Listening to ‘highly arousing’ songs makes you look hotter, finds science

Playing the right track could bag you a second date

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Women find men more sexually attractive after listening to ‘highly arousing’ music, new research suggests.

Romantic attraction is a complicated thing but when it comes to pursuing a potential date forget the love notes, fancy dinners and rose petals because it’s actually music that has the power to influence their judgement.

Whether it’s the steamy goodness of Marvin Gaye or slow jams from Canadian rapper Drake, putting on music that gets your beau in the mood could bag you a second date.

Looking at the effect of music on sexual attraction, researchers from the University of Vienna wanted to discover if certain songs would influence a person's choice of partner.

“Facial attractiveness is one of the most important physical characteristics that can influence the choice of a partner,” said Helmut Leder, one of the authors of the study

“We wanted to find out how music can alter the perception of this feature.”

In the study, researchers presented 96 heterosexual participants with excerpts of songs, followed by an image of a face from the opposite sex with a neutral expression.

The participants were then asked to assess the face in terms of attractiveness and say whether or not they would date the person pictured.

To test the effect accurately, participants were shown the same faces without music in a separate study.

Interestingly, the results found that women rated male faces as more attractive and were more willing to date them when exposed to music.

In particular, highly stimulating and complex music led to the greatest effect but this was not seen among male participants.

Now, researchers hope to recreate the study on a larger scale.

“Our goal is to replicate these results in a larger sample and to modify some aspects of the experiment,” said Bruno Gingras, another author of the study.

“For example, we would like to clarify whether musical abilities and creativity can compensate partially for deficiencies in terms of physical appearance and fitness.”