Miles Davis or Mariah Carey? Your choice of music genre might be influenced by the amount of testosterone coursing through your body. Levels of this sex hormone have been linked to music taste, providing the first evidence that musical preference has a biological basis.
Most research into music tastes has focussed on the role of an individual’s personality, says , of Nagasaki University, Japan. “Extroverted people tend to like pop music, for example,” he says.
But could there be a biological explanation for such preferences? A range of hormones and brain chemicals could conceivably play a role, but Doi and his team decided to put testosterone to the test first, because this hormone has already been linked to personality traits and is known to affect brain regions involved in processing rewarding experiences.
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Working with colleagues in Japan and Italy, Doi recruited 37 male and 39 female volunteers – most of whom were students – and played them excerpts from 25 little-known pieces of music. Each person had to rate the excerpts on a 19-point scale based on how much they liked it, as well as providing a saliva sample, which the team used to measure their testosterone levels.
Rebellious tastes
On analysing their data, they found that male volunteers with higher testosterone were more likely to prefer kinds of music that the team had classed as “unsophisticated” – for example, soft rock or heavy metal. Male volunteers with lower testosterone levels were much more likely to prefer classical music and jazz – genres the team call more sophisticated.
You may not agree with the team’s descriptions of these genres. But this is the first evidence of a biological basis for music preference, says Doi.
He thinks testosterone might shape music taste by affecting brain regions like the amygdala, which helps process emotions, and areas that respond to rewarding and pleasurable experiences. “I think testosterone somehow influences the function of these regions,” he says, although he isn’t sure how – or why – this might be happening.
Other studies have found that men with high testosterone levels are more likely to act rebelliously. It’s possible that such young rebels opt for heavy metal and soft rock because it is not esteemed by their parents and teachers in the same way that classical music might be, says Doi.
“Independent of biology, the social environment and educational history of the participants, as well as the influence of their peers, parents and teachers are extremely important,” says , at the University of Vienna, Austria. “Testosterone is probably one tiny aspect of what music preference constitutes.”
Female factor
Doi says that, if his finding is confirmed, it is likely that other hormones can also influence our tastes – be it in music, art or design.
However, the team failed to find a link between testosterone and music taste in the female volunteers. This might be because the range in testosterone levels is narrower among women, says Doi, making it harder to detect in a relatively small study.
Testosterone also varies over the course of the menstrual cycle, says Nater, so an experiment would need to be designed to take this into account. “I don’t think they had the chance to find something relevant in women,” he says.
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