A scientific study finds that your personality
has a bigger impact on the type of music you
like than any other factor.
What does your mix tape say about you?
It’s not news that music can affect your
mood.
The typical medical waiting room has soothing
songs to help ease tension and anxiety.
Gyms pump in the upbeat, driving music to
motivate people to get moving.
And I like listening to melodramatic show
tunes after a hard day.
No judging.
This is a safe space.
But beyond affecting our moods, our musical
tastes are linked to our personalities.
And now we know that the two are more closely
related than previously thought.
Because science.
A team of researchers from Stanford and the
University of Cambridge conducted studies
on musical taste and personality.
But they almost immediately disregarded the
concept of music genres.
That’s because genres are fuzzy categories
that are really only useful to the music industry
for marketing purposes.
Within each genre you’ll find very different
types of music.
One song may have a faster beat and poppy
lyrics, while another slows things down and
challenges the listener with complex melodies,
even though both songs are in the same genre.
The team wanted to go a level deeper than
genre, to the qualities that
define Western music.
They identified three broad dimensions of
music: arousal, valence and depth.
A song with an intense beat and driving music
has a high rating in arousal.
Valence is a term in psychology that refers
to emotional reactions.
Generally speaking, positive valence means
the music is happy and negative valence means
the music is sad.
And depth is a measure of a song’s complexity
-- simple tunes have low depth.
The researchers conducted surveys in which
9,500 people listened to short clips of music
unfamiliar to them.
The subjects rated the clips, which represented
a wide variety of music with different levels
of arousal, valence and depth.
The subjects also took a personality test.
And that’s when the team saw how the same
personality types gravitated toward music
with similar levels of those three dimensions.
According to the researchers, open-minded
liberals gravitate toward complex music with
high depth.
The more neurotic among us tend to listen
to high intensity, emotionally negative tunes.
Extroverts like me tend to like happy songs
with positive valence, which is why I serenade
the office with “Walking on Sunshine”
at least once a month.
Perhaps we’ll be able to learn more about
ourselves by taking a closer look at the music
that moves us.
And services like Spotify or Pandora could
use this research to tweak recommendation
algorithms so that you’re more likely to
hear stuff that appeals to you
based on your personality.
Beyond that, music can help improve physical
and mental health.
Who knows?
Maybe in the future the doc’s prescription
will read “listen to two Weezer albums and
call me in the morning.”
While you fire up that Mastodon playlist and
rock out, don’t forget that we have awesome
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