"Poor musical taste"? What is an objective measure of that?
"good musical taste" == "liking the music that I like"
But of course it's not something that can be quantitatively measured.
FTA:
"'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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
"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 society