A new study published in the Journal of Intelligence suggests that a person's everyday music listening habits contain subtle clues about their general cognitive ability. Scientists discovered that the lyrics of the songs provide more insight into their intelligence than the musical beats or melodies do. These findings provide evidence that the digital footprints we leave behind could help approximate cognitive skills without formal testing.
Traditional intelligence assessments rely on formal tests. Yet, cognitive abilities are used constantly to navigate the complexities of everyday life. With smartphones capturing so much of what we do, researchers saw an opportunity to study cognitive ability in a natural setting. They chose to focus on music listening because it is a very common daily activity.
To conduct the study, the researchers tracked the smartphone usage of 185 participants over five months. These participants also completed a short cognitive ability test on their smartphones. This test measured their capacity for fluid reasoning, vocabulary comprehension, and mathematical knowledge. Over the course of the study, the participants listened to 58,247 unique songs. The researchers gathered detailed information about these tracks, extracted audio characteristics, and analyzed the lyrical content.
To analyze this data, the researchers employed machine learning. The computer models detected a small but reliable link between a person's music listening behavior and their cognitive test scores. The most informative predictors were not the musical sounds, but the words within the songs.
"One finding surprised us," study author Larissa Sust said. "The lyrics of the songs people listened to were more useful for predicting cognitive ability than the musical features. The themes and language used in the lyrics seemed to matter more than aspects like tempo or musical key."
Specifically, the models found that people who listened to songs with less positive emotional tones tended to have higher predicted intelligence scores. The researchers suggest that sad or melancholic music might appeal to those who use music for introspection. Songs with lyrics focused on the present moment were also associated with higher cognitive ability. On the other hand, preferring lyrics with many social words tended to predict lower intelligence scores.
Furthermore, a preference for songs with low liveness was a strong predictor of higher intelligence. Sust explained: "Patterns in people's music listening contained small but detectable signals related to their cognitive ability, suggesting that the digital traces we leave behind in daily life could potentially help approximate intelligence."