Are musical tastes cultural or hardwired in the brain?

Video: Melanie Gonick/MIT

Still images: Josh McDermott and Alan Schultz
Audio of Tsimane' female singing: Josh McDermott
Audio files for experiments: Josh McDermott
Music sampled from, "Avec Toi" by Dana Boulé

[TheMap]

Thank you again MIT. This is really put things in perspective and broaden our understanding of musics.

[sbeast]

I have a predisposition to like dubstep, but after years of therapy I can now listen to good music :)

[geriquin]

Over time the music that creates mood in movies and the media has influenced our preferences. You’ll notice consonance in pleasant, happy, comforting scenes and dissonance in scary, weird, unhappy scenes.
Have we been programmed to prefer consonance over dissonance?
A musical piece can tell a story without lyrics using these chords.

[mangomariel]

For some reason I feel this research was not conclusive enough.

[HeyItsKora]

I’m disappointed... This seems to me to have been a waste of a great opportunity to experiment. Here’s why I think this.
From this video alone, it seems that they asked person X to listen to consonant, and dissonant intervals, back to back, asking which of the two the subject prefers. This is a fundamentally flawed exercise because hearing one interval followed by another changes the brains perception of the latter interval. For instance, If I play a major 3rd interval to someone (a pleasant/happy sounding harmony), and immediately after, I play them a minor 7th interval (less pleasant, more tension, more dissonance - though by no means a *very* dissonant interval), having first heard the major 3rd interval will actually change my perception of the minor 7th interval, compared to had I been shown the minor 7th first. This is the fundamental reason behind how chord progressions are crafted. It’s not just a sequence of independent chords, it’s a system of tension/resolution, a journey from chord to chord, with each chord influencing how the next chord will sound to the listener.
A more sound experiment would involve showing an interval, then waiting an hour or two, to ensure that the listener has been distracted enough to hear the next interval with a “fresh pair of ears”. This removes the chance of the first interval influencing the way the second, and subsequent intervals will be interpreted.
Alternatively, asking a group of subjects -the more, the better- to all listen to interval A and gathering data on how they rate it on a ‘pleasant scale’ of 1 to 10, comparing the results and checking for trends in the data to ensure there is statistical significance, then asking a different group of subjects to listen to interval B, following the same rules - always ensuring that there is statistical significance before moving on. This way, you get ONE data point PER subject, which is the best way to avoid subconscious comparisons by gauging the sound -or agreeableness- of subsequent intervals using the agreeableness of the first interval as a subconscious reference. Naturally if I hear a major 3rd of a perfect 5th, and I’m then shown a more harmonically complex interval like a major 7th, the latter is far more likely to be interpreted as less pleasant to the ear, whereas it could turn out that when shown a major 7th *first* I actually find it to be quite an enticing and agreeable sound.

Just my two-cents. I got very excited when I saw the title of this video and saw it was uploaded by MIT. Unfortunately it really felt like a waste of a fantastic opportunity to gather some fascinating data... They could have done so much more with this opportunity...

[itsmegoomy]

I want more studies like this! This is cool!

[woopygoman]

But don't tastes change as we age? Think neuroplasticity.

[lflee]

Wow, with that said, we are musically brainwashed from the get go for many generations. (⚆_⚆)

[niabride]

i found the "unpleasant" sound still pretty harmonic, so am i from old tribe? this makes the whole effort worthless for me.

[PiolsFlorentino]

These can also be affected by our parents' musical preferences.

[kimhelweg]

Bach would have loved it. Think of a 6 voices fuge that changes tonality in each octave. This is a very interesting project telling us that the western musicality is not natural but very artificial and what goes for tonality very limited. But this fact a lot of Western composers have underlined for many years already. Next step could be to find out where this group of people's understanding of pitch comes from.
For a western pop oriented audience sounding out of tune, for a composer as me sounding like a very advanced approach to tonality. But what formed this sense of tonality? Lack of classical western musical education? Or rather the sense of being near the nature? And if the last question should be answered with a yes, where in nature does those frequencies come from?

[Cry-AegisInquisitor]

maybe they just can't grasp their unpleasant feeling with the bad sounds, although they would given time to really feel into it or meditate on it

[albe]

Honestly don't believe either is true. I grew up in Africa and enjoyed reggae, rap, high life and Afro beats. I moved to the UK and hated house, trance and hard rock. However my friends kept dragging me out to these clubs because that's where the hot girls were and I started getting lucky and hooking up. I learnt to like these new music because it associates with pleasant clubbing, drinking, dancing and courting experiences from my youth. Now 20 years later, married, grey, with teenage kids; I still have a huge collection of house, trance and hard rock. I think this is influenced by social experience and by environment. Maybe you can call that cultural but it can change if you change the environment.

[thedubstepaddict]

This will help me so much during my MSA-Presentation here in germany.

[fuzakerunateme]

Can't help but feel like I've been click baited by the title after watching the whole thing haha. Still, interesting stuff :)

[shirshakbt]

So much respect for these researchers.

[RedPearlPrincess]

This makes sense to me, because most children when given instrumental toys etc will just... make noise and find it delightful even when us adults want to cry from how it makes our ears metaphorically bleed. So we are definitely not born with the like or dislike for harmonious or dissonant music.

[cheeseandonions]

Fascinating video... but at the same time, all cultures developed some kind of music. So it suggests that the general liking for rhythm may be hard wired.

[batteredskullsummit]

And the circling is worth it Finding beauty in the dissonance

[realmusic]

Its interesting how the Western scientists/theorist considered musical preferences as possibly biological but non Westerners saw it as clearly a social/environmental factor.