If Only It Were True!

I have posted a lot of times about the odd claims about music that come out from time to time. But now TDAmeritrade, an online brokerage owned by the Toronto Dominion Bank, has done an interesting sort of survey: Your taste in music says a lot about your bank account.

The richest Americans may be way more likely to listen to classical music — which could include Beethoven, Mozart and Bach — than the rest of us. Indeed, those who listened to classical reported that they raked in an average income of more than $114,000 per year, compared to just $58,000 for country music fans (the lowest of those measured), according to a survey of 1,500 millennials released this month by TDAmeritrade. TD Ameritrade said that it believes this finding will hold true for all age groups.

I suppose this is good news, if true. It means that board members of classical music organizations like symphony orchestras and opera should be able to find affluent patrons. Yahoo! It is also interesting that it was millennials that were surveyed. Why do they think that this would hold true for other age groups? Not stated, so perhaps doubtful.

But then the brief article goes on to cite some other research that is certainly doubtful:

Indeed, listening to classical music may help improve your academic performance, according to a study published in the journal Learning and Individual Differences. The researchers found that 
students who listened to an hour lecture with classical music playing in the background 
scored significantly higher on a quiz on the topic, than did those who didn’t hear any music.

The reason that lectures are typically NOT given with classical music (or any other kind) playing in the background is because it is a bad idea. Any extraneous sounds like music, construction, traffic, jets flying overhead, would be distracting if you were trying to focus on what a lecturer was saying. This is why university campuses are so typically quiet. If we were given more details we might be able to see how they got these odd results. The article ends with yet another study with the opposite results:

Of course, there’s also plenty of research to show that classical music isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Some research, for example, has found that silence is actually the key to being productive.

So, points for mentioning a contrasting view. The real truth is that statistics are very often highly misleading due to a host of factors: small changes in the way surveys are presented can lead to widely differing results. Different questions give different findings. In contexts like the above, different classical music can lead to hugely different results. Imagine, for example, that the subjects heard a lecture with loud Stravinsky as opposed to muted Vivaldi. Different results? You bet! Whenever I hear the claim made that listening to Mozart makes infants smarter I always say, "ok, now let's redo the experiment with Bach!"

The question that really nags at me is why an online brokerage would be surveying millennials about their musical taste? What if they discovered that the richest among them were, instead of classical fans, actually country music fans? What are they going to do? Change their on-hold music? Offer a country music ETF built around Martin Guitars? It's kind of inexplicable.

Let's wind this up with some Vivaldi. This is violinist Rachel Podger and Arte dei Suonatori playing "La Stravaganza" Concerto no.2 in E minor, RV 279 by Antonio Vivaldi: