Youth Incorporated Magazine

One’s taste in Music is believed to define their personality. You might listen to your parent’s 90s’ playlist, your cousin’s, or your friend’s playlist but you might not pay attention to the taste of the music they like. A recent research paper even suggested that one’s personality can be very much determined only by listening to their playlist rather than their age, gender, cultural background, or socioeconomic status.

It is not complete to say that a music playlist will be able to reveal your personality completely to the world but can help in understanding it. According to studies the music genres are not divided scientifically but to understand the types of music they identified three dimensions of music which are:- Arousal, Valence, and Depth.

Talking about these three dimensions:-

• Arousal is considered to be songs that soothe you or lift your spirits. In simple words think about the music one would like to listen to when on a run or in a gym.

• Valence has attached to it the emotional spectrum. Positive valence songs are referred to as happy songs. The lyrics, tunes, and presentations bring out joy. If a tune is negative then it falls under sorrow. Think of the ballad that tells about the spectrum from wrong to right.

• Depth is considered to be songs with complexity. These songs talk from different perspectives with little complicated tunes or lyrics. These songs are not considered bad at all, it’s just the lyrics or complex tunes that make it difficult for some to understand the music.

Many experiments have been done to find out what can be one’s personality in terms of these dimensions mentioned above. It was a little tricky task to find personality for some people because the dimensions happen to be a mixture of all three, which was interesting to others. To gather information about such people, researchers then tried to look after their daily routine like when people work out, drive, cook, work, etc, what is that one song that keeps on playing on a loop from their playlist, if a particular song scores high they would be ‘maybe’ sure about one of the music dimension that particular person would fall. This experiment was a kind of success in most of the cases, but exceptions are always present. 

We mostly judge the music taste of someone by their social status, gender, age, etc. It is said that people with adventurous and liberal thoughts like to listen to joyful songs, however, people with high neurotic tendencies would prefer music with high levels of intensity and sadness. It is also published in a research paper that people with a sensitive heart and caring nature would like to listen to low tunes, intensity, and peaceful songs. Although it is not fixed that what your taste in music is today will not change in the future. Time flows, from a person to its surroundings everything changes. One can not be sure to not get influenced by something or someone and according to it the taste in music also changes. Some people prefer listening to old music even with evolving time because of their natural comfort with those songs, they would not prefer to come out of their comfort zone. Change in the taste of music sometimes also refers to change in the personality of an individual too, for example, you sometimes start to like your friend’s playlist if he/she happens to be your good friend, your taste might get influence from source to source and so on. 

This concept of finding someone’s tastes and preference is altogether an interesting theory, you can never be sure by just one pattern because a person can be a secrete disco fanatic and also can be full of sensitivity or joy. 

It’s perfectly okay to enjoy any music that you find good to listen, just flow with it. It will also help you understand who you can vibe with. Next time someone makes you listen to their playlist, listen to it more carefully. It will tell you a lot about that person.