I’ve always wondered in a chicken-and-egg kind of way about whether we seek out music which reflects our mood and personality, or whether the music we listen to actually dictates our mood and personality to some degree.

In that context, this is quite an interesting study (unfortunately I can’t find the full text on-line). As well as finding that on average the most popular topic of discussion when two strangers are forced to get to know each other is music (although one wonders whether the study mixed ages, cultural backgrounds etc sufficiently given that the average age of the participants was 18), the study found that the type of music a person listens to was a reasonably good predictor of personality traits when compared with more common forms of personality testing. It also seemed to show that peers have an good ability to predict one another’s personality traits based on musical taste alone (another article on this aspect of the study is here).

Delving deeper, it seems that many people over the years have considered this type of question, and more fundamentally, why we make and listen to music at all. There is even a branch of science (or philosophy perhaps) called ‘evolutionary musicology‘ which is part of the examination of the relationship between biology and music. Wikipedia helpfully tells us that:

The most common position of evolutionary psychologists is to assume that proposed cognitive adaptation is actually a by-product of other functions until evidence proves otherwise.

Hmm. Another (more comprehensible, for non-evolutionary psychologists) theory is that music developed as an identification mechanism for signalling social cohesion within a group. That idea would fit well with the study above, and would explain why we tend to talk about music with strangers more than other topics: we’re actually examining the extent to which we identify with the same cultural or social group. Presumably this means that in ages past if another caveperson banged rocks together at the wrong tempo this was grounds for clubbing him or her to death whilst grunting “ungh unh unnngh!”*

The whole thing also makes sites like Last.fm and Pandora, which analyse your listening habits and recommend new music, an interesting proposition – everything being wired to everything else means that it’s now relatively easy to build fairly comprehensive statistics on one’s musical tastes, and to compare those statistics with other people’s. It also raises questions about the whole ‘High Fidelity’ idea that a romantic partners should be chosen (or rejected, rather) based on their musical taste: is this just an elaborate mechanism to reinforce cultural or social divisions?

Of course none of this really gets us any closer to working out whether personality and mood drives musical taste, or the other way around. In the meantime, why not take this highly dubious music-personality analysis test? Your author’s results are here for interest’s sake (with a disturbingly – or pleasingly, depending on your point of view – low score of 4% for “fun and simple” music).

*(”Why do you need new bands? Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It’s a scientific fact.“)