You Are What You Listen To
August 4th, 2008 by Jason RentfrowWhat’s your favorite style of music? Classical or Jazz? Rap or Dance? Salsa or Tango?
The music research we’ve been doing here at Signal Patterns indicates that people’s preferences for music genres tend to group together. In other words, people who really like a particular style of music, say classical, tend to also like certain other genres, like jazz and world music.
So far, it looks like preferences for a large assortment of music genres can be grouped into five music dimensions. Those dimensions spell the acronym FUSES:
- Forceful (described as loud, distorted, and energetic, and includes heavy metal, rock, alternative and punk),
- Urban (described as rhythmic, percussive, and funky, and includes rap, dance, techno and electronica),
- Sophisticated (described as intelligent and inventive, and includes classical, jazz, and world),
- Earthy (described as melancholic and real, and includes country, folk and bluegrass) and
- Smooth (described as relaxing and gentle, and includes R&B and soul).
One of the reasons we’re interested in people’s music preferences is because we believe (as we suspect do most of you) that the types of music people like reveals information about their personalities. To be sure, we’ve compared your responses to our Music Patterns preferences survey with your responses to our Personality Patterns survey. And the results are in…
Forceful music fans tend to be thrill-seeking, rebellious, haphazard, at ease, and self-indulgent.
Urban music fans tend to be outgoing, friendly, confident, warm, and generally happy.
Sophisticated music fans tend to be imaginative, reflective, creative, quick-witted, intellectual, and private.
Earthy music fans tend to be nice, understanding, honest, sympathetic, and nurturing.
Smooth music fans tend to be cooperative, friendly, conventional, rule following, hard working, and empathic.
So there you have it; there are connections between the styles of music people like and their personalities, many of which seem fairly intuitive and may be in line with any stereotypes you have about types of music fans. And that raises another interesting question: Do we listen to music that fits our personalities, or do we acquire personality traits that fit the music?
August 11th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
The “Dense” category is really interesting, something I never would have thought of. I’ve got a bachelor’s in classical music and this is the first time I’ve considered the category. Although I think of symphony music / stringed instruments as thin, not dense. I am a bit puzzled about a few of the categories, like putting jazz and world together; I despise the former and adore the latter - so I expected contradictory results. But overall, remarkable. Nice work.