Music preferences 2023

Instrumental electronic, hard rock, weird remixes, beautiful movie music, and odd stuff

Anon asks on Twitter:

i'm just curious. what's your favorite genre of music?

It seems like a good diversion from the usual serious posting on the blog. What I listen to depends heavily on context. For working, I listen almost exclusively to instrumental music because I find that this interfere less with my pattern of thought. Mainly I listen to di.fm's e-radio channels:

I am mostly fond of the dark drum and bass channel. It has music like this stuff:

For walking around solo, I like the jazz channels:

Mostly I like the Piano Trios channel, which is also mostly instrumental. Smooth jazz is better for background music for socializing. And speaking of music for socializing, some stuff I like:

Dizzy Mizz Lizzy. Danish 90s rock (in English).

D-A-D, also Danish rock, is also good:

Foreigners will not benefit from this, but Red Warszawa is excellent Danish language drinking music:

Many evenings were spent "warming up" (with vodka and cheap beer) to go to a bar by first listening to the best "hits" from Red Warszawa, then eventually never leaving the apartment. It takes a while to listen through all the hits (Hurra skolen brænder, Mosekonen Brygger, Analfabet, Lugter af fisk, Børn er dumme og grimme, Aldi, Singelingeling, Slå ihjel, Satanisk kommunisme, Fjæsing, Sindssyg af natur, Nord for nordkap, Julemandens selvmordsbrev, osv!).

Other than Danish music, there's the usual classic rock songs. Pink Floyd:

Led Zeppelin:

The Doors:

Jimi Hendrix:

Black Sabbath:

Rolling Stones:

Other than rock, I particularly like the modern synthwave stuff, such as Kavinsky:

As well as the more exotic variants, Xurious is a fun right-wing artist:

His stuff is a bit hard to find because Youtube censored him after the Brexit/Trump victories. Another awesome song (Rivers of blood):

A similar artist is Daniel Deluxe:

This music is also instrumental so good for working.

Another Danish artist I enjoy is Trentemøller, mostly the older stuff:

His newer stuff is more chill, which makes it better for background music than work music in my tastes.

Old Deadmau5 is also excellent:

Jungle can also be decent, Hilight Tribe:

Getting into the more obscure stuff, this song is an all time favorite I've listened to since I was a child and my dad had the LP (City):

I speak German but I can't understand what he's saying. Too much east German dialect.

Speaking of German, Kraftwerk is an all time favorite as well:

And speaking of German music, a classic (Trio):

Semi-related, but Pendulum's remix of The Prodigy's Voodoo people is excellent and crazy music video:

In a more chill vein, I love this old, obscure Santana song:

Going into the rock again, I like especially Metallica's old 4 albums before they turned too boring in the Reload-Load era:

I enjoy old disco songs, and especially modern remixes of them, e.g. Donna Summer:

On the more soft, classical side, I love Morricone and these Danish national symphony versions are top tier:

For singing along, I especially enjoy the old stuff featured in e.g. Fallout 3:

In general, I am particularly fond of weird remixes, say, Eminem, but in medieval style:

Or weird Finns (Steve'n'Seagulls) playing 80s rock in bluegrass style:

The serious part

You could use the above as inspiration, but you could also try to psychoanalyze me. After all, everybody believes that music tastes relate to psychological variation. In fact, one might use music preferences as a covert personality measure. A good starting point is something like this (Rentgrow Gosling 2003, 70ish students from USA, Texas):

The present research examined individual differences in music preferences. A series of 6 studies investigated lay beliefs about music, the structure underlying music preferences, and the links between music preferences and personality. The data indicated that people consider music an important aspect of their lives and listening to music an activity they engaged in frequently. Using multiple samples, methods, and geographic regions, analyses of the music preferences of over 3,500 individuals converged to reveal 4 music-preference dimensions: Reflective and Complex, Intense and Rebellious, Upbeat and Conventional, and Energetic and Rhythmic. Preferences for these music dimensions were related to a wide array of personality dimensions (e.g., Openness), self-views (e.g., political orientation), and cognitive abilities (e.g., verbal IQ).

The correlations are not generally impressive in size:

The strongest predictor is openness to experience and liking classical, jazz, and blues (reflective and complex), IQ relates a bit to that too (.19 verbal).

Faster rock music is mostly associated with intelligence (.19), and openness (.16).

To Hanania's satisfaction, conservative music á la country, pop and religious music has a slight negative association with intelligence (-.18), and somewhat stronger with political conservatism (.24). Rap and hip-hop is mostly associated with extroversion (.20), but not with intelligence (odd).

To make sure these aren't just odd results, let's look at a second study (Raćevska Tadinac 2018, Czech high school students, n = 460):

Music is a component of human culture of a historically universal presence. Enjoyed by many and irrelevant to few, music continuously receives interest from academia and the public alike. Capable of uniting, as well as dividing, music is often in a focus of individual comparisons. In this study, we combine the approaches of evolutionary and social psychology to investigate the relationship between intelligence, music preferences, and uses of music. We collected data from 467 high school students. We used the Nonverbal Sequence Test, the Uses of Music Questionnaire, and the Scale of Music Preferences. Confirming our expectations based on the Savanna-IQ interaction hypothesis, we found intelligence to be a significant predictor of the preference for instrumental music, but not of the preference for vocal-instrumental music. Furthermore, we revealed the significant role of cognitive use of music as a predictor of the preference for instrumental music. We conducted factor analysis of the Scale of Music Preferences, and revealed five factors: reflective, popular, conservative, intense, and sophisticated. We also found the cognitive use of music to be significantly correlated with the preference for instrumental music, as well as music of reflexive, intense and sophisticated factors. Taken together, our findings support the Savanna-IQ interaction hypothesis.

Their classification factor analysis:

And the associations with intelligence:

So even in Czechia, conservative music is negatively associated with IQ, hard rock stuff positively, and sophisticated (classical, opera) positively. These associations probably generalize well among Europeans at least. The various Asian music genres were not studied in these studies, not that I listen to them. Electronic music did not fall well within their classification scheme, perhaps because boomer professors don't know what younger people listen to, so they didn't ask properly about it.

Personally, I play the drums, and mostly play improvisation with funk or techno elements. I guess I should record a video of this and post it at some point

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