Does Your Musical Preference Reflect Your Intelligence?

Maybe (h/t Reader Sam):

He found that “net of age, race, sex, education, family income, religion, current and past marital status and number of children, more intelligent Americans are more likely to prefer instrumental music such as big band, classical and easy listening than less-intelligent Americans.” In contrast, they were no more likely to enjoy the other, vocal-heavy genres than those with lower intelligence scores.

A similar survey was given as part of the British Cohort Study, which includes all babies born in the U.K. the week of April 5, 1970. In 1986, when the participants were 16 years old, they were asked to rate their preference for 12 musical genres. They also took the same verbal intelligence test.

Like the Americans, the British teens who scored high marks for intelligence were more likely than their peers to prefer instrumental music, but no more likely to enjoy vocal selections.

Now, Beethoven symphonies are far more complex than pop songs, so an obvious explanation for these findings is that smarter people crave more complicated music. But Kanazawa doesn’t think that’s right. His crunching of the data suggests that preference for big-band music “is even more positively correlated” with high intelligence than classical compositions.

“It would be difficult to make the case that big-band music is more cognitively complex than classical music,” he writes. “On the other extreme, as suspected, preference for rap music is significantly negatively correlated with intelligence. However, preference for gospel music is even more strongly negatively correlated with it. It would be difficult to make the case that gospel is less cognitively complex than rap.”

I could take offense at the gospel music crack, except that this author has previous done a study which suggested that the more intelligent one is the more likely they are to be atheists and liberals. He clearly has a bias against things religious.

Also, gospel music is a term which can mean several things, and I have a feeling he's referring more to what we would know as "black gospel" rather than all religious music. There's a big difference between the black gospel style and the Southern Gospel style I've sung for almost 40 years (that's my story and I'm sticking to it).

Music preference is also has cultural roots depending on the environment in which you've been raised.  A person who has been raised around classical music, as I was and my kids were, are a lot more likely to find an interest in it.  Both my kids listen to classical music as a first preference and have never been interested in any form of popular music...and certainly not rap or hip/hop.  Neither was I, though my first preference became Southern Gospel when I was first exposed to groups like the Blackwood Brothers and the Oak Ridge Boys when I was about 15 (the Oaks were the number one group in Southern Gospel at the time and didn't jump to country until several years later).

Interestingly, although I didn't care much for pop music at the time, I rather enjoy listening to 70's stuff (except disco) now.  I guess it's the connection to my high school and early college days that makes that music fun to listen to today.

The author's theories are interesting, but I wouldn't make too many judgments about intelligence based on them.