According to a new music personality test from Signal Patterns, they can codify your taste in music, give you music options to listen to and even connect you to people with similar music tastes by taking a five-dynamic music taste test from their Website. Signal Patterns is a team of scientists that are "developing a technology that gives people new ways to explore their personality, their preferences, and their relationships with the people around them." They are the folks behind some cool Facebook personality tests (if you dig that sort of fare).
My Signal Pattern
My music personality is: Aggressive, Loud, and Percussive. Here's what my FUSES model says:
FUSES stands for Forceful, Urban, Sophisticated, Earthy and Smooth. Your music traits cross music genres. For example. if one of your traits is “forceful”, you might like AC/DC’s "Back in Black," Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and Puff Daddy’s "Victory." Our research team has carefully chosen a small number of musical prototypes or “probes” that research has shown can help to better understand a given individual’s musical tastes. The prototypes are the result of more than 10 years of research using tens of thousands of respondents, both on the internet and in laboratory settings.
My Take: Clips were cheesy, but the technology has promise
They played 40 different 15 second clips which I had to rate each one on a scale. The scale was from "I really dislike" to "I really love". Many of the clips were cheesy, Muzak sounding tracks, which could account for why I scored so "aggro-ly". This test is supposed to look beyond tastes and get results from deeper in the brain. I don't totally agree with it, but the test was a fun way to spend 4 minutes and if enough people take it, could lead to some interesting data that bands and labels can use to launch new music. Check it out for yourself.
Take the Test:http://www.signalpatterns.com/music_survey
Enjoy. Share.
Ivan
This article appears in Feb 4-10, 2009.