Lyrics seemed to matter most

The participants listened to 58,247 songs overall. 

Speaking to PsyPost, study author Larissa Susst said: “When we looked more closely at how our prediction models worked and which aspects of music listening were most informative, one finding surprised us.

“The lyrics of the songs people listened to were more useful for predicting cognitive ability than the musical features… In other words, the themes and language used in the lyrics seemed to matter more than aspects like tempo or musical key.” 

She added that this finding went against previous research, which suggested genre might be a better predictor of predicted intelligence.

While the difference wasn’t huge, lyrics with a “less positive emotional tone” were more strongly linked to higher intelligence in this study. The study authors point out that other papers have linked this to introspection and self-reflection.

And songs whose lyrics focused on the present, those which seemed honest, and those which related to home were also associated with higher cognitive ability. 

Those who liked lyrics with more social words and less certain language were likelier to have lower cognitive scores, meanwhile. 

Bear in mind, though, that the paper said their “predictive performance was modest”, and that the variance in predicted intelligence was relatively small.