Does personality affect your musical ability? Yes

by Terry Robson October 23, 2015

Your personality determines many things; it influences how many parties you are invited to, it can influence your nickname (isn’t that right Shifty?), and it influences whether you buy that steel blue business suit or the paisley blouse. Now new research shows that your personality can also impact your musical ability, not your musical preference, your capacity to play or produce music.

Of course your personality has an influence on what sort of music you prefer. In this column we reported a study earlier this year showing that people who scored high on empathy tended to prefer mellow music (from R&B, soft rock, and adult contemporary genres), unpretentious music (from country, folk, and singer/songwriter genres) and contemporary music (from electronica, Latin, acid jazz, and Euro pop). Empathic thinkers also disliked punk and heavy metal. By contrast people who were “systemisers” (having an interest in understanding the rules that govern things such as the weather, music, or engines) preferred music that was high energy, full of positive emotions, and featuring a high degree of cerebral complexity.

It makes sense that as your personality varies so do your musical tastes but this study has taken things a step further by indicating that personality impacts your musical abilities as well.

It makes sense that as your personality varies so do your musical tastes but this study has taken things a step further by indicating that personality impacts your musical abilities as well.

Conventional wisdom has it that it takes 10,000 hours of practise to become an expert in anything but these researchers wanted to see whether personality might play just as big a role as persistent effort when it comes to musicality. To test this researchers from the University of Cambridge and Goldsmiths University recruited 7,000 subjects and tested them on various musical abilities such as melodic memory and rhythm perception. Performance on these tests was then correlated with outcomes on tests to measure the big five personality traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness.

The results showed that aside from musical experience the next best predictor of musical ability was personality and specifically scoring high on openness. The trait of “openness” involves being imaginative, having a wide range of interests, and being open to new ways of thinking and changes in your environment. People who score low on openness tend to be set in their ways, prefer routine, and have conventional values.

The other link to musical ability was that people who scored high on extraversion tended to self-report higher singing abilities: these are the ones you can’t get off the karaoke stage, so no real surprises there.

So what the researchers have shown is that you can have musicality in non-musicians. Maybe we need to rework the phrase; maybe it shouldn’t be “practise makes perfect” but should be “personality makes perfect” instead?