Musical Zodiac – Your Choice In Music Tells A Lot About You

There is a subset of theatrical mindreading or stage mentalism known as "Cold Reading".  That's when the performer looks over and speaks with the participant and makes some general assumptive comments about them based on their speech, dress, body language, style and what ever other physical cues or clues are apparent.  When performed by an expert, it is uncanny as to how much revealing information can be gleaned from someone just being themselves.  It is the ultimate display of judging a book by its cover!

So for a moment, YOU are the Cold Reader and I tell you the kind of music to which I like to listen.  What can you tell about me from that?  Perhaps more than you might think.

We use a lot of music on the Morning News Radio Show.  We find songs that serve as comedy effects, support for subject matter under discussion, guest intros or theme songs and more.  To be able to do that effectively we fortunately have a have a wide knowledge of popular music between the three of us on the show.

But for the average music listener, a new article written in The Hill shows a link between preferred musical genres and one's capacity for empathy.

What they found was, " those with a bias toward empathizing preferred mellow music that might fall within the genres of R&B and soft rock, while those who prefer genres such as heavy metal or hard rock tend to show a bias towards logic-based thinking, rather than showing empathy."  

Can  draw from that Republicans rock hard and Democrats rock lite?  Perhaps not but wait, there's more!

Another study found that what we might assume to be "stereotypically" true, for the most part, is true!   Self-assured people were more likely to enjoy positive music, those who seek excitement prefer higher arousal music, and those who are open-minded had a more general preference for music overall and were also more open to music that spanned genres.

Greater detail is written in The Hill and it's really interesting . I encourage you to check it out because as one researcher puts it, "The idea that music is solely entertainment, or even just a pure aesthetic experience, is very misguided. Music is a form of language. It’s part of human evolution, and it’s deeply embedded into our brains.”