For as long as orchestras have existed, musicians have traded a quiet folklore: that the people drawn to each instrument share a certain temperament. In the 1980s and 90s, the British music psychologist Anthony Kemp spent roughly ten years putting that folklore to the test — measuring hundreds of musicians against established personality inventories (Cattell's 16PF, Eysenck's scales, the Myers-Briggs framework) and publishing the results in his landmark book The Musical Temperament: Psychology and Personality of Musicians (Oxford, 1996).
His central findings, echoed by a line of other researchers, were surprisingly consistent. Players of string and woodwind instruments tended to be more introverted, emotionally sensitive, and conscientious — with string players showing the most pronounced inward, perfectionist streak, and a touch more anxiety. Players of brass, along with pianists and organists, tended toward extraversion, confidence, and social ease. Percussionists shared the brass players' outward, high-energy, "tough-minded" cast. Singers scored highest of all in extraversion, sensitivity, and independence. Kemp framed the whole picture around four great axes: introversion, independence, sensitivity, and anxiety.
A second, larger body of work asks a related question: not what we play, but what we listen to. In 2003, psychologists Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling analysed the music preferences of over 3,500 people and found that taste in music is not random — it clusters into a handful of dimensions, each linked, gently but measurably, to personality. Their four dimensions have anchored the field ever since:
Reflective & Complex (classical, jazz, folk, blues) — tied most strongly to Openness: imagination, love of aesthetic experience, intellectual curiosity. Intense & Rebellious (rock, alternative, metal, punk) — also linked to Openness, and to a taste for intensity and sensation. Upbeat & Conventional (pop, country) — linked to Extraversion and Agreeableness, and inversely to Openness. Energetic & Rhythmic (hip-hop, dance, electronic, R&B) — linked to Extraversion and outgoing, sociable energy.
And, as with instruments, the arrow runs both ways: we are drawn to music that mirrors who we are, and then the music, and the identity we build around it, keep shaping us in turn.
A note in good faith: these are fascinating tendencies, not iron laws. The links are real but modest — group averages, weak-to-moderate correlations, and studies that sometimes fail to replicate. Treat what follows as a mirror to think with, not a verdict. Play, and see what rings true.
Almost everyone has felt it: a moment in a song when a wave passes over the skin, the hair on the arms lifts, a shiver runs down the spine. It has a name — frisson, or "musical chills" — and it is not a figure of speech. It is a measurable event in the body, and for a long time it was a genuine scientific puzzle: why should an abstract pattern of sound — no food, no warmth, no touch, nothing the body actually needs — trigger a physical thrill of pleasure at all?
In 2011, a team at McGill University led by Valorie Salimpoor and Robert Zatorre answered a large part of it. Scanning the brains of people at the exact instant of a chill, they found that music floods the striatum with dopamine — the same reward chemical released by food, money, and other things evolution built us to pursue. This was the first direct proof that a purely abstract reward, a mere arrangement of tones, can move the ancient machinery of pleasure as powerfully as anything physical. It is part of why music appears in every human culture that has ever been found.
But the deepest finding was subtler, and it reaches back into everything this page is about. The scan showed two separate moments, in two different brain pathways: one burst of dopamine in the seconds of anticipation, just before the peak — and a second, distinct burst at the peak itself. In other words, a great part of the pleasure is not in the beautiful chord. It is in the instant before it, when your brain has predicted it is coming and is leaning toward it. The chill lives in the space between expectation and arrival — which is exactly the space that music, with its tension and its resolution, is built to stretch.
This is why frisson so often strikes at a precise kind of moment: not when music does what you expect, and not when it is pure chaos, but when it breaks a pattern it first taught you to expect — a sudden key change, an unexpected harmony, a voice that soars past where you thought the line would end, a silence held a beat too long. The pleasure is the reward for a prediction met in a way you did not quite see coming. Your brain wagered on what came next, and the music paid out with interest.
Not everyone feels chills, and that difference is real rather than a matter of trying harder. Research links a greater tendency toward frisson to openness to experience — the same trait, from the personality science above, that draws people toward reflective and complex music. Those who feel the shiver most tend to be those who listen inward, who attend closely to the structure of what they hear rather than letting it pass as background. If music reliably lifts the hair on your arms, it is a quiet sign that you are not merely hearing it. You are following it — predicting, leaning, waiting — and being answered.