Harin Lee
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harinlee.info
Harin Lee
@harinlee.info
Exploring world in sounds.
Junior Research Fellow, University of Cambridge

www.harinlee.info
After few flights and 8hrs of canoe ride up the Maniqui river, we met the Tsimane villagers in Bolivian Amazon to understand what they find appealing to hear and see, and how they compare to other parts of the world. @manuelangladatort.bsky.social @norijacoby.bsky.social
July 18, 2025 at 9:51 PM
Demographic mixing in cities certainly contributes a lot to the musical diversity, especially in megapolis like Paris and Sao Paulo. However, it doesn't entirely explain the rise, so something about the urban interactions and experience itself seems to be at play.
June 4, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Additionally we document how this listening radius changes over the course of life. One's radius expands rapidly from the mid-teens, reaches its peak in late-twenties, and then narrows through mid-life and beyond.
June 4, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Also at the individual level, people living in larger urban areas tend to listen to a broader variety of music themselves (i.e., wider listening radius), expanding their personal musical repertoire.
June 4, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Size matters! Across all three countries, the larger the city, the more distinct people’s musical tastes were from their neighbours. In other words, there’s less of a single, shared musical taste in big cities.
June 4, 2025 at 5:30 PM
We measured diversity of music in two ways: (1) how different people’s musical tastes were from their neighbours in the same area, (2) how wide-ranging each individual’s personal music 'listening radius' was. We processed more than 250 million listening logs across France, Brazil, and Germany.
June 4, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Big cities are vibrant hubs of culture, but why exactly is that? Now out in @natcomms.nature.com, we analysed music listening patterns of over 2.5 million people and demographics to examine mechanisms driving cultural diversity. With @researchdeezer.bsky.social @norijacoby.bsky.social

Highlights ⬇
June 4, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Ready to submit my PhD thesis.

After taking this picture I realised that the thesis cover I designed matches the lamp and the sofa in my flat. Definitely some psychological priming going on here!
May 19, 2025 at 2:54 PM
2. Are Expressions for Music Emotions the Same Across Cultures? arxiv.org/abs/2502.08744

While many studies have relied on predefined set of emotion categories, we propose a systematic pipeline to mine the taxonomy across languages without presumptions of the emotion space.
May 9, 2025 at 9:41 AM
1. Visual and Auditory Aesthetic Preferences Across Cultures arxiv.org/abs/2502.14439

Do people from different parts of the world find certain shapes, colour combinations, and musical sounds more beautiful? Recruiting 4,835 participants from 10 countries, we try to answer this.
May 9, 2025 at 9:41 AM
Serving as a co-chair for ISMIR 2025 in Korea, we are excited to announce call for the music-program! If you have MIR integrated creative music performance in mind to be performed at gorgeous KAIST auditorium, do consider applying.

Submission: ismir2025.ismir.net/call-for-music
Deadline: 30th June
April 25, 2025 at 10:45 AM
Bringing EEG brain science to Berghain club, Berlin 🧠🎛️ Next weekend I’m teaming up with a Berlin-based DJ/producer “Egregore” to integrate brain oscillations to live ambient music. We will control melodic pulses with neural tempo and use different mind states to alter fragments of sounds!
March 3, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Finding your first postdoc job can be daunting and resembles Squid Game. So that others don't go through the same trouble, I'll be sharing my insights on where and when to look, what to prepare etc. Tomorrow 12pm CET and will also stream via zoom (send me DM for a link). Here are some highlights 🦑
January 30, 2025 at 8:16 AM
Wow the silencing in X is so real. Many of my friends saw the post but couldn't interact and it shadow banned these posts...
November 18, 2024 at 2:57 PM
Attended this last year and was truly an inspiring experience. Great crowd and toulouse is absolutely gorgeous. Highly recommend!
November 17, 2024 at 3:14 PM
We make all data and code available for open and reproducible science! Interactive visualisations of songs' can explored at musicdiscover.net 
Data (OSF): osf.io/ra38k/
Code (Git): github.com/harin-git/mu...
May 20, 2024 at 5:16 PM
Finally, we explore factors contributing to cultural change. Both in Ukraine and Russia, the war has brought to light the underlying subnational variations in cultural values and demographics, setting an example in how collective engagement with culture can capture such nuances.
May 20, 2024 at 5:13 PM
Computational analysis of the semantic content of the newly emerging local music trend in Ukraine directly reflects themes of war and anti-Russian sentiments.
May 20, 2024 at 5:13 PM
Cultural responses among post-Soviet countries were asymmetric: Ukraine saw a stark rise in the discovery of local, patriotic music, while Russia experienced a decrease in their local music.
May 20, 2024 at 5:12 PM
Creating networks via inferred pathways of music diffusion further reveals how the once homogenous post-Soviet cultural cluster brakes down into fragmented national clusters after the invasion.
May 20, 2024 at 5:11 PM
Our results show cultural disintegration among the post-Soviet countries that were exceptional in magnitude compared to other world regions. This process slowly began months before the invasion and rapidly escalated immediately after the onset of the invasion.
May 20, 2024 at 5:10 PM
Our mega project, jointly led with @manuelangladatort.bsky.social, is out now as preprint! We monitored millions of daily music discoveries across 1,423 cities and use this data to probe worldwide cultural shifts in real-time during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
May 20, 2024 at 5:10 PM
Hi Bluesky 🔵 Travelling to Tokyo this week for ICMPC 2023 to present a two year long project led by @manuelangladatort.bsky.social and myself, studying how music diffuses around the globe 🎶
August 21, 2023 at 4:02 PM