It turns out there’s a link between your favourite music and your moral compass. It’s science!

A new study published on PLOS One says that your musical preference has a connection to your personal sense of morality. Entitled “Soundscapes of morality: Linking music preferences and moral values through lyrics and audio,” it says that date proves that music can have a major effect on how we view the world and how we behave in it.

Using machine learning, a team of scientists at Queen Mary University of London and ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy, analyzed the lyrical content and audio qualities of hundreds (including lexicon-based approaches and BERT-based embeddings, to identify each song’s narrative, moral valence, attitude, and emotions”) and managed to draw connections between the music and an individual’s moral compass.

Dr. Charalampos Saitis, a Lecturer in Digital Music Processing at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, and one of the lead authors of the study explained that in addition to the songs in the study, the 1,400 participants were given psychometric questionnaires designed to tease out who they were as a person. The boffins then asked for their top five favourite songs. Those tracks were then analyze for all those attributes and lines were drawn back the questionnaires.

I quote from Phys.org:

“Using ML algorithms, the team analyzed the extracted features to predict participants’ moral values. Various text processing techniques, including lexicon-based methods and BERT-based embeddings, were employed to analyze narrative, moral values, sentiment, and emotions in lyrics. Additionally, low- and high-level audio features provided via Spotify’s API were used to understand encoded information in participants’ musical choices, enhancing moral inferences.

“The results demonstrated that a combination of lyrical and audio features outperformed basic demographic information in predicting individuals’ moral compasses. Specifically, musical elements like pitch and timbre emerged as crucial predictors for values of Care and Fairness, while sentiments and emotions expressed in lyrics were more effective in predicting traits of Loyalty, Authority, and Purity.”

The gathered data is pretty dense. If you want to slog through it, go here.