Listening To Sad Or 'Downer' Lyrics Might Mean You're Smarter

A paper published in the Journal of Intelligence has found that people who listen to music with less emotionally positive lyrics appear to have slightly higher levels of projected intelligence. 

Scientists tracked the smartphone activity of 185 participants over five months, creating a custom app to check the kinds of music they listened to. 

The researchers also asked the people involved to take a test, which measured their fluid reasoning, vocabulary comprehension, and math knowledge. Combined, these gave the study authors a way to measure their cognitive ability.

By the end of the analysis, which involved advanced machine learning tasked with finding links between participants’ music taste and their cognitive test scores, they found “small but reliable associations”. 

Lyrics seemed to matter most

The participants listened to 58,247 songs overall. 

Speaking to PsyPost, study author Larissa Susst said: “When we looked more closely at how our prediction models worked and which aspects of music listening were most informative, one finding surprised us.

“The lyrics of the songs people listened to were more useful for predicting cognitive ability than the musical features... In other words, the themes and language used in the lyrics seemed to matter more than aspects like tempo or musical key.” 

She added that this finding went against previous research, which suggested genre might be a better predictor of predicted intelligence.

While the difference wasn’t huge, lyrics with a “less positive emotional tone” were more strongly linked to higher intelligence in this study. The study authors point out that other papers have linked this to introspection and self-reflection.

And songs whose lyrics focused on the present, those which seemed honest, and those which related to home were also associated with higher cognitive ability. 

Those who liked lyrics with more social words and less certain language were likelier to have lower cognitive scores, meanwhile. 

Bear in mind, though, that the paper said their “predictive performance was modest”, and that the variance in predicted intelligence was relatively small.

Live vs studio-recorded music may matter too 

Another surprising finding was that those who listened to studio-recorded music tended to have higher cognitive scores than people who listened to live recordings.

Listening to more music, and lyrics not in German (the participants were German speakers), was also associated with higher cognitive scores. 

“In our study, 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,” Sust said. 

But the differences were so small that she cautioned, “On their own, these effects are therefore likely not strong enough to be practically useful,” and were more likely to become “meaningful if combined with many other types of behavioural data”.