What’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?
February 3rd, 2009 at 2:45 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.
April 6th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
In listening to the mixed samples after taking the survey I found that some of your categories seem to be a bit confused.
I’m told by your survey that I don’t like Percussive music and “can’t stand music with a prominent drumbeat and strong vibrations.” I played the mixed sample at the bottom and this is what I heard:
contemporary percussion ensemble - Liked it a lot
rap / hip-hop - Disliked it a lot
latin jazz with marimba - Liked it a lot
pop salsa (in Spanish) - Liked it a little
some type of world music - Liked it
I’m told that I don’t like Dense music and “can’t stand music that is heavy and not light and airy.” The mixed sample played:
symphonic music - Liked it a lot
ELPesque instrumental with cheesy synthesizer - Neutral based on length of sample (I like ELP just not cheesy synthesizer)
some mock angry rock - Disliked it a little
jazz fusion - Liked it
I’m told that I’m “indifferent to music that is intricate and must be heard more than once to take it all in.” The mixed sample played:
classical solo piano - Liked it a lot
fuzz guitar with electric violin - Neutral
traditional salsa - Liked it a lot
opera - Disliked it
What this tells me is that your model needs to be tweaked a bit. I agree that music can tell a lot about someone’s personality, but I feel like there was a bait and switch between the samples in the survey and the examples after the fact. I’ll be interested in whether you make any adjustments to this model.