I have always wondered about this, do you know a lot about someone when you know his or her music tastes? Does music define us and do you learn a lot about a person you have just met when this person tells you about his music preferences?
Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling did a study a few years ago that showed that music is by far, the predominant topic discussed between university students, as young people, who were interacting with a randomly-assigned participant in this study, were discussing about music much more often than about books, clothes, movies, TV or even sports.
It turned out that music is regarded as an important step in getting to know someone, sure, haven’t you talked about music to a person you have just met? If the person tells you he or she likes heavy metal, or folk music or country, you are obviously forming a sort of opinion about this person, but is it justified?
In the same study, the researchers tried to find out if it was possible to predict someone’s personality from their favorite songs or albums, and it turned out that music preferences were very good at predicting certain traits, like ‘openness to experience’, and were better than video/photo preferences at predicting someone’s ‘emotional stability’ and ‘agreeableness’.
Another study, conducted by Professor Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University on more than 36,000 people, the largest ever conducted attempting to find a correlation between music tastes and personality, demonstrated the following:
- Indie fans have low self-esteem, are creative but are not hard-working, or gentle.
- Heavy metal fans have low self-esteem, but are very creative, gentle, introvert, at ease with themselves, but not hard-working.
- Rap fans have high self-esteem and are outgoing.
- Dance fans are creative and outgoing, but not very gentle or generous.
- Country and western fans are very hardworking and outgoing.
- Reggae fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, kind, generous and at ease with themselves, but are not hardworking.
- Classical music lovers have high self-esteem, are creative and at ease with themselves, but are introvert.
- Opera fans have high self-esteem, are creative and gentle
- Blues fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle and at ease with themselves.
- Rock ‘n’ roll fans have high self-esteem, are very creative, hardworking and at ease with themselves, but are not very kind or generous.
- Jazz fans seem to be creative, at ease with themselves, outgoing and have high self-esteem.
- Pop music fans have high self-esteem, are hardworking, outgoing, gentle but not creative and at ease with themselves.
- Soul fans generally have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle and at ease with themselves.
This is a little weird, so I suppose that if you have low self-esteem you are stuck with indie music or metal, and if you are hard-working you are stuck with pop, rock or country? Rap, pop and country music fans are missing the creative part, would you have thought that classical music and heavy metal lovers have so much in common? But according to Professor North, both musics have much more in common than what we think, as ‘a lot of modern metal, especially that originating in Europe, is heavily influenced by classical music.’
But what about people who like different genres like Indie and rock? Do they have low or high self-esteem, are they lazy or hard-working?
It seems like a never-ending quest, finding someone’s personality through some tastes or preferences, and the eternal question of which one came first, the musical taste or the personality? Which one did influence the other? Also aren’t we going through different phases during our lives, music-wise?
One thing is sure, and I don’t need any study to demonstrate this, someone’s taste in music can be a total turn off, I could not even imagine being interested by someone who dig,… let’s say Yanni, Michael Bolton or Celine Dion.