On the Interplay between Musical Preferences and Personality through the Lens of Language
This work bridges computational linguistics, music psychology, and personality analysis, but is incremental as it connects existing research domains.
The study investigated whether musical preferences are reflected in language through personality traits, using a dataset of 500,000 text samples from 5,000 authors, and found significant personality differences across five musical genres.
Music serves as a powerful reflection of individual identity, often aligning with deeper psychological traits. Prior research has established correlations between musical preferences and personality, while separate studies have demonstrated that personality is detectable through linguistic analysis. Our study bridges these two research domains by investigating whether individuals' musical preferences leave traces in their spontaneous language through the lens of the Big Five personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism). Using a carefully curated dataset of over 500,000 text samples from nearly 5,000 authors with reliably identified musical preferences, we build advanced models to assess personality characteristics. Our results reveal significant personality differences across fans of five musical genres. We release resources for future research at the intersection of computational linguistics, music psychology and personality analysis.