structural equation models (SEMs). The key concepts are music appreciation (measured on a scale from 1 to 10), evaluations, experiences and the qualities of musical features, which the listeners explore and describe from a first-person perspective. The qualities are understood in terms of a satisfaction or dissatisfaction rating of operational features. The development of the causal model is based on a reiterative methodology involving surveys. Applying the causal model to a large survey of 800 listeners reveals that listeners adopt a slightly different causal pathway for their appreciation of liked versus disliked music. When listeners dislike music, the source of their dissatisfaction is more consistently attributed to the perceived or missed musical qualities rather than to their personal experiences. The iterative methodology and causal modeling offer a foundation for further investigation and refinement in various listening contexts.