Over the past two weeks I have been involved in a music psychology project that was the brainchild of an insurance company called Quotemehappy.com. They were interested to look at the relationship between musical genre preferences and driving behaviour across a large sample of UK drivers. The company hired a polling organisation to run a questionnaire across over 2000 members of the public and then sent the data to me. What did we find? Aggression: Some of the results replicated those reported in an article that I wrote with Nikki Dibben (Dibben & Williamson, 2007). People who listen to drum and bass and heavy metal music were more likely than…

This week I had a very nice email from a gentleman who is kind enough (much like you, dear reader) to glance over my blog now and then. This student was embarking on a music psychology project at his college and he wanted to ask me a simple question to help him develop his project ideas: Why do different people like different types of music?   Well, after reading the question I sat at my computer for a minute or two spouting off ideas like a slot machine fires out coins when you hit the jackpot. Where to begin?! So may things influence how people come to form musical preferences;…