9 ms·
Musical preferences mainly shaped by a person’s cultural upbringing
- emodendroket 10y agoA lot of extrapolation here.
- fhood 10y agoSo this means that the next time someone says to me "I don't like X genre" or "I only listen to Jazz" I am allowed to murder them in their sleep for being uncultured musical xenophobes....right?
- Nav_Panel 10y ago> uncultured Yeah, so, the problem with the headline is that, these days, "musical taste" is mostly a class signifier. A lot of research has been done relating to this[1] (though a lot is either paywalled or clickbaity news site). If you remove these class associations, most westerners will agree that consonant music sounds good (regardless of genre and context) and dissonant sounds less good. Whether this is due to nature or nurture is what the OP's article is trying to determine. 1: https://theses.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-09072001-101445/unrestricted/whitethesis.doc.pdf https://theses.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-09072001-1014...
- kough 10y agoMy parents met at a Philip Glass concert and actively encouraged me to listen to Sun Ra. I've known all along that my taste is an extension of theirs. Thanks, mom & dad.
- teh_klev 10y agoYour parents sound like they have quite an eclectic taste in music. I only discovered Philip Glass and Sun Ra ~12-13 years ago (I'm 49). If you are able to you should have a listen to BBC Radio 6's Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone and Freakier Zone programmes. There's probably a lot of stuff you'd like to listen to and discover.
- kough 10y agoThanks for the suggestion, I'll check it out!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mojoe 10y ago"Poor musical taste"? What is an objective measure of that?
- cronjobber 10y agoBetter titles: "Poor musical taste? Blame their upbringing" "Poor musical taste? Blame your status insecurity" Edit: Post title has been edited, context has been lost. Original title was: "Poor musical taste? Blame your upbringing"
- unit91 10y agoStill problematic. What does it mean to have "poor" taste? I'll throw in the epistemic problem too: if I have poor musical taste, how will I know it?
- cronjobber 10y agoThough downvotes indicate that it isn't obvious, my suggested titles fix all these problems. Everybody can easily think that other people have poor musical taste, just subjectively. We now can "blame" their upbringing. If I think I have poor musical taste, I know that's a strange thing to believe, your "epistemic problem". I conclude that I have been led to believe this because people of quality claim to love Stockhausen and I don't.
- unit91 10y agoIt seems like this still conflates the quality of a person (objective) with the quality of one's music taste (subjective). Your example of quality (moral and rational, I assume) people loving Stockhausen and you not loving it informing your self-assessment only works if music taste is an objective good, like preferring non-murder to murder. Even then, we would need to know that preferring Stockhausen or non-murder is an objective good, since presumably preferring it is among the quality-making properties of your quality friends. So unless I can know which music is objectively good in a properly basic or evidential way, I'm stuck never knowing whether my music taste is good or bad. Or, as I think is the case, music taste is subjective.
- Dr_tldr 10y agoWould be interested to hear from someone more involved in the life sciences the exact point when Nature magazine decided to chase that 'Psychology Today' clickbait money.
- mcarlise 10y agoForever ago. Science and Nature are in the top 10 rated impact factors for life science journals. Other than NEJM (top rated), the nature derivatives round out most of the top ten as well (nature genetics, nature reviews, etc...). I think the problem stems from the inability for peer review to adequately test or reproduce papers before they are published. Which gives Nature and Science (which both make a large amount of money from their publishing practices) a lot of leeway to publish 'headline' based science. What bothers me, is that a lot of headline based papers paint a 'either or scenario' - or attempt to proove positives. When in reality, the scientific method can only disprove hypotheses. Only holistic second source papers (review articles) should make large claims; for instance, no single paper prooves the theory of evolution, but rather a large corpus of papers fail to disprove the theory. An additional problem is accepting anything peer reviewed as valid because it was peer reviewed. Which is the driving force behind the peer review paywall - that peer reviewed artcles are somehow more valid then other forms of communication mediums. This implies that there exist somewhere, a publication format that is infalliable. And since retractions and fraud occur all the time in peer review, there are plenty of counter arguments to disproove this notion. While this annoys me some, it will never be fixed. The number of 'scientists' that do not employ sound thinking and reason, will always out weigh the number of brilliant minds. There is a reason why almost all science can be traced back to five individuals (Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Einstein). These people reached a level of analytical thought that was unmatched. Surely we might be able to argue that they reached the low hanging fruits - but it was really their ability to not accept popular thought, and dismiss assumptions, and in most cases show a revered defiance towards establishments (Galileo especially) because they refused to not appeals to the fact (nullius in verba). So rather then spend a large amount of time to rid the world of bad publishing form - we should just accept it; and unfortunately most of us will never 'free our minds from the allegory of the cave'. And probably even more so for the groups that spend a large amount of advertising and headlines to convince others that they have reached this level of thought. Wow - that comment got away from me fast; I really only intended to write the first two sentences, and just kept typing.
