What your taste in music says about your personality 
When people ask: ‘What kind of music do you like to listen to?’, I often don't know how to answer that. It feels to me like a kind of control question, so that someone can determine how I am based on that. My music list is quite diverse, just like a person consists of multiple colors. There are melancholic songs in it (which I like to listen to in order to torment myself), but also plenty of cheesy pop hits. So I could answer that I love indie rock, but I could also say that I enjoy listening to Justin Bieber. Both answers are true, but they present a totally different picture. So yes, what does this actually say about me? Usually, I just respond with: ‘Well, actually everything really.’
Still, I am curious to what extent your taste in music actually says something about your personality. Music is a form of expression and can move people, but a song that makes me burst into tears might do absolutely nothing for someone else. And the reverse is also true: people go completely wild at festivals on dubstep (electronic dance music), while I myself end up having a panic attack from this music genre. So there must undoubtedly be a link between your personality and taste in music. But how does this process actually come about?
Research shows that your taste in music not only says something about your personality but also about the structure of your brain. For this research, the scientists surveyed about four thousand people via Facebook. They began by asking people in the study about aspects of their personality, where the researchers distinguished between empathetic thinking and systematic thinking. In the first way of thinking, you take a lot of account of the feelings of others, and in the second way of thinking, you are mainly focused on recognizing and predicting patterns. The more empathy you possess, the more you pay attention to feelings in the music, and the more systematic your thinking is, the more you pay attention to music patterns and melody. Additionally, the participants listened to music fragments from different genres. It emerged that more empathetic people enjoy calm music, such as soft rock, R&B, and soul. More specifically: they like to listen to soft, warm, emotional, and poetic music with a negative tone. The group that thinks in a more systematic way, on the other hand, prefers loud and intense music, such as punk, heavy metal bands, and hard rock, in other words: fast music with a lot of vibrations and a more positive tone. So taste in music actually says something about a person on an emotional level. That explains why I dislike intense and loud music: I am just an emotional wreck and therefore pay more attention to feelings in the music.
When people ask: 'What kind of music do you like to listen to?', I often don't know how to answer that. It feels to me like a kind of control question, so that someone can determine based on that.
What your taste in music says about your personality: Amayzine.com.
