# New Way to Categorize Music and Using it to Determine Personality



## 20centrfuge (Apr 13, 2007)

I stumbled across this recently, and I have been quite fascinated with it.

https://phys.org/news/2016-05-scientists-categorize-music.html

Some psychologists and researchers at Cambridge, McGill University, and Stanford have proposed a way to categorize music that is independent of genre. They propose categorizing music according to three different variables: Valence, Arousal, and Depth.

Valence is essentially the emotional component of the music - does the music express positive emotions such as well being, happiness, etc., or negative emotions such as frustration, anger, sadness.

Arousal is the energy level of the music - how much does it arouse your faculties? Is it static music (low arousal) or active music (high arousal)

Depth is similar to complexity, sophistication, or intellectual demands of the music.









They submit that though people may be attracted to different genres of music, people with the same type of personality will seek music with roughly the same levels of these three variables.

To go even further, they state that they can predict which levels of these three variables suit each person according to their personality and, vice-versa, can determine your personality type based on what you listen to.

There is a* test *you can take that tests you and corresponds with their theory.


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## 20centrfuge (Apr 13, 2007)

One of the things it makes me wonder: Is the bulk of the music I love of roughly the same levels of these variables? Do I gravitate to certain musical moods, energy levels, and sophistication? 

Do you find this to be true in your case?


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## Tchaikov6 (Mar 30, 2016)

I just don't get the point. Why do we need to categorize music in a different way? Why can't we just listen to music how we want to, and categorize it how we want to? Do we need psychologists to do it for us?

I'm just confused about what all of this is doing to enhance music and music therapy...


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

20centrfuge said:


> I stumbled across this recently, and I have been quite fascinated with it.
> 
> https://phys.org/news/2016-05-scientists-categorize-music.html
> 
> ...


Contemplating these variables, I come to realize I should love Justin Bieber's music. Or rap. Or Britney Spears.
Such music (1) expresses positive ("I love you, I love you") or negative ("I hate you, I hate you") emotions, and little else. In other words, there is no complexity of emotions, no "gray area" in most cases. It's just "I love you, I love you" or "I hate something" (the latter especially in rap).
(2) Such music certainly arouses me. I want to turn it off, smash the disc, bust the radio or stereo player, and hit something as I lament the fall of human culture ....
(3) Such music has the absolute, infinite depth of a black hole ... or of that "nothingness" from which the Big Bang arose. And as I understand contemporary astro-quantum-physics, that "nothingness" was really a "full-of-somethingness-nothingness." Huh? Yeah. That's why I'm not a physicist.

But hey! That music fits the three variables. Doesn't it?


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Just because an academic finds something to do, doesn't mean that it's worth doing.


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

That isn't a way to categorise music it's only a way to categorise an individual's response to particular music.
As such, I don't see there is anything illuminating to be discovered.
As for my personality? I must be schizophrenic as I may be as likely to be found listening to Bruno Mars or Stravinsky or Gesualdo or Perfume Genius!


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## topo morto (Apr 9, 2017)

20centrfuge said:


> They propose categorizing music according to three different variables: Valence, Arousal, and Depth.
> 
> Valence is essentially the emotional component of the music - does the music express positive emotions such as well being, happiness, etc., or negative emotions such as frustration, anger, sadness.
> 
> ...


So my initial reaction is that there's no commonly-agreed way to measure those things in any genre of music, so how were they giving a score to each piece in the first place?

From reading the link....



> The researchers also conducted a second study of nearly 10,000 Facebook users who indicated their preferences for 50 musical excerpts from different genres. The researchers were then able to map preferences for these three attribute categories onto five personality traits and 30 detailed personality facets. For example, they found people who scored high on Openness to Experience preferred Depth in music, while Extraverted excitement-seekers preferred high Arousal in music. And those who scored high on Neuroticism preferred negative emotions in music, while those who were self-assured preferred positive emotions in music. As the title from the old Kern and Hammerstein song suggests, "The Song is You". That is, the musical attributes that you like most reflect your personality. It also provides scientific support for what Joni Mitchell said in a 2013 interview with the CBC: "The trick is if you listen to that music and you see me, you're not getting anything out of it. If you listen to that music and you see yourself, it will probably make you cry and you'll learn something about yourself and now you're getting something out of it."


