Does your personality dictate your music taste?
Some new findings about personality and musical preferences.
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that music is a very important part of human life and culture. It’s all around us — we hear music at important life events (like graduation and weddings), inside stores, on public transportation, in movies and TV, on the radio, etc. As an essential creative outlet and form of self-expression for many, it also has significant relevance to our identities and relationships, allowing us to understand and connect with others. For many, bonds are formed based around shared tastes, particularly music (and especially in formative years, like middle school) (Williamson, 2014). I know in my own life, many of my close friendships were started or strengthened by sharing music and musical experiences with each other.
Because music is so essential to our daily life and our development, it makes perfect sense that personality might play into our preferences and tastes. You can probably think of a few assumptions that come to mind when someone mentions liking a specific type of music. Your mental image of a country fan is likely different from your mental image of a hardcore punk fan, or an acid jazz fan.
We have certain cultural associations with different types of music, which is strengthened by the subcultures that form around different music scenes. But is there something about the music itself that appeals to certain personalities? A recent study conducted by Maya B. Flannery and Matthew H. Woolhouse aimed to answer that question!
The connection between personality and music preferences has been examined a few times before, but it’s a very complicated subject, and thus hard to study conclusively. There have been studies comparing personality traits with genre preferences, or musical dimensions (basically the “vibes” of a song, like “reflective” or “complex”), or musical attributes (emotional and reactive attributes, like “sad” or “danceable”). However, these types of studies have some issues. One is that it is extremely difficult to categorize music. Take genre, for example. It’s nearly impossible to conclusively and objectively define genres.
Even in the study of musicology, genre classifications can mean one of at least 3 different things: how the music is technically structured compared to other songs of a “genre,” the ethnographic influence of it (how listeners engage with the music and each other), and the sociological classification given by the music industry to group songs together. Even if a study chose one type of genre classification, say technical structure, there are so many technical aspects within that, including time period/culture of origin, type and style of instrumentation, lyrical content and language, mode, rhythmic structure, and more. Given the complexity of it, it is understandably difficult to study.
The findings of these studies could also indicate different things. For example, genre preference could be more tied to the cultural associations with specific genres (like the overall culture, fashion, and values of underground punk music), whereas musical dimension/attribute preferences could indicate links to the mood or experience the music elicits. So how do you study the links between personality and aspects of the music itself? And how can we objectively categorize music effectively?
Flannery and Woolhouse approached this by quantifiably manipulating specific acoustic attributes of 3 different classical piano songs:
One by Bach:
One by Beethoven:
And one by Mozart:
These pieces were transcribed into a digital piano software, and then specific aspects of the stimuli were manipulated (for a total of 48 different stimuli). This method is called music acoustic feature (MAF) manipulation, and there are many different features that could be manipulated, but this study chose to focus on 4, because of their high degrees of variability in music:
Dynamics
By varying intensity attack and decay rates (manipulating the speed at which the stimuli increased/decreased intensity).
Mode
By (re)composing the stimuli to conform to music-theoretic major and minor scales (in Western music, to most people, songs written in major scales “sound happy,” like ABC, while minor songs sound dark or “sad,” like While My Guitar Gently Weeps. )
Register
By transposing stimuli into different octaves (making the relative pitch of the songs lower or higher. For example, a piccolo has a higher pitch/register than a bass).
Tempo
By changing the rate of note onset (the perceived speed of the song).
This study defines personality via the Big Five Inventory (BFI), to determine each participant’s position among each personality factor (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness).
[Here is a link to an unofficial version of the BFI, if you’re curious about your own alignment for fun/entertainment purposes].
These measures have been proven to be predictive and stable in individuals over time, and make for a somewhat reliable view on personality. People with high extraversion have traits of sociability, enthusiasm, adventurousness, and forcefulness. High agreeableness is associated with warmth, forgiveness, sympathy, and not being stubborn or demanding. Those with high conscientiousness are efficient, driven, thorough, and not impulsive, whereas high neuroticism is related to shyness, irritability, and a lack of confidence or contentment. High openness is associated with being curious, creative, imaginative, and having wide interests.
90 participants of the study were given a BFI questionnaire, and then were presented with the 48 separate stimuli, and asked to rank how much they liked or disliked each stimuli/version of the songs, on a sliding scale from 0 (dislike) to 100 (like). The results were then analyzed to see if there were any significant correlations between BFI results, and stimuli preferences. Overall, there were significant, but fairly weak associations between preferences and personality traits. Of the results, here were some of the most significant:
Agreeableness:
- People who scored high in agreeableness (above the mean score) rated stimuli higher overall compared to those who didn’t score as high.
- Those who scored low in agreeableness (below the mean score) rated slower tempos lower than average.
Conscientiousness:
- Those with low conscientiousness rated major mode highest, and slow tempos lowest.
Extraversion
- People with low extraversion rated louder dynamics and slower tempos lowest.
- People with high extraversion rated major mode and high register highest.
Neuroticism
- Low neuroticism rated fast tempos highest.
Openness
- Quiet dynamics were rated disproportionately high among participants with high openness.
While the results aren’t all significant main effects, there is still a lot to be learned from the study! It supports the findings of previous studies, but provides a more specific view of what aspects of music are tied to personality. This study obviously isn’t holistic — there are many more factors to music (and personality) than those presented here that could have significant associations, and future studies could further uncover and strengthen the associations between music preference and personality traits. But, what we know now is that there are distinct associations between preferences for particular acoustic features of music, and general personality traits.
So, maybe I like punk music because my low neuroticism likes the quick tempos, and my high extraversion doesn’t mind the loud dynamics. Maybe I’m not as much of a fan of slow ballads because my conscientiousness score isn’t as high as other aspects of my personality. Of course there’s room for nuance and there are many other factors that contribute to why we like certain music over others. But, next time you listen to your favorite song, think about what aspects of it you like (besides just lyrics or genre), and how it might relate to certain aspects of your personality!
References:
Bansal, J., Flannery, M. B., Woolhouse, M. H. (2020). Influence of personality on music-genre exclusivity. Psychology of Music. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735620953611
Flannery, M. B., Woolhouse, M. H. (2021). Musical Preference: Role of Personality and Music-Related Acoustic Features. https://doi.org/10.1177/20592043211014014
Greenberg, D. M., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D. J., Monteiro, B. L., Levitin, D. J., Rentfrow, P. J. (2016). The song is you: Preferences for musical attribute dimensions reflect personality. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(6), 597–605. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550616641473
Leight, E. (2019, June 6). Lil Nas X’s ‘old town road’ was a country hit. then country changed its mind. Rolling Stone. Retrieved May 13, 2022, from https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/lil-nas-x-old-town-road-810844/
Rentfrow, P. J., Gosling, S. D. (2003). The Do Re Mi’s of everyday life: The structure and personality correlates of music preferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(6), 1236–1256. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.6.1236
Williamson, V. (2014). You are the music : how music reveals what it means to be human.
