Being a software application writer must give you a lot of free time. That’s perhaps one explanation behind Virgil Griffith, who’s correlated musical tastes with the SAT scores of their fans. Here’s how he did it: via Facebook, he had a friend download the ten most frequent “favorite music” at colleges via their school’s Network Statistics page. Then he downloaded the average SAT score from CollegeBoard, for students attending the colleges. Griffith plotted the average SAT score with the 133 most popular entries for “favorite music” and the results are, well, results.
Here’s what it found: Beethoven is smart people music. Lil Wayne is really dumb people music. In between, there’s metal. While apparently, classical music was strong enough to be a top ten artist as some schools (we’re calling bullshit), there were only three metal nmbands that made the cut, Disturbed, Tool and System of a Down. If it sounds like the poll is from 2009, then you’re right. But the three metal bands fell right around the middle, meaning that techno, oldies, jazz and gospel are apparently listened to be people less intelligent than those three bands. It’s even odder when you see that while Beethoven listeners are apparently the most intelligent, classical music as a genre is pretty down there too. It’s pretty fun to look at, but it ultimately doesn’t mean anything.
[via Consequence of Sound]