There's no information on how the pieces were rated for 'Valence', 'Arousal', or 'Depth'.

If the 'scientists' have come up with their own subjective ratings, then the experiment's results are hugely polluted by - indeed, founded upon - those same scientists' perceptions and preferences.

Can't see any real science here from what I've read.


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## 20centrfuge (Apr 13, 2007)

SONNET CLV said:


> But hey! That music fits the three variables. Doesn't it?


Well I would call Justin Bieber music relatively high on arousal, low on depth, and high on Valence. IF (and this is the fundamental question) these are the same strength of variables you like with your classical music, then, in theory, you probably should like it. BUT, I assume your classical listening is of much higher depth, and more than likely embraces darker emotions. As such, your claim does little to refute the theory that was posed.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending this, really. I have nothing to lose. But if you are going to make an argument, you may as well make it with respect to what they are actually saying -- that the variables that you embrace could potentially transfer to another genre.

Then again, I'm not sure that they are saying that you could easily transfer genres. More like, if you (or a clone of you) were to be placed, as tabula rasa, in a different cultural setting, though you might like a different genre of music, the levels of the three variables would be similar, regardless of genre.


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## Klassik (Mar 14, 2017)

Here is the PDF Full-text article from the journal for those who think this is interesting: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1948550616641473


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## Totenfeier (Mar 11, 2016)

MarkW said:


> Just because an academic finds something to do, doesn't mean that it's worth doing.


I wanted to post to say I give your post hundreds and hundreds of likes - see also John Keating's (Robin Williams) trashing of "Dr. J. Evans Pritchard" in _Dead Poets Society_.


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## 20centrfuge (Apr 13, 2007)

topo morto said:


> So my initial reaction is that there's no commonly-agreed way to measure those things in any genre of music, so how were they giving a score to each piece in the first place?


Good point. This could be the biggest flaw in the system.


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## topo morto (Apr 9, 2017)

Klassik said:


> Here is the PDF Full-text article from the journal for those who think this is interesting: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1948550616641473


Thanks. I see the scientists have not rated the pieces themselves - they've got listeners to do it....



> Seventy-six judges with no formal music training independently
> rated 102 musical excerpts of mixed genres based on
> their perceptions of psychological attributes expressed from the
> music. To reduce the impact of fatigue and order effects, judges
> ...


So I guess that addresses my previous concern. The thing is, I can't see that I really have preferences for either end of most of these spectra - I can think of music I like at either end of any of those characteristics.

Indeed, when I did the online survey, I came out as liking every 'type' of music about the same. But this doesn't mean that I like every _piece _of music the same - far from it! So this study of musical preferences seems to relate little to my ideas of my preferences...


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

topo morto said:


> Thanks. I see the scientists have not rated the pieces themselves - they've got listeners to do it....
> 
> So I guess that addresses my previous concern. The thing is, I can't see that I really have preferences for either end of most of these spectra - I can think of music I like at either end of any of those characteristics.
> 
> Indeed, when I did the online survey, I came out as liking every 'type' of music about the same. But this doesn't mean that I like every _piece _of music the same - far from it! So this study of musical preferences seems to relate little to my ideas of my preferences...


Also, music, and classical music especially, is apt to take one through a range of emotion, experience, mood etc within the confines of a single movement. How one can make generalisations about a whole genre is beyond me.


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## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

I spent 30 seconds thinking about this study and it seemed a bit odd, so clearly it must be that those guys who made it and have studied psychology their whole lives are silly and wrong, and I am right.


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## topo morto (Apr 9, 2017)

Petwhac said:


> Also, music, and classical music especially, is apt to take one through a range of emotion, experience, mood etc within the confines of a single movement. How one can make generalisations about a whole genre is beyond me.


Yep... one thing that i noticed about the lengths of the excepts in the online study you can do is that they're far too short for any kind of development, or any kind of harmonic logic to develop. They're also much too short to listen to any development in the lyrics. One of the rap-style excerpts stopped before any lyrics even came in!

