Past the Noise: What Shapes Our Taste in Music
Musical preferences are far from static. From first exposure to getting deeper into new sounds, there is some interesting psychology at work.
I have a vivid memory from my university years. Visiting a friend at his halls of residence and him putting on an Aphex Twin record. I remember my response:
“What is this white noise?”
Fast forward one year. I’m playing that objectionable ‘noise’ and similar music frequently. Somewhere along the line, I’d acquired a taste. It’s always left me wondering how tastes can change so drastically.
Questions of taste, specifically good taste, have permeated western society since at least the 19th Century, when formerly philosophical questions of aesthetics took on a more sociological cant. Victorian culture tended to see ‘good’ taste as aligned with that of the ruling class, the social emulation of those better positioned in the hierarchy. And as all the bars, clubs and concert halls attest, music undeniably has a social element. In the words of Mariusz Kozak, Director of Undergraduate Music Theory, Columbia University, it is an “efficient [regulator of] bodily and emotional responses [in] large groups of participants” serving the purposes of social cohesion and inclusion. In this sense, then, ‘taste’ is the drawing of acceptable boundaries. And when group members transgress these boundaries, it provides opportunity for a reconception of where the lines are drawn.
Yet In in the case of individual tastes, psychology seems a better angle of view than sociology. And for that, it’s worth getting back to basics. What are the preconditions? What primes us to like new music in the first place?
First of all, there’s the universal musicality of our species. As Colwyn Trevarthen, Professor of Child Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Edinburgh said, “Infants seem born with a kind of musical wisdom and appetite.” But why? Some studies suggest that spoken language and music evolved in parallel from a proto-language whose origins were in primate calls. Since then, as already mentioned, it has been in service of group identity, cohesion and inclusion. And, as with the languages we learn, it turns out the music we best understand, most easily gravitate to and recall most clearly, is that of the culture we grow up in.
And although, “In the first six months or so, babies can actually follow the syntax of any musical style — complex rhythms from Turkey or major scales from Europe” our musical enculturation helps shape our future tastes. This cultural conditioning is what Nolan Gasser, in his excellent and detailed book Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste, calls ‘listening with an accent’.
“The kinds of music that we were exposed to as infants and toddlers helped to create very specific mental patterns — schemata — of the most typical melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic progressions. These schemata serve to create expectations when we listen to music, and, as it turns out, we tend to experience greatest pleasure when those expectations are met.” Mariusz Kozak
As Gasser says, “depending on where you were born and raised, what constitutes ‘normal music’ will vary widely — with profound ramifications not only on what you’ll hear, but how you’ll hear it.”
No matter how outlandish his music seemed to me on first exposure, Aphex Twin, a Cornishman, was creating music from the same cultural framework I’d been raised to understand on a fundamental and unconscious level.
All that said, Gasser is clear in his point that “comprehension is not a prerequisite for preference”. Better to say that enculturation prejudices it — we have an “innate bias against the unfamiliar”.
And implicit in this is a bias for the familiar, which can be seen in the long-noted psychological phenomenon known as the ‘mere-exposure effect’, whereby repeated exposure itself is enough to build a preference. The theory goes that exposure increases ‘perceptual fluency’, the cognitive ease with which we process incoming information. In Gasser’s words: “Familiarity breeds preference by way of prediction.”
So perhaps Aphex Twin’s ‘white noise’ simply took a while to parse. Yet overexposure can just as easily kill a song.
What’s at play when this happens is the “satiation effect” whereby the learned safety borne of exposure becomes outweighed by our aversion to boredom. This pattern follows the inverted U of the Wundt Curve: preference climbs until it reaches a ceiling then begins to diminish. In this, two evolutionary forces exist in tension: learned safety and novelty-seeking. One provides security, the other opportunity — both of obvious evolutionary benefit.
In Gasser’s view, then, similarity and difference both open avenues to expanding our tastes — “our psychology — our ability to predict, react, and appraise — sets up a dynamic whereby we can add music to our genotype whenever it provides a satisfying fulfilment or surprise to our statistically grounded expectations.”
For me, all this talk of perceptual processing, comprehension and prediction transforms music appreciation into a series of puzzles we’re subconsciously solving, auditory conundrums where we master one pattern and move on to the next. In which case, complex musical forms, more challenging puzzles, should hold our attention for longer. At least University of Sheffield’s Dr Michael Bonshor, an expert in the psychology of music seems to think so. “[M]ore complex music will have greater longevity, as it will be more challenging and retain the listeners’ interest for longer, whilst simple music may be sometimes be more immediately accessible, but may lose its appeal relatively quickly.” However, some studies indicate “familiarity is the single most important predictor for liking”. The mere-exposure effect seems overwhelming. Sadly, for those stuck working next to a radio over which they have no control, musical Stockholm Syndrome appears to be a very real threat. This isn’t to say familiarity and complexity are mutually exclusive. In fact, Gasser illustrates the point that they can operate in tandem by pointing out that those who have had formal music training are often drawn to more complex musical styles.
In their essay Chasing the Wundt Curve: an Adventure in Consumer Esthetics, Punam Anand and Morris B. Holbrook state that the term ‘music’ refers to an “extremely complex gestalt” that “One pulls apart […] only at one’s peril.” Suffice to say, then, that musical tastes build on pre-existing understandings and expectations. For something new, you need an ‘in’. Most likely several. It suggests that making the effort to broaden our listening habits, even a little bit, could create a feedback loop that further extends the horizon of our taste. This transforms musical taste from gut-level instinct, out of our hands, to a matter of personal agency. We can make more music more accessible to ourselves.
We just have to listen past the noise.