The Pop Corporation

Science has vaguely been doing its thing again, crunching some numbers and then spewing out some kind of finding. These findings we’re talking about here are by no means definitive, but we’ll talk about them anyway, because it’s funny to so.

Apparently, according to boffins, being a musician makes you more attractive to possible suitors. Do you want a source for that? Get stuffed. This ain’t that kind of show. Actually, it is and we’re just yanking your chain but you won’t click the link anyhoo BUT in a recent paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, an Austrian research group aimed to study the evolutionary origins of musical prowess, and its relation to Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. RAWK ‘N’ ROLL!

Any road, these science folk have a theory that traits are passed on through generations (that’d be the Darwin bit, right?) and it’s all about attracting a potential mate. Attraction is the key word here, rather than survival. Like those fancy little birds that arrange stones and twigs in the forest while showing off to another fancy little bird.

The study has a long title, like a ’60s psychedelic band with a point to prove: “Darwin’s sexual selection hypothesis revisited: Musicality increases sexual attraction in both sexes.” Could’ve been longer, but regardless, the study asked a sample of 23 male and 35 female students, all of them heterosexual. Presumably those that aren’t heterosexual don’t do ‘attraction’.

Participants were shown images of people from the opposite sex, while recordings of piano music was playing simultaneously, which was claimed to be performed by the person in the picture. Sneaky. They were asked to smash or pass on these images, asked about the likelihood of a date, a one-night stand, a long-term relationship and all that, and they punched in the numbers.

There was a control group too, where the pictures had no suggestion of musical prowess. Basically, what happened was everyone kinda fancied those they thought were musical over the ones that weren’t.

They clearly didn’t poll anyone who has been gaslit by a bass player from a Cramps-a-like band, or had a terribly abusive relationship with someone who was in a mid-tier indie band from the ’90s, eh? That all said, there’s something quite funny in the results. We’ll let you read it first and see if you spot it, and then we’ll make our judgements.

Let’s write a quote from the study in big letters, to give it some credibility.

“Musicality […] can influence the perception of attractiveness of opposite-sex faces and dating desirability mostly among females. Males appear to be less influenced by music when rating female faces.”

“Music is part of every human culture. As music psychologists, we try to get a better understanding of how music affects our feelings and thoughts as well as our behaviour. Our research field keeps growing worldwide.”

Notice how men weren’t so taken with female musicians there? On some granular level, they were probably assuming they knew more about music than them because they had a Velvet Underground poster in their student halls that one time, or indeed, a bit of their DNA may think that female musicians are somehow the result of another man’s intervention.

Anyway, lol. People can be crap, this whole thing either proves nothing or confirms what we already thought, but music is ace and so is poking fun at everything, so we’re basically no wiser for this entire endeavour.