Many of the reasons for which I like music can't really be perceived in snippets of that length.

So while the article claims to want to get away from genre-based theories, using clips of that length almost forces you into falling back on your own genre prejudices.

Another thing I noticed is that all of the clips sounded a bit second-rate to me. And indeed....



> Roughly half of the pieces
> (52) had been commercially released, but had low sales figures,
> and the remaining 50 pieces were unreleased songs that had
> been purchased from Getty Images.


So none of them are pieces that really, on average, have been shown to 'hit the spot'.


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## JeffD (May 8, 2017)

I separate music I like from music I am interested in. Some music I like, but it is not sit forward and listen music for me. Not all that interesting. Other music is very interesting. Like what the heck is going on here. How do I sort this out. And I may or may not respond to the music any other way but intellectually.

And to add a further complication, there is music I would like to play. I don't feel compelled to play every piece of music I hear, and the things I play may or may not always be something I want to listen to.

I guess my point is that I am not sure how anything can be determined about my personality just by the music I seek out, because I seek for so many different reasons.

But who knows. I have taken many personality tests and often found the test nailed it. I hate being so simply figured out.


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

On the musical preference score, I got between low and average for mellow music

I got a low score for unpretentious music

I got a very high score for sophisticated music

I got a low score for Intense music

And I got a very high score for Contemporary

Out of the categories: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability I got below average for all except openness to Experience which I got above average on.



Your score for Emotional Engagement with music: 17

Your score for Intellectual Engagement with music: 20

Your score for Physical Engagement with music: 16

Your score for Social Engagement with music: 20

Your score for Narrative Engagement with music: 15


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

MarkW said:


> Just because an academic finds something to do, doesn't mean that it's worth doing.


Sharp, very sharp answer.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

20centrfuge said:


> ... (or a clone of you)...


What? A clone? Hey, I have enough problems with just one of me to deal with. I certainly don't need a clone!


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## quietfire (Mar 13, 2017)

What a load of bull. Complexity will only go as far as the listener. Some idiot listening to Bach's GV can still receive less complexity than an intelligent person listening to JL's On The Floor.


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## Daniel Atkinson (Dec 31, 2016)

Different groups of people listen to the same music for different reason, it is not something that you academics can actually accurately categorize. If it where that easy, the world would be nicer place


Daniel


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## Bettina (Sep 29, 2016)

quietfire said:


> What a load of bull. Complexity will only go as far as the listener. Some idiot listening to Bach's GV can still receive less complexity than an intelligent person listening to JL's On The Floor.


I agree with you for the most part, but I wouldn't say idiot - I would say musically untrained person. Someone who doesn't perceive much in a musical work isn't necessarily stupid; they're just not musically inclined/educated. I know of many brilliant people (including several English professors) who have no ear for music, in large part because they have never listened to it very carefully and spend much of their time studying words rather than sounds.


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## AfterHours (Mar 27, 2017)

I doubt I'll bother taking the test due to lack of interest and due to its flawed premise/methods, but if I did I am sure I would skew its expected results and it wouldn't know what to think of me. My tastes are varied in the extreme, as are many users here.


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

Whenever I take personality tests, I typically use them to gauge my own thoughts on myself and how closely they match up. I also hope to learn something new about myself.

This test reinforced my sense of strong emotional stability and fondness of sophisticated music. However, some notions that I didn't resonate with were the oversimplifications of the generalizations made based upon the clips listened to. It said I don't like mellow music much, but they just didn't play anything mellow that I enjoyed. The solo piano works that were mellow were tunes I found quite cheesy.

I don't think this test is good for people that are obsessed with music, but could perhaps be more beneficial to a more casual listener.

But still, I think they need to tighten up their test if they really want to make it a useful way to gain information about patients of therapists/psychiatrists.


