
Musical preferences mainly shaped by a person’s cultural upbringing - snake117
http://www.nature.com/news/poor-musical-taste-blame-your-upbringing-1.20256
======
stcredzero
A couple of red flags here. Do people really understand their own preferences?
There's a number of psychological experiments that indicate our self reports
of our preferences and why we prefer certain things are quite inaccurate.
(There was a famous one involving socks/stockings that were preselected to be
equally preferred by the general populace. It turns out, that if the things
are pretty much the same, people tend to select things from a particular side
of the table, yet they give all sorts of reasons that sound more socially
plausible than, "it was the one on the left.")

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.

------
Dr_tldr
Would be interested to hear from someone more involved in the life sciences
the exact point when Nature magazine decided to chase that 'Psychology Today'
clickbait money.

~~~
mcarlise
Forever ago. Science and Nature are in the top 10 rated impact factors for
life science journals. Other than NEJM (top rated), the nature derivatives
round out most of the top ten as well (nature genetics, nature reviews,
etc...).

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.

~~~
EGreg
What would be better than peer review?

Arxiv lets preprints be published. Would be cool if afterwards they'd have
reviews from credentialed users.

~~~
mcarlise
I agree with the reviews from credentialed users. People should put their
names on the arguments for or against a paper, and let others evaluate them in
return.

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.

~~~
EGreg
So why not make a service for arxiv papers or any other source of resources
and have experts critique them?

Maybe there is already a good source of experts on Quora or something. Or
start a new site where experts are invited.

~~~
mcarlise
> So why not make a service for arxiv papers or any other source of resources
> and have experts critique them?

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.

~~~
EGreg
If someone wants to partner with me on this, I'd be happy to do it. We have
the underlying platform for it already.

Find me on [http://qbix.com/about](http://qbix.com/about) (click to email me)

------
panglott
Despite the clickbaity headline about "musical tastes", there is some real
information here.

"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).

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
This neatly debunks the other recent thread which suggested it was possible to
reduce harmony to mathematical axioms.

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.

------
jwp729
Shouldn't this article have appeared in Nurture magazine?

~~~
HenryTheHorse
You, sir, deserve the Mili Vanilli box set.

------
HenryTheHorse
The (jokey) title of the article is somewhat unfortunate as it confers a value
to "musical taste". Anyway.

> “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.

------
kough
My parents met at a Philip Glass concert and actively encouraged me to listen
to Sun Ra. I've known all along that my taste is an extension of theirs.
Thanks, mom & dad.

~~~
teh_klev
Your parents sound like they have quite an eclectic taste in music. I only
discovered Philip Glass and Sun Ra ~12-13 years ago (I'm 49). If you are able
to you should have a listen to BBC Radio 6's Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone and
Freakier Zone programmes. There's probably a lot of stuff you'd like to listen
to and discover.

~~~
kough
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check it out!

------
malchow
A countervailing – and edifying – view from Boethius, who is always worth
reading:
[http://www.cengage.com/music/book_content/049557273X_wrightS...](http://www.cengage.com/music/book_content/049557273X_wrightSimms_DEMO/assets/ITOW/7273X_01_ITOW_Boethius.pdf)

~~~
pc2g4d
+1 for Boethius reference!

I didn't know about his music work. Thanks for sharing.

~~~
malchow
One of the original quadrivium!

------
phillc73
I have a 2-year-old son. When his mother's not around we listen to AC/DC,
Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Live, Metallica, Pearl
Jam and others of similar genre and era.

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.

~~~
hellameta
You should get some musical instruments in the home if you don't already. This
goes a long way!

~~~
phillc73
We do have lots of musical books, where you push the spot on the page and
usually an animal plays some instrument.

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.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
Drums can take a fair amount of abuse (within reason - better than stringed
instruments, for example)... though you may not enjoy his early jam sessions.
I gave my son a set of tuned handbells when he was 2, they were a hit, and
hard to break.

------
mojoe
"Poor musical taste"? What is an objective measure of that?

~~~
Bromskloss
Interesting question. Would it perhaps make sense to consider good music to be
the music that those people like who are knowledgeable about and skilled in
music themselves?

~~~
HenryTheHorse
> ..those people like who are knowledgeable about and skilled in music
> themselves?

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.

~~~
Bromskloss
> The Pop revolution that started in the 1950s pretty much destroyed the
> argument

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?

~~~
Decade
> How so?

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.

------
bufordsharkley
I have very little overlap with the musical taste of my mother or father (or
my sister for that matter).

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).

------
randomgyatwork
One of my few childhood memories is of being in a car with a baby sitter, she
used to listen to new-wave, it was the 80's. To this day I'm still a fan of
that type of music, and even the new music I like tends to have an 80's synth
feel to it. I don't really remember my parents listening to much music when I
was a kid.

------
Qantourisc
My personal experience is rather different. I really do not care for the
mainstream radio, as such I didn't know music I cared for until later in my
life. It's only when I actively started looking I was able to find music I
like. To this day, music I don't care about, just goes straight through me as
background noise.

------
fhood
So this means that the next time someone says to me "I don't like X genre" or
"I only listen to Jazz" I am allowed to murder them in their sleep for being
uncultured musical xenophobes....right?

~~~
Nav_Panel
> uncultured

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...](https://theses.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-09072001-101445/unrestricted/whitethesis.doc.pdf)

------
devonkim
We can look at a simple counter example to see the trivial findings compared
to the title. Siblings can have completely different musical tastes.

~~~
qbrass
Your siblings may hate a song you love because they were annoyed by your
singing along to it. They may love a song you've never heard because they were
with their friends when listening to it.

~~~
devonkim
Those aren't even examples of taste though as much as idiosyncratic single-
song ratings when the topic is about preferences for different tonal groups
(consonance, dissonance, etc.). Unless there's a strong generalization
possible for an entire genre based upon novel experiences (whether positively
reinforcing or negatively doesn't matter here) I don't understand how taste is
shaped so extensively in this manner.

------
norea-armozel
Well my parents had odd tastes. My dad loved Led Zeppelin but also had plenty
of cassettes of Louis Armstrong. But predictably hip-hop was never in