For four years Liz and Jeff Olson were neighbours, polite and distant, until one day Liz sneaked a peek at the landscape gardener’s record collection and realised they could make beautiful music together.

“I thought we had nothing in common until I saw a CD by Jellyfish (an obscure Beatlesque pop group) which I thought no one else had — well, that was a revelation that lead to us getting together,” said a still astonished Liz, who works for Newark council in Nottinghamshire.

Liz is not alone in making life-changing decisions based on cultural ephemera. In his 1995 novel High Fidelity, Nick Hornby’s alter ego Rob Fleming recommends always judging a potential mate by their record covers.

Some scoffed, but a forthcoming study in the journal Psychological Science suggests that Hornby and the Olsons were spot-on.

Samuel Gosling, a British psychologist at the University of Texas, and Peter Jason Rentfrow, an American teaching at Cambridge, have identified links between taste and personality. Or what your music says about you.

Among a battery of tests, volunteers created a CD of favourite songs. Strangers then judged what the anonymous compilers were like — extrovert, adventurous cheery, brainy, melancholic and so on.

The CD proved significantly more reliable than other ways of quickly assessing people such as by looks, clothes or taste in films or politics. The Olsons, for instance, love punk, which the Rentfrow-Gosling index equates with outgoing social personalities.

The index is so focused that, last week, Rentfrow was able to match Tony Blair and Ruby Wax, the comedian and writer, to records they selected for Desert Island Discs. Blair’s mixture of classical (Debussy) and rock standards (the Beatles and Free) pointed to a “conventional rebel” while Wax’s choices of Mussorgsky, the Doors and West Side Story signalled a “loud” personality, said Rentfrow.

The psychologists also monitored courting couples’ first six weeks of conversation, and discovered that they used music to “check each other out” nearly twice as much as books, television or sport.

While the men tended to use musical references to establish themselves as belonging to a particular “tribe”, and the women more often choose it to reflect moods, in both cases it had the effect of communicating their character types. “Nick Hornby was right: the music does not lie,” said Rentfrow.

“And this is not just among young people, but also among office staff who are increasingly allowed to use iPods at work. Music is a great social filter and safer than talking about politics or religion,” he said.

“What surprised us is the truth behind many of the stereotypes. If you like country or choral music, you are likely to be more plainly spoken than if you are into music without strong lyrics such as electronica.

“But we were surprised to find that, despite their love of aggressive music, rap and heavy metal fans were typically more shy than many other music lovers. I am not sure they want us to know that, though.”

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