Death Metal Favoured By The Brainiest
A survey conducted amongst students at the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (yes, it does exist)Â has revealed that many of them rated death metal as one of their favourite genres. Musical styles such as jazz or classical, traditionally viewed as the preferred choice of the nerdly geekitude, ranked at the bottom of the pile here.
An article in the Independent revealed that many students experienced a beneficial cathartic release from listening and reacting to heavy guitar music. The students at the academy are drawn from the top 5% of Britain’s youth, and the survey states that one respondant was drawn to the “visceral brutality” of metal. Another student quoted thus:
“As with most music, it depends heavily on the person’s mood at the time. So while there probably is your ‘average metalhead fan’, there will also be a lot of other fans who just feel ‘metalheady’ every so often. Which I guess goes some way to justify my playlists being named ’emotions’.”
Perhaps this student would find good use for Moody, a Mac app (PC version coming soon) that allows you to create mood-based iTunes playlists. The program is described here at Rocketsurgeon, who also have a review of Nextune – a mood and instrument based playlist generator which is already available for both PC and Mac.