Musik is what we are

I’ve always been intrigued by this. Perhaps because I feel music is an important frame of reference in my own particular life; perhaps because I find in music a language capable of naming and exploring behind and beyond any other language. How much can we know about ourselves or others by looking into music files and profiles? How much can music say about how we feel, see and think about the world?
There are clues pointing to music as a predictor or describer of personality. Music sings and sounds who we are. But let us begin from the beginning. I was net-surfing in some psychology blogs and ran into an interestingly fun study that I try to summarize as follows.
The original paper is called “Message in a Ballad: The role of music preferences in interpersonal perception”, a study developed in University of Texas by Rentfrow and Gosling (2006) and published in Psychological Science Journal. They put participants in same-sex and opposite-sex pairings and told them to get to know each other over 6 weeks. Analysing the results, they found the most popular topic of conversation was music. The number of people who talked about music was surprisingly high. In the first week an average 58% of the pairs discussed music compared to 37% of all the other categories of conversation combined. Other categories included books, movies, TV, football and clothes.
Why do we use music as a first port of call in getting to know another person? What is it about music that's so useful when we first meet someone and what kind of information can we extract from the music another person likes? We probably think that music is indirectly telling us something about the other person's personality. For this reason, the second question this study tried to answer was: how good is music as a measure of personality? To answer this question, a group of participants was asked to concoct a list with their 10 favourite songs. Later, another group of participants was asked to “extrapolate” characteristics of personality of the listener based on the list created. The predictions of this second group were compared with a standardized test of personality, the Big Five Personality Traits, measuring: openness to experience, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability.
Results showed that music preferences were reasonably accurate in conveying aspects of personality. Of the five traits, it was a person's openness to experience that was best communicated by their top 10 list of songs, followed by extraversion and emotional stability. On the other hand, music preferences didn't say much about whether a person was conscientious or not.
Some advancement was given regarding the relationship between music preferences and personality traits: those who like vocals tend to be extraverted; preference for country music is related to emotionally stable people (which is really bizarre because country music is all about heartache!); and jazz is associated with intellectuals. This raises the question of why people listen to particular types of music. These are the explanations cited on the post: One theory is that people simply find some music more pleasant for aesthetic or cognitive reasons. Another is that people use music to regulate their mood: I want to get hyper for a night out so I put on some dance music. Another is that music is related to identity; people listen to music that expresses they way they see themselves. It seems likely that a combination of all these theories is probably true.
Now, this study was carried out in Gringoland and it is evidently significant that this is strongly influencing the musical genres and preferences that emerge (which are determined by a particular culture and commercial dynamic). Another important caveat for this study was that the average age of the participants was around 18 so this findings might not hold in different age-groups. I wonder if this relation between music preferences and personality traits would prevail across cultures, age-groups, social class and other variables, what kind of genres or music styles would appear and related to what personality traits in other musical cultures such as Mexico.
Above and beyond the technical specificities of the study, the idea that music describes and reflects, at least partly, who we are is alluring and seductive. Perhaps we can be as diverse inside as a music mosaic; we can have as many mind-colours as rhythms, melodies and sound textures in our heads. In the simplest case, “it seems that talking about (and sharing) music might be a very powerful way to make a connection with another person.”