Exploring personality and musical self

The aim was to investigate whether vocalists and instrumentalists (N = 108) would differ in personality traits, such as the Big five dimensions, competence-based self-esteem, and musical self-perceptions. The design involved both global and domain-specific features to more closely map similarities and differences between the groups. Results indicated that vocalists reported significantly higher levels of extraversion, agreeableness, and openness than the control group (p < .01–.05) but not musicians. The musical self-perceptions were explored using a qualitative method by asking the students to, in their own words, describe aspects of two categories of musical self-perceptions. For self-perceptions related to musical development, goal-orientation, personality, and expressivity were of most importance for both vocalists and instrumentalists, although personality ranked first among vocalists and third for instrumentalists. For self-perceptions related to musical expression in a performance, vocalists assigned most value to timbre, emotions, and musical ideas, whereas instrumentalists indicated dynamics, musical ideas, and timbre. In sum, global and objective measurements failed to discriminate well between vocalists and instrumentalists, whereas the qualitative study aimed at tapping domain-specific features was successful in embracing a large variety of musically related items and to differentiate between vocalists and instrumentalists