Potpourri Reverie

Message In A Ballad

alchemyjones:

I was reading about a set of studies done by Samuel D. Gosling and Peter J. Rentfrow in my Personal Relationships class about the role that music can play in our relationships with others. The first study paired up 60 different university students with each other and told to converse with each other with no further instruction on what to discuss beyond talking about whatever would help them best get to know each other. The study lasted for 6 weeks and found that students discussed music more than all other subjects for 5 out of the 6 weeks (As shown in the graph below), demonstrating the prominent role music preference plays in the lives of young adults in industrialized countries and how it can be used to help persons establish identity and acquaintance:

The second study set out to see if music preference could actually speak about one’s personality and answer the questions, “Do a person’s music preferences convey a clear, consistent, and interpretable message about his or her personality? If so, how accurate is that message? And what features of these preferences convey the interpersonal information?” Participants were asked to make lists of their top 10 favourite songs, which were then compiled to mixed CD’s and distributed among observers who were tasked with ranking the participant’s various personality traits. Gosling et al. elaborate:

“… Observers might rely on specific features of a target’s music preferences (e.g., fast tempo) that could allow direct inferences about that target’s behaviors (active) and personality (extraverted). Second, judgments about a target could be less direct, influenced by a stereotype (e.g., heavy-metal fan) that is associated with a whole suite of traits (disagreeable and reckless).”

Along with a list of favourite songs, participants also provided a self-ratings on different personality dimensions. Interestingly, the traits found in the participant’s self-rating were very closely matched with the traits found in the observers’ analyses based solely on the content of the mixed CD.

I thought that this would be an interesting experiment to try on a platform like Tumblr. Obviously, most people reading your blog will have some impressions of your personality, but you have to admit, it would be pretty cool to see if all of this holds up, right? So, here’s what I’m asking people to do:

1. Write a brief self-summary of yourself. It doesn’t have to even be entire sentences, it could just be a list of traits. Try to keep it under 100 words and don’t publish it until the end.
2. Reblog this post with a list of your top 10 favourite songs and provide links to listen to all of them. (If you use YouTube links, try not to use music videos, as the study is not meant to analyze visual stimulation.) (As it turns out, finding YouTube links without videos is a lot harder than I thought it would be, so if you’re writing an analysis for someone, don’t watch the video.)
3. Ask that your followers or people reading the post on your blog to listen to the songs and message you with a brief summary of what they believe your personality to be like. Again, it could just be a list of traits or a summary under 100 words.
4. A day or two after posting your top 10, publish your self-summary with the messages you received from other people and see how they line up.

The study did not take lyrical content into account, so it may be interesting to see what affect that has on the outcome of this study. If the songs you chose have lyrics and you would like to, include your favourite lyric from the song on your list and see how that affect’s others’ perception of you.

My list, for example, would look like this:

1. Stars - Soft Revolution “Sing it when you feel alone/Backwards through the megaphone/Sing it to the ones you love/And the one’s you’d like to be rid of.”
2. Metric - Dead Disco “Touchdown, look around/Everyone’s the same/Worldwide, airtight/No one’s got a face left to blame”
3. Kylie Minogue - Better The Devil You Know “Say you won’t leave me no more/I’ll take you back again”
4. Tegan and Sara - So Jealous “How can they ask why I feel so angry?/Do you see my problem if I never explain it?”
5. Dragonette - Gold Rush “Please, you’ll never leave/What would you do without me?”
6. Beyoncé - Halo “I swore I’d never fall again/But this don’t even feel like falling”
7. Feist - Sealion “SEALION! SEALION! SEALION! SEALION!” (I guess this one doesn’t really have lyrics.)
8. Memphis - I Want The Lights On After Dark “Let me disappear/I was never here/I was never seen/On the LCD screen which replays your dreams”
9. Mother Mother - Simply Simple “Take me lightly/I am not the way I ought to be/I’m just the way I’ve got to be”
10. Florence + The Machine - Breaking Down “All alone even when I was a child/I’ve always known there was something to be frightened of/I can see it coming from the edge of the room”

I’d be curious to see what people think my taste in music says about me, so feel free to send me a message with what you think about me after hearing these songs.

I am reblogging myself because I spent 2 hours writing it and it only got 4 notes and goddammit it’s a good idea and there are 900 people reading this blog, SOMEBODY should actually do it.