Music preferences as signs of who we are - Personality and social factors

Abstract

Recent research shows that music preferences can be summarized by four dimensions and these dimensions are associated with certain personality characteristics, analyzed according to the five factor theory of personality. However, when directly asked to describe listeners of different musical genres, respondents make limited reference to personality characteristics. When classification of musical genres familiar to university students in Turkey by factor analysis and by judgments of similarity are compared, five main groups emerge. One group, which may be similar to the “folk” dimension that emerged in some studies with west European samples although it was missing in the North American data, subsumes styles indigenous to Turkey. Some styles such as techno, underground, blues, Turkish art music and another Turkish genre called Arabesk are classified differently depending on the method used. The comparison of personality profiles with perceived qualities of genres and their listeners do show some consistencies but some styles that appear similar may appeal to very different kinds of persons. Studying the relationship between music preferences and person variables would benefit from including a variety of measures, different cultures, and both target person and perceiver perspectives.