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.

PASSPORT.MID

| Sunday, March 15, 2009

Passport.mid. We all know it (if we all used to listen to the midi files regularly in the days of Windows 95...) but have we ever heard it live? I searched for it. But I didn't find it.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, just listen to these. I used to bump it to this back in '99.
http://nuggit.nu/music/songs/PASSPORT.MID
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNrcP7ejah0

Now, some band out there should play and record themselves playing this with real instruments.