Musical preferences mainly shaped by a person’s cultural upbringing
nature.com
nature.com
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.
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.
Arxiv lets preprints be published. Would be cool if afterwards they'd have reviews from credentialed users.
I like pre-print services, and I wish they would go one step further and allow people to comment/critic the paper. This way, when you find a paper, you could see all associated thoughts and join the conversation. The really powerful idea behind pre-prints is that it would speed up academic publishing, by eliminating the ~6 month publication time.
The only problem with pre-prints (currently) is they are not widely accepted for academic tenure. With academic publishing being a multi-billion dollar industry, I'm kind of surprised there are not more tech startups working on this issue.
Maybe there is already a good source of experts on Quora or something. Or start a new site where experts are invited.
Yeah I think this would be a great idea. If you had the capture ability of sci-hub with the invite ability of quora to get experts to critic papers. Then add on-top of that some simple blog features like top highlight, sharing, subscribe to citation links, and comment/discussion (that matches HN's no counter productive comments/etc).
The large obstacle would be paywalls - like sci-hub; any attractive paper would be illegal to have on the service; if you simply pulled from pre-prints (arxiv; plos pre-print, etc..) you will probably lose academic disciplines that do not value these services (biology primarily comes to mind). On the other hand, CS would probably embrace it as a complement to their conference publishing culture.
Find me on http://qbix.com/about (click to email me)
Unless the author(s) of something on the arXiv is established, and the paper says something like "submitted to so-and-so journal", you should take everything in arXiv with heaps of salt.
This implies the broad sweep that anything that passes peer review is more valid than anything that does not. I do not feel comfortable with such an argument.
This list is a bit too short. Most of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics can't be attributed to any of them, and even then it only covers physics.
Einstein is one of the founders of quantum mechanics (1921 Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect). And Newton founded calculus - which procedes any ability to mathematically describe natural observations.
Moreover, saying newton "founded" calculus to mean that all theories that need "ability to mathematically describe natural observations" is same as crediting all theories to al-Khwarizmi because he "founded" algebra!
"Founder of quantum mechanics" - I didn't say founder. I said one of the founding members; Planck, de broglie, einstein, von Neumann. I don't see how quantum mechanics materializes without the foundation created by these thinkers.
> "list of only true scientists" I didn't say list of true scientists. And you inserted 'only' as if I made the claim that this list is comprehensive (i.e. these are the only scientists that ever existed). But rather these scientists paved the way for a lot of scientific advancement in the last two centuries.
Lastly, which this one is more my fault - I clearly didn't explain my thought. Newton's association with calculus was to refute your claim that he only had an influence in the field of physics (he was the Lucasian professor of mathematics after all).
Alternatively, your "quotation" of founded (twice) is smug; and condescending. Further, none of this tit for tat banter is contributing to anything of real or inherent value. Perhaps our time is suited better on something else?
I did not mean to blanket that other scientists do not contribute. And you might be right, my sentament was certainly fast paced and not perfectly thought out. I do go back and fourth on this idea. Sometimes I think that 90% of the science community could disspear and nothing substantial would be lost. Other times I think that that 90% largely contributed to the critical mass needed for a limited number of works to be celebrated over a long period of time. And provide many contributions that are not seen (apparently relativity was floating around in papers for almost a decade before einstein's 1905 paper).
> did not mean to be smug I might have been overly sensitive. I mistook the double use of 'founded' as an attempt to challenge my contextual understanding over the controversy of both calculus and alegbra (which I'm not expert on either topic by any stretch).
I certainly do not want you thinking that I do not appreciate any criticism of my arguments or opinions. I just felt the last comments of ours was going towards a path of 'who did what when', and 'what magnitude of work', etc...
"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).
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.
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.
This is the sort of thing where the experimenter has to be careful about what they're testing. To someone unfamiliar with 12-tone equal temperament, a major chord on a piano might sound out of tune relative to just-tuned 4:5:6 major chord. A just chord can also sound out-of-tune when played in an inharmonic timbre. If you play a major chord on a piano and a listener says "I don't like how that sounds", it might not be that they don't like harmonic music. It might be just that they don't like how a major chord sounds when played on an equal-tempered piano.
One way to do this kind of testing is to use pure sine waves that have no harmonics. So, without harmonics there's no particular reason to prefer just intervals to random, arbitrary intervals except that the former may conform to the listeners expectations.
> “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.
I didn't know about his music work. Thanks for sharing.
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.
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.
"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"
I'll throw in the epistemic problem too: if I have poor musical taste, how will I know it?
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.
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.
of high social status
“people of quality”
“a quality family”
Synonyms:
upper-class
occupying the highest socioeconomic position in a societyFTA:
"'Our results show that there is a profound cultural difference' in the way people respond to consonant and dissonant sounds, says Josh McDermott, a cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and lead author of the paper. This suggests that other cultures hear the world differently, he adds."
"good musical taste" == "liking the music that I like"
But of course it's not something that can be quantitatively measured.
You might be interested in the contrary view, expressed by Paul Graham in "Taste for Makers" [1]:
Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it's not true. You feel this when you start to design things.
