People who tuned in to the Eurovision finals this weekend may have noticed an odd trend. The often dance-friendly song contest was packed with ballads this year. Things felt a little subdued, despite the tear-away sparkle dress from Croatia and the Russian singer who climbed a wall that looked like it was exploding. Could it be that the year's political and economic turmoil somehow affected the tempo of Eurovision songs? We decided to find out.

The question of whether the speed of a given Eurovision song reflects internal problems in that country comes down to a simple numbers game. Beats per minute (BPM) is a measurement of tempo, and there are several available programs for analyzing BPM. For this test, we used the free Mac software called MixMeister and uploaded the 43 songs on the Eurovision 2016 double CD set in order to get a BPM value for each track. This data was then placed in a scatterplot on Excel along with the United Nations Gini Index for that country. The Gini Index is a measure of a country’s level of inequality. The higher a given Gini score, the greater the gap between rich and poor. Multiple analyses have shown that high Gini scores are correlated with increased social and political instability.

And now for some nefarious p-hacking. As the scatter plot above shows, there is a positive correlation between a song’s BPM (the x-axis going across) and the competing country’s Gini Index (the y-axis going up). While it isn’t the case for every country, on average the tempo of the song was faster when the level of inequality was higher in that country. Using Graph Pad’s Prism 7 statistical software, a Student’s T-Test showed that this was a highly significant result with a p-value of 0.0001 and a t-value of 24.9838. (Scientific studies consider a statistical result to be “significant,” or less likely to be the result of a random error, if the p-value is below 0.05. Likewise, the further a t-value is from zero, the more likely it is that you can reject the “null” hypothesis that there is no significant difference.) In other words, this analysis shows that there is a strong positive correlation that is highly statistically significant—though of course, you have to take the idea of "statistically significant" with a major grain of salt , here.

If we continue our statistical analysis, we find that economic inequality has a pretty small impact on the song as a whole. Linear regression analysis found that r = 0.2189, or an r^2 (the coefficient of determination) of 0.05. That means only 5 percent of the total variation in the BPM can be explained by a country's Gini. 95 percent of the BPM is explained by other factors. So a nation's Gini is just one (rather small) factor that is affecting the relative speed of beats in a Eurovision song.

In addition, it's important to keep in mind that we only looked at songs from this year, so our sample size was 42 songs (there was no data on the Gini Index for San Marino, so this country was excluded from the analysis). The larger the sample size, the more robust the result and the less likely the coincidence. This was enough data to establish a correlation of this sort, but we'd like to see more research, perhaps looking into the past four decades of Eurovision to see whether there are historical patterns.

The real question is, why would the Gini number affect song tempo at all, even if it only accounts for 5 percent of the variation between songs? One obvious answer is that there is no effect, because correlation doesn't equal causation. After all, there is a statistically significant negative correlation between the number of pirates and the average global temperature. But it is highly unlikely that the reduction in piracy on the high seas has had any role in global warming. This Eurovision analysis could fit into a similar category.

But if there were a causal connection, what could it be? There is compelling evidence that economic inequality increases the average levels of stress in a society. There is also abundant evidence that the tempo of music affects the level of stress in the listener. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, musicals were among the most popular genres in Hollywood. Penniless audiences couldn't get enough of Judy Garland, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, and other musical stars. Something about toe-tapping songs seems to provide a welcome escape from grim economic reality, and that could explain the giddy, upbeat sound of numbers like "We're in the Money" from the 1933 classic Gold Diggers of 1933.

If artists are responding to the mood of their fellow citizens, it's possible that a faster tempo isn't about escapism but rather is an expression of stress. This might explain the beats behind the ballads from Estonia (180 BPM) and Slovenia (145 BPM). Of course, it wouldn't explain why hip-hop, a genre full of songs that deal with economic and social inequality, typically has a BPM of 115. Economist Noah Smith looked at our statistical analysis and offered a couple of possibilities via e-mail:

Real explanation: Probably an omitted variable. South Europe probably has faster songs traditionally, and also happens to be more unequal. Fun explanation: Upbeat songs distract the proletariat from the evils of late stage capitalism and create false consciousness!

There are obviously a lot of unknown variables in our hypothesis. But the correlation that we found does add credence to the idea that art expresses something of the culture where it originates. At the very least, it's a diverting way to analyze a cheesy music contest. We eagerly await further analysis of Eurovision and economics—or perhaps someone will explore the relationship between the number of people creating scatterplots with Eurovision songs and the total amount of way too much free time.