Your Taste in Music Can Reveal How Smart (or Dumb) You Are
from Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal
Your Taste in Music Can Reveal How Smart (or Dumb) You Are
Virgil Griffith,
popularly known for the Wikipedia Scanner that detects where the
Wikipedia edits are coming from, maintains another very interesting
project that maps musical tastes of college students with their
intelligences levels (determined by their SAT score).
The x-axis represent the SAT score while the colored boxes indicate the music
genre and the artist / composer.
Fans of Lil Wayne’s music scored the lowest in SAT while listeners of
Beethoven’s work were among the highest scorers. The full chart is available at
Music That Makes You Dumb.
To come up with this chart, Virgil used Facebook to determine the
"Favorite music" at different colleges in US and then combined it with
the average combined SAT scores of students from these colleges. He has
done a similar exercise for books as well.
The musical taste vs SAT score chart maps the 133 most popular (out
of 1,455) favorite music from 1,352 schools. In terms of music genres,
it follows like this - Soca < Gospel < Jazz < Hip Hop < Pop
< Oldies < Raggae < Alternative < Classical < R&B
< Rap < Rock < Country < Classic Rock < Techno in
increasing order of SAT scores.