Whatever job people do, they naturally want to do better. Football players like to win games. CEOs like to increase earnings. It's a matter of pride, and a real pleasure, to get better at your job. But if your job is to design things, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no way to get better at your job. If taste is just personal preference, then everyone's is already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that's it.
Sounds like nonsense to me. Design, to my mind, is less about "beauty" than it is about communication. Achieving beauty is the goal of the artist, but the designer is trying to achieve something much more concrete : helping the user understand your product.
Thus, it follows that design can to a degree be assessed & measured. If your users understand your product and how to use it, then it's probably competently designed. If they have no idea WTF is going on, then probably not.
> Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes.
Sure, but that's not why practically everyone in academic music/art say it, or refuse to make value judgments about art.
> You feel this when you start to design things.
My experience has been exactly the opposite - I have a degree in music though I work as a programmer.
> Football players like to win games. CEOs like to increase earnings.
Both of which have well defined, internal metrics (higher numbers are better).
> It's a matter of pride, and a real pleasure, to get better at your job.
It may be for some people for some jobs, but this does not relate to generalizing personal taste to universal truth in any way.
> But if your job is to design things, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no way to get better at your job.
It does not follow that iff beauty is in the eye of the beholder then designers can not improve. Cultures share values. Improving design (in a professional setting) is something closer to optimizing in the eyes of the target market... to click a button. Of course, the solution space is both practically infinite and time dependent. Neither beauty nor taste need be intrinsic or universal, we just need to agree upon a shared language (social convention).
I know, right? And I'm not even endorsing PG's view! Just putting it out there for discussion.
You may not be able to measure beauty, but you can ask your users/customers if they like your design.
This is an age-old question and implies that aesthetic judgements can only be made through knowledge. The Pop revolution that started in the 1950s pretty much destroyed the argument (only to have Rock music - as opposed to Pop - make similar elitist arguments). Jazz and Classical music continue to make those claims (and then complain they don't attract bigger audiences).
Good music is that which moves you. No more, no less. If it doesn't move you, it doesn't make it bad, it just means you need to find something different to listen to.
How so?
> Good music is that which moves you. No more, no less. If it doesn't move you, it doesn't make it bad, it just means you need to find something different to listen to.
Still, there are some things that almost everybody agrees are better than some other things. For example, someone singing out of tune, or a beginner playing the violin. Musicians and non-musicians alike would say that those things sound bad. Doesn't that mean that there is something more to it than individual taste, or, rather, that all our individual tastes agree on some things, which might be thought of as decidedly good or bad, in some sense?
> Still, there are some things that almost everybody agrees are better than some other things
Within the accepted confines of a genre or style, yes. For instance, if you are playing the blues and cannot do a decent note bend, you are boring the audience. But bending a note is not a criterion in every style. So how does one employ that as an aesthetic criterion for ALL music?
The problem with a universal aesthetic criterion is that we run into the same old arguments about how rap is not music, how metal is noise and how free jazz is chaos (or how Philip Glass is just repeating three notes).
Does that help?
Because many pop musicians are successful without “knowledge and skill in music” as it was defined at the time. I would push “pop music” even further back to traditional folk music, which has rarely been appreciated by professionals. Though, I guess commercial pop really took off with the invention of the phonograph.
> Still, there are some things that almost everybody agrees are better than some other things. For example, someone singing out of tune, or a beginner playing the violin.
Put it into a loop, add some other loops, I can work with that. The main problem with poor music performance is the lack of consistency, not the quality of the sound itself. I remember when rock came out, and the old people all said it sounded horrible, who would want to listen to the screeches and distortions of electric guitars.
We now have simultaneous islands of knowledge and skill of music. Most successful musicians specialize in a particular genre, and nobody has time to be skilled at all the popular genres, both composition and performance.
Then each genre has a tendency to ossify and split, as young people take music in a new direction, and the old practitioners say, that’s not our music. Rock music split off from jazz. In the old days, jazz was rebellious music associated with African Americans. Now, the local community college teaches jazz classes. Amusingly, the freeform jazz musicians there are old white men, and the young African American man teaches a rigid formal version of jazz. When the teachers put on the end-of-semester concerts, the old white men let their students play, but the African American hires professionals from out of state to do the solos.
So, no, you can’t extract a category of people ”who are knowledgeable about and skilled in music themselves” to be an arbiter of taste.
In the West good (i.e. classical) music is associated with taste, achievement, self-discipline, and status, and is used to reinforce the experience of same.
But it's as much about social castes and identity politics as the actual music.
Individuals with high political status go to certain kinds of concerts, but not to others.
People obviously do enjoy various kinds of music for their own reasons. But it's extremely hard to untangle that experience from the identity politics and moral messages around the music.
People who are genuinely equally likely to listen to hip hop and Wagner are very rare. If you find one, chances are they're a professional or semi-pro musician anyway - or at least a dedicated music geek.
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).
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-09072001-1014...
Sorry for the stupid association: http://fma.wikia.com/wiki/Alex_Louis_Armstrong
I just happen to like anime more than music.
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