What your musical taste says about your personality

Which out of these eight songs and pieces of music do you prefer?

• Hallelujah — Jeff Buckley
• Come Away With Me — Norah Jones
• All of Me — Billie Holliday
• Crazy Little Thing Called Love — Queen
• Concerto in C — Antonio Vivaldi
• Etude Opus 65 No 3 — Alexander Scriabin
• God Save the Queen — The Sex Pistols
• Enter Sandman — Metallica

No, we’re not putting together a Spotify playlist for the weekend. This is actually a personality test.

Research from Cambridge University suggests that your music taste is linked to how you think.

If you picked the first four songs (Jeff Buckley, Norah Jones, Billie Holliday and Queen), the study suggest you are an empathiser.

Jeff Buckley playing at Glastonbury in 1995 (Picture: Rex Features)

Empathisers are more people-focused, and concentrate on the emotions of others. And the findings suggest they prefer more mellow, unpretentious music.

If however you went for the second half of that list, you are more likely to be a systemiser – someone who looks for rules and patterns in the world.

The Sex Pistols on stage at the ULU back in 1976. (Picture: Getty Images)

Systemisers tend to prefer more intense music.

But what if your choices were from all over the list – and you have both Metallica and Norah Jones on your iPod?

Then that means you have traits of both empathisers and sympathisers, and are probably a generally well-rounded individual.

David Greenberg, who undertook the study, explained:

Although people’s music choices fluctuates over time, we’ve discovered a person’s empathy levels and thinking style predicts what kind of music they like.

In fact, their cognitive style — whether they’re strong on empathy or strong on systems — can be a better predictor of what music they like than their personality.

The full details of the study are here, if you want to have a full deep-dive and figure out what your reaction to the Stormzy album says about your psychology.

HT Spring

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