Science is endeavoring to be able to tell things about a person just based on what music they listen to....

The fundamental question guiding our research program is, Why do people listen to music? Although the answer to this question is undoubtedly complex and beyond the scope of a single article, we attempt to shed some light on the issue by examining music preferences. In this research we take the first crucial steps to developing a theory of music preferences--a theory that will ultimately explain when, where, how, and why people listen to music.

[link]

I haven't had the time to read the whole thing yet....

Funny, I wrote something similar on my blog about Library Thing, but I think the caveat is that your aesthetic choices only say something definitive about you if you really care about aesthetics. The fact that this study only interviewed undergraduates, who are (or at least were when I was an undergrad) most likely to self-identify with a sub-culture based on its aesthetic trappings, seems to make it more likely to skew towards a high correlation between personality and aesthetic choices.

Let me also point out that statements like this...

In short, people who listen to jazz are smart, liberal, adventurous, and poor; people who listen to heavy metal are smart, liberal, adventurous, athletic, and prone to social dominance; people who listen to Madonna or the "Dancing With Wolves" soundtrack are agreeable, conscientious, conservative, rich, happy, dumb, emotionally unstable, and hot; and people who listen to hip hop are extraverted, agreeable, liberal, athletic, and hot. Well, those are the tendencies at least (I've known some smart Madonna fans, though I have to say that they were pretty emotionally unstable).

...make my skin crawl.

Let me also point out that statements like this...

Yeah, I hope that was the blogger way-overgeneralizing the results of the study - that paragraph really bothered me too.

Incidentally, this is what my iPod has served up since this morning:

Boris - "Pink"
Deerhoof - "Aho Bomb"
Spoon - "Decora"
Jens Lekman - "Another Sweet Summer's Night on Hammer Hill"
Augustus Pablo - "Kid Ralph"
Miles Davis - "Yesternow"
Howlin' Wolf - "Red Rooster" (This Is Howlin' Wolf's New Album version)
cLOUDDEAD - "Jimmybreeze, Pt 2"
Devendra Banhart - "Fistful of Love"
The Go-Betweens - "Karen (Live)"
Minutemen - "Political Song For Michael Jackson To Sing"
Meat Puppets - "New Gods"

I think this means that I am angry, playful, assumptive, wistful, stoned, ambitious, revisionist, stoned, pansexual, nostalgic, wry, and supercharged. Like the rest of you.

In short, people who listen to jazz are smart, liberal, adventurous, and poor . . .

So what they really found was that the degree to which you say you like jazz-blues-classical music was correlated .1 with a little internet-type IQ test. I guess most people here know that a correlation of .1 very small: it means that by knowing a person's "intelligence" you can predict 1% of the variance in their music preferences. It does not mean that people who listen to jazz are smart. The correlation with how poor you are? It was .04, so income would account for less than two thousanths of the variance in music preferences, if .04 were reliably different from zero, which it was not in this sample. Anyway, it's all based on college students, so it probably only applies to them.

I heard an opera piece last sunday on Prairie Home Companion. It's immanently recognizable. I't been used in bunches of stuff. The singer they had was wonderful, and even though I'd arrived at my destination, I refused to get out of the car and turn off the engine until the piece was over.

It was driving me crazy that I couldn't just come into the thread and hum it for y'all, until someone identified it for me.

However, Google was once again my friend. It was the Habanera piece from Carmen.

Gloatage: You know who came to my house this evening to dine with family and friends and play Cities and Knights of Catan (the best damn game in the world) until 1 am?

If you guessed "Megan," you'd be right!

You know, if you really wanted to gloat, you might have mentioned your victory!

That's not the way Democrats play the game!

I, for one, am quite jealous. Two of my fave Buffistas in one place--Sweet!