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Abstract

The current study investigated how music has been used during the COVID-19 pandemic and how personal factors have affected music-listening behavior. During the shutdown in Spring 2020 in Germany, 539 participants took part in an online survey reporting on functions of music listening, attributes of listened music, and active engagement with music, retrospectively before and during the pandemic. Next to these implicit questions, participants were asked to describe the changes they explicitly noticed in handling music during COVID-19, their current worries, and their new everyday life during the pandemic as well as personality traits and stress reactivity. A logistic regression model was fitted, showing that people reduced their active engagement with music during the lockdown, and the function of killing time and overcoming loneliness became more important, reflecting the need for distraction and filling the silence. Before the lockdown, music was listened to for the function of motor synchronization and enhanced well-being, which reflects how people have lost both their musical and activity routines during the lockdown. The importance of in-person engagement with music in people’s lives became particularly evident in the connection between worries about further restrictions and the need for live music