An acquired taste…

Is musical preference a representation of self-expression or a function of education and exposure?

Self-confessed music snobs may find the latest findings from the University of Melbourne a little disappointing.

Researchers there have determined that our appreciation of music is not based on natural ability or our personality, but by learning and exposure. This suggests that individuals could develop a penchant for anything, from Johann Sebastian Bach to Justin Bieber, provided they were frequently acquainted with the music. Though the latter is something I struggle to agree with, considering our chronic exposure to bland, formulaic pop and my own aversion it.

In the Australian study, 66 volunteers with a range of musical training were tested on their ability to hear combinations of notes to determine if they found the chords familiar or pleasing. The researchers discovered that people need to be familiar with sounds created by combinations of notes before they can hear the individual notes. If they weren’t used to hearing the chords played to them, they were likely to find the sound dissonant or unpleasant.

“Our study overturns centuries of theories that physical properties of the ear determine what we find appealing. It shows that musical harmony can be learnt and it is a matter of training the brain to hear the sounds,” said Associate Professor Neil McLachlan from the Music Mind and Wellbeing Centre – an initiative that aims to understand the relationship between our brains and music.

To confirm their findings, the study authors trained 19 non-musicians to find the pitches of a random selection of western chords.  Over ten short sessions of training, the participants’ ability to hear notes improved rapidly and they reported that the chords they had learnt sounded more pleasant, regardless of the combinations of notes used.

“This highlights the importance of training the brain to like particular variations of combinations of sounds like those found in jazz or rock,” said Associate Professor of Psychology Sarah Wilson, concluding that our taste in music is down to nurture, not nature.

The contemporary psychological view, and a much sexier one than the Melbourne’s study of familiarity, is that our musical preferences are manifestations of explicit psychological traits, possibly in interaction with specific situational experiences, needs or constraints. People seek musical environments that reinforce and reflect their personalities, attitudes and emotions.

One disadvantage of the Australian study is that it only looked at one element of music without considering other attributes such as tempo, rhythm and dynamics or the types of instruments featured. Conversely, a study from Brazil published in the New Journal of Physics revealed how people are attracted to certain rhythmic patterns in a song, rather than its melody. It would be interesting to see results from a study that considers more than one musical dimension.

Additionally, perhaps the researchers should have used neural imaging in the study to determine if brain activity correlated with the participants’ ratings of the chords. Previous studies with positron emission tomography (PET) studies have found that the hippocampus actives during music considered ‘pleasant’ and the parahippocampul gyrus, which is implicated in emotion processing has been found to activate during dissonant music (Kolesch et al. 2006).

I suppose the Melbourne’s study findings are hardly astounding when you consider taste in music tends to differ culturally and historically. If you never step out of the homogenous, auto-tuned pop bubble that dominates our radios, adverts and shop floors, anything that does not fit in that category might sound downright unappealing. So perhaps this study should encourage those who stick to what they know to seek out types of music that they may have once dismissed, in the hope of finding a wealth of meaning that Bieber alone cannot convey.

Neil McLachlan, David Marco, Maria Light, Sarah Wilson. Consonance and Pitch. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2013; DOI: 10.1037/a0030830