Does music reflect IQ?

A preference for instrumental music indicates higher intelligence, research finds. People who like ambient music, smooth jazz, film soundtracks, classical music and similar genres without vocals tend to have higher IQs.

spring.org.uk - A Musical Sign Of High IQ - PsyBlog

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A Musical Sign Of High IQ

This is how your musical taste reveals your IQ.

A preference for instrumental music indicates higher intelligence, research finds.

People who like ambient music, smooth jazz, film soundtracks, classical music and similar genres without vocals tend to have higher IQs. While vocal music might be seen as the ‘opposite’ of instrumental music, liking vocal music has no link to IQ. In other words, many people with high IQs also like vocal music, but so do many with less impressive levels of intelligence.

The conclusions come from a survey of 1,500 people.

All were given IQ tests and asked about their preferences for eighteen musical genres.

The results showed that…

“…net of age, race, sex, education, family income, religion, current and past marital status and number of children, more intelligent Americans are more likely to prefer instrumental music such as big band, classical and easy listening than less-intelligent Americans.” A second similar survey of thousands of 16-year-olds and their musical preferences was carried out in the UK in the 1980s. This also found a link between high intelligence and a preference for instrumental music. One theory about why liking instrumental music is linked to high IQ is the cognitive complexity of the music.

However, the researchers found this couldn’t be true.

Opera, for example, is seen as complex, yet the people who like it are no more intelligent than those who don’t.

The study’s authors write:

“It would be difficult to make the case that big-band music is more cognitively complex than classical music. On the other extreme, as suspected, preference for rap music is significantly negatively correlated with intelligence. However, preference for gospel music is even more strongly negatively correlated with it. It would be difficult to make the case that gospel is less cognitively complex than rap.” Instead, the reason, according to Dr Satoshi Kanazawa, the study’s co-author, is that instrumental music is more novel. Music that is novel — in other words, developed more recently in evolutionary terms — tends to be preferred by people with higher IQs. The study was published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (Kanazawa & Perina, 2011).

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