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

*Music*

Your preference score for Mellow music: 9

Your preference score for Unpretentious music 5

Your preference score for Sophisticated music: 33

Your preference score for Intense music: 7

Your preference score for Contemporary music: 8

*Personality*

On Extraversion you scored: 5.5

On Agreeableness you scored: 4.5

On Openness to Experience you scored: 7

On Conscientiousness you scored: 4.5

On Emotional Stability you scored: 7

*Satisfaction with Life*

Your score on Life Satisfaction was: 33

Basically, I found the personality readings to be accurate as well as the satisfaction with life, but I did not agree that I do not like mellow music.


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

I think we should focus on the wording here and examples they use to describe the type of music that they define as fitting into that model.

Mellow music is defined as romantic, relaxing, unaggressive, sad, slow, and quiet; often heard in genres of soft rock, R & B, and adult contemporary;

Unpretentious music is defined as uncomplicated, relaxing, unaggressive, soft, and acoustic, and primarily from the country, folk, and singer/songwriter music genres;

Sophisticated music is defined as inspiring, intelligent, complex, and dynamic, and were from the classical, operatic, avant-garde, world beat, and traditional jazz music genres;

Intense music is defined as distorted, loud, aggressive, and not relaxing, romantic, nor inspiring, and were from the classic rock, punk, heavy metal, and power pop music genres);

Contemporary music is defined a percussive, electric, and not sad, and from the rap, electronica, Latin, acid jazz, and Euro pop music genres) (MUSIC).

Based on their definition and genre examples given for mellow music, I don't really fit in to liking that category. Seeing as how strongly I agreed with their survey of my personality, perhaps there is more to this test than meets the eye.


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

If they would have played some Chopin Nocturnes, it probably would have fit under sophisticated rather than mellow, which makes sense to me.


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## 20centrfuge (Apr 13, 2007)

Captainnumber36 said:


> I don't think this test is good for people that are obsessed with music, but could perhaps be more beneficial to a more casual listener.


I agree completely with this statement. Non mainstream listeners such as those here on TC would probably be considered outliers from a statistical point of view.

In spite of all this, the idea of a measurable correlation between which music one prefers and their personality is a fascinating one. I know most classical listeners consider pop and other casual music somewhat beneath them (myself included) but there are some ideas in this research that have merit and, I believe, could lead to interesting discussion.

Truthfully, I'm somewhat disappointed at how flippantly most posters to this discussion have discarded these ideas without *really* considering them (present company excluded).


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

20centrfuge said:


> Truthfully, I'm somewhat disappointed at how flippantly most posters to this discussion have discarded these ideas without *really* considering them (present company excluded).


Yeah, I'm saddened people call it flawed immediately. Psychology is about coming up with _theories_, not answers. It's like saying an opinion is right or wrong, versus a fact being right or wrong. This is simply one way of many to categorize music and emotions, and I think it very plausible myself. I might check out the personality quiz later, to see if it's accurate about me.

_Nothing is detracted by categorizing feelings._ Categorizing feelings doesn't reduce the impact these feelings make on us as individuals. But in fact, it could help with looking up new music one will enjoy, trying to predict what one may be predisposed to.

Just a prediction before I do the quiz, I think I would score somewhere in the middle of arousal (as I love both extremes of chill and excited), leaning more towards positive emotionality, and quite high on depth.


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## topo morto (Apr 9, 2017)

20centrfuge said:


> I know most classical listeners consider pop and other casual music somewhat beneath them (myself included)


This corner of the internet seems to have a lot of that going on.... much more than I've experienced in 'real life'!



20centrfuge said:


> Truthfully, I'm somewhat disappointed at how flippantly most posters to this discussion have discarded these ideas without *really* considering them (present company excluded).


I've read the whole pdf, and on the face of it the study seems valid and interesting - I don't reject it. Much of my disappointment with it was partly based on doing the web survey - and the (subjectively) poor quality of all the clips, and their short length. The web survey did say that I like all types of music about the same, which is true, and said that I am a terrible person, which is also true.


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## Klassik (Mar 14, 2017)

Anyway, I won't be participating in the study. I don't think that one should know much (or anything) about the study before participating in it. It could influence the results. Getting to the study through a link with a summary of the study seems like a folly to me. I worked in a psychology research lab a number of years ago and we tried to keep the participants about as dumb as possible as to what we were doing until after the participant went through the experiment and was debriefed. Of course, we were intentionally causing stress to the participants so naturally we didn't want them to know what was going on before they went through the experiment (don't worry, it was IRB approved so it's not like we were stressing them out too much).


