Music vs Intelligence

| Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Results of the Study

Hilarious.

I don't totally agree with the way it was conducted--he took the average most popular music of each college from Facebook and then took the average SAT score from each college from CollegeBoard. That's way vague.

But the results are still pretty funny in how predictable they are. It clearly goes mindless top 40 at the low end of the SAT scores to pretentious prick music at the high end. Lil Wayne to Beethoven. TI to Radiohead.

On the schools page of the report, #615 (in order of average SAT) is Oregon Institute of Technology. Somewhat disappointing. Top artists are Jack Johnson, My Chemical Romance, Incubus, and Country. It's incredibly white music though, I guess that's not so surprising...

NoiseAddicts, where I found this first, brings up some interesting thoughts:

Of course the (unanswered) question is, what is the relationship? Do you choose music based on your intelligence? Surely your personality has something to do with musical tastes, doesn’t it? Can listening to certain types of music make you dumb or smart? Do people gravitate towards a certain type of music because they are smart and think that it will make them seem smarter?

Something a little more sophisticated than Facebook stats might be better to answer those questions.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow i didn't know college kids had such shitty taste in music.

dude if you wanna check out some awesome production type stuff, torrent "prefuse 73". he bleeds into rap a little with guest vocals, but it's mostly just radass hip-hop/techno-y/whatever beats.

ND said...

Oh yeah, I have two albums by Prefuse 73... I got them back when I was first getting into trip-hop type music. :D I have to be in the mood for it, but when I am, his stuff is definitely awesome.

And let me say, "college kids" have better taste than high schoolers, who have better taste than middle schoolers.

Anonymous said...

o you're way ahead of my curve. maybe dudes with Ph.D's will have amazing taste in music then. O.o