Beethoven or Beyonce? Charlie Parker or Carly Simon? Rachmaninoff or Radiohead? There are 1264 types of modern music, so how do you choose what to listen to? Virgil Griffith thinks he has the answer: it depends on how dumb you are. The software application writer wondered if there is a link between intelligence and musical taste. “I’ve listened to artists who after listening to I thought to myself ‘Wow… loving this rubbish says a lot about someone and how much they got going on in their head.’ Could one’s musical tastes say something about intelligence? How about SAT scores?” he writes on his website Musicthatmakesyoudumb
It should be noted that the tabulations were done in 2009, which is why Lorde, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry are not on the list. Ranking musical genres, Indie is listened to by the smartest people, Soca by the dumbest. Griffith notes some of the more interesting finds. “Counting Crows is an interesting one near the top of the list. However, when Princeton, Duke, Williams, and UPenn make up ~20% of the weight you’d expect a high average score. Beethoven wins by a LAND SLIDE of about 120 points. Further, the difference between ‘Beethoven’ and ‘Classical’ is about 400 points. Unbeknownst to me when beginning this study, the California Institute of Technology actually has the highest average SAT score of any institution in the world. As a Caltech Ph.D. student, this pleased me immensely. MIT, at #6, can suck it.”