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## Headphone Hermit (Jan 8, 2014)

20centrfuge said:


> I stumbled across this recently, and I have been quite fascinated with it.
> 
> https://phys.org/news/2016-05-scientists-categorize-music.html
> 
> ...


This is an awful piece of pseudo-research. There are weaknesses with their conceptualisation of music, musical preferences and personality types. As an illustration of this, they use a very crude and unsophisticated view of music. For example, "Mellow music is defined as romantic, relaxing, unaggressive, sad, slow, and quiet" - yet there are many examples of very famous 'classical' music that would fit into this descriptor but they limit this to examples from "soft rock, R & B, and adult contemporary" - all of which I dislike intensely (whereas I adore music such as Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata which fits the descriptor well). As a result, this 'test' does not capture what I really think about music or which types of music I like (or dislike) at all.

Poor research design, poor methodology, poor knowledge of the topic. I strongly suggest that you treat any 'findings' with a very large degree of scepticism.


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## Headphone Hermit (Jan 8, 2014)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> This is simply one way of many to categorize music and emotions, and I think it very plausible myself.


Yes, there are many ways to categorise music and emotions, but as an expert in music, you would surely recognise that the way selected is a poor categorisation that is based on weak understanding of music.

Ergo, if the categorisation is weak, then the 'findings' resulting from the study are unreliable and lack validity and thus the study is deeply flawed

This is not a good piece of academic work


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## Headphone Hermit (Jan 8, 2014)

And if you want to know how they categorised the music, this is from their paper:

"Seventy-six judges with no formal music training independently rated 102 musical excerpts of mixed genres based on their perceptions of psychological attributes expressed from the music."

And that is why their categorisation of the music is so flawed - the categories created from the perceptions of non-experts who are unlikely to know that classical music can fit into each of the categories that they have been arbitrarily created.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

We know that President Trump probably likes "Chopsticks." We hardly need a study to tell us that.


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

MarkW said:


> Just because an academic finds something to do, doesn't mean that it's worth doing.


So true. I always think that an academic is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing!


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## topo morto (Apr 9, 2017)

Headphone Hermit said:


> And if you want to know how they categorised the music, this is from their paper:
> 
> "Seventy-six judges with no formal music training independently rated 102 musical excerpts of mixed genres based on their perceptions of psychological attributes expressed from the music."
> 
> And that is why their categorisation of the music is so flawed - the categories created from the perceptions of non-experts who are unlikely to know that classical music can fit into each of the categories that they have been arbitrarily created.


From what I remember of reading it, they made it clear that they thought music of all (or most) genres could fit into all (or most) of the categories.

And the validation of the categorisations was that most people agreed on them.


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## Pat Fairlea (Dec 9, 2015)

Barbebleu said:


> So true. I always think that an academic is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing!


I suppose I should speak in defence of my former profession! That quote cold be more accurately rendered as "An academic is someone who knows more and more about something in particular until they understand how little they actually know". My preferred definition of the role of academics is "to find out new stuff about the world and then to tell people about it".


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Pat Fairlea said:


> I suppose I should speak in defence of my former profession! That quote cold be more accurately rendered as "An academic is someone who knows more and more about something in particular until they understand how little they actually know". My preferred definition of the role of academics is "to find out new stuff about the world and then to tell people about it".


I don't have a problem with either academics or finding out new stuff about the world -- but some of what some are trying to find out is neither scientifically sound nor useful (except for getting published.  ). i.e. "worth doing."


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

MarkW said:


> I don't have a problem with either academics or finding out new stuff about the world -- but some of what some are trying to find out is neither scientifically sound nor useful (except for getting published.  ). i.e. "worth doing."


True, are they really going to have therapists conduct this test to evaluate personality? Highly doubtful. It's pretty useless. There are stronger correlations between human personality/emotionality and elements of reality to compare to evaluate, I'm sure.


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