- Qantourisc 10y agoMy personal experience is rather different. I really do not care for the mainstream radio, as such I didn't know music I cared for until later in my life. It's only when I actively started looking I was able to find music I like. To this day, music I don't care about, just goes straight through me as background noise.
- phillc73 10y agoI have a 2-year-old son. When his mother's not around we listen to AC/DC, Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Live, Metallica, Pearl Jam and others of similar genre and era. When I sit down at the computer he runs in repeating, "guitar, guitar, guitar". When I ask him who is the best guitarist, he's conditioned to answer "Angus". I'm seriously hoping to influence his musical tastes, because when he turns teenager, I don't want to be stuck listening to crap.
- hellameta 10y agoYou should get some musical instruments in the home if you don't already. This goes a long way!
- phillc73 10y agoWe do have lots of musical books, where you push the spot on the page and usually an animal plays some instrument. At the moment, we feel he is a little too small at 2 for his own instruments, as they will be destroyed in pretty short order. They're high on the list of things to obtain when he's just a little more careful with things.
- abakker 10y agoa small toy keyboard would be a good bet. They're nearly indestructible and cheap. definitely worth it.
- blacksmith_tb 10y agoDrums can take a fair amount of abuse (within reason - better than stringed instruments, for example)... though you may not enjoy his early jam sessions. I gave my son a set of tuned handbells when he was 2, they were a hit, and hard to break.
- tinco 10y agoYou do realize that when he turns teenager he will rebel, and only listen to K-Pop right? Then at 20 in college he'll learn to develop a musical taste less attached to social stigma, and maybe reacquaint himself with rock. But perhaps also because of his teenage musical roots the rock will be mostly K-rock ;)
- HenryTheHorse 10y agoThe (jokey) title of the article is somewhat unfortunate as it confers a value to "musical taste". Anyway. > “This pretty convincingly rules out that the preferences are things we’re born with,” McDermott argues. The word "nurture" may lead some to believe that tastes are fixed. Thankfully, they're not. Immersion in new forms of music is one of the great pleasures, and given enough time, all forms start making sense. The brain eventually recognizes patterns and finds pleasure.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jwp729 10y agoShouldn't this article have appeared in Nurture magazine?
- HenryTheHorse 10y agoYou, sir, deserve the Mili Vanilli box set.
- norea-armozel 10y agoWell my parents had odd tastes. My dad loved Led Zeppelin but also had plenty of cassettes of Louis Armstrong. But predictably hip-hop was never in my dad's collection (nor mine at least for my teen years). Now I listen to everything from synthwave to Chinese opera. I don't know why but I think it's because the variety of music my parents consumed exposed me to different structures in music even if it's of the same genre. So I think I pick up on that commonality that all music seems to contain. I think it's not so much tastes that matter but how much variety you get in exposure to music to be able to appreciate music you've rarely, if ever, heard.
- dozzie 10y ago> [...] but also had plenty of cassettes of Louis Armstrong. Sorry for the stupid association: http://fma.wikia.com/wiki/Alex_Louis_Armstrong http://fma.wikia.com/wiki/Alex_Louis_Armstrong I just happen to like anime more than music.
- norea-armozel 10y agoI think Satchmo would approve.
- jpreiland 10y agoI'd believe that. I grew up on The Beatles and The Beach Boys, and now I listen to just about anything that seems "musical" enough to me. All genres, there's a commonality there, as you said. I'm glad my parents exposed me to (what I believe is) top quality songwriting and melodies since I was little. This topic makes me wonder what sorts of music, if any, people who are less musically inclined were exposed to at a young age. I've met people that say they don't like music, or people who couldn't hum a tune from memory, and it seems so foreign to me. I don't consider myself to be particularly gifted - it seems like basic stuff. Yet there are plenty of people out there who know music about as well as I know sports (not at all). Hopefully that didn't come off as elitist or anything
- randomgyatwork 10y agoOne of my few childhood memories is of being in a car with a baby sitter, she used to listen to new-wave, it was the 80's. To this day I'm still a fan of that type of music, and even the new music I like tends to have an 80's synth feel to it. I don't really remember my parents listening to much music when I was a kid.
- panglott 10y agoDespite the clickbaity headline about "musical tastes", there is some real information here. "In their experiments, McDermott and his colleagues investigated aesthetic responses to music by playing combinations of notes to three groups of people: the Tsimane’ and two other groups of Bolivians that had experienced increasing levels of exposure to Western music. The researchers recorded whether each group perceived the notes as pleasant or unpleasant to hear. They tested consonant chords, which are common in Western and many other musical cultures, as well as dissonant ones. (In ‘do re mi fa so la ti do’, for instance, the ‘dos’ are exactly an octave apart and are an example of consonant notes.)" The question is whether there is some innate human preference for consonant or dissonant chords. These scientists concluded that preference for consonant or dissonant chords is influenced mainly by culture (not, say, genetics).
- stcredzero 10y agoIn the middle ages, the third interval was considered too rich, and so simply not used. There are other things our music that were considered sounds of the devil, so were not used either.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoThis neatly debunks the other recent thread which suggested it was possible to reduce harmony to mathematical axioms. Having said that - the harmonic series is obviously interesting and relevant to some music. But any notion that it's some kind of musical master key that can unlock all of music's mysteries is naive.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kens 10y agoI found this study really surprising. It seemed obvious to me that there's a physical basis for why intervals like a perfect fifth sound good. I.e. the 3:2 ratio means the waveforms mesh nicely. (By the way, all the talk of integer ratios seems like numerology, but if you look at the waveforms and frequency spectrum then it makes sense.) But the investigated groups didn't prefer consonant chords over dissonant ones, unlike Western listeners. But they did dislike "roughness" such as a minor second (where you end up with beating), so they are capable of identifying notes that don't go together and have some preferences. P.S. For those who didn't read the study, it has nothing to do with musical tastes and liking one type of music over another (which is obviously cultural). It's more low-level than that.
- malchow 10y agoA countervailing – and edifying – view from Boethius, who is always worth reading: http://www.cengage.com/music/book_content/049557273X_wrightSimms_DEMO/assets/ITOW/7273X_01_ITOW_Boethius.pdf http://www.cengage.com/music/book_content/049557273X_wrightS...
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- mjt0229 10y agoOh, great! Something else my daughter can blame me for.
- 6stringmerc 10y agoWell, I can understand how the principle being asserted would apply to cultural preferences with respect to scales & modes...but beyond that, eh, not so much.
- PaulHoule 10y agoSo you really can blame baby boomers for nickelback.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- devonkim 10y agoWe can look at a simple counter example to see the trivial findings compared to the title. Siblings can have completely different musical tastes.
- qbrass 10y agoYour siblings may hate a song you love because they were annoyed by your singing along to it. They may love a song you've never heard because they were with their friends when listening to it.
- devonkim 10y agoThose aren't even examples of taste though as much as idiosyncratic single-song ratings when the topic is about preferences for different tonal groups (consonance, dissonance, etc.). Unless there's a strong generalization possible for an entire genre based upon novel experiences (whether positively reinforcing or negatively doesn't matter here) I don't understand how taste is shaped so extensively in this manner.
- bufordsharkley 10y agoI have very little overlap with the musical taste of my mother or father (or my sister for that matter). When I was 5 or 6, and first heard Scott Joplin's music ("The Sting" was on television), it was a religious experience. Music I had never heard before spoke to me. And it was like this for every new transcendent musical experience afterward; it felt like something external (and was in each moment seemingly unrelated to my upbringing).
- Mc_Big_G 10y agoDidn't read the article, but how is this not obvious?
- stcredzero 10y agoA couple of red flags here. Do people really understand their own preferences? There's a number of psychological experiments that indicate our self reports of our preferences and why we prefer certain things are quite inaccurate. (There was a famous one involving socks/stockings that were preselected to be equally preferred by the general populace. It turns out, that if the things are pretty much the same, people tend to select things from a particular side of the table, yet they give all sorts of reasons that sound more socially plausible than, "it was the one on the left.") Unless one is a musician, one probably has a very undifferentiated understanding of intervals and chords in isolation. Also, musical preferences very rarely involve listening to intervals and chords in isolation. They are part of a complex "cocktail" of auditory and other stimuli that go together. (Most often, I meet people who only understand "music" in a context that includes performers and specific recordings/performances and are really unable to discuss pieces of musical composition in the abstract.) As an analogy, this is like presenting some aromatic compounds to people from different cultures, asking how much they like the compounds, then declaring wine preferences are mainly cultural. The conclusion, that such things are cultural, seems obvious. The construct of the experiment seems legit on the surface. However, there is a pretty poor logical connection between the two on closer examination. There should be a name for this kind of fallacy. It's a kind of unjustified reductionism. It's virtually a trope in the social sciences.
- baldfat 10y agoWell how about: composition-division fallacy? https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/composition-division https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/composition-division > Often when something is true for the part it does also apply to the whole, or vice versa, but the crucial difference is whether there exists good evidence to show that this is the case. Because we observe consistencies in things, our thinking can become biased so that we presume consistency to exist where it does not. OR The Texas Sharpshooter https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-texas-sharpshooter https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-texas-sharpshooter > You cherry-picked a data cluster to suit your argument, or found a pattern to fit a presumption.
- pjlegato 10y agoTheir data also equally supports the exact inverse conclusion: that people do have innate biological musical preferences for certain intervals, but remote and isolated cultures can override these and train people to be indifferent to them.