On the Interplay between Musical Preferences and Personality through the Lens of Language

TL;DR

This study explores how musical preferences influence language use and reflect personality traits, revealing significant differences across genres and advancing understanding in computational linguistics and psychology.

Contribution

It bridges music psychology and linguistic analysis by linking musical preferences to language patterns and personality traits using large-scale data and modeling.

Findings

Significant personality differences across musical genre fans

Language traces can predict personality traits

Resources released for future interdisciplinary research

Abstract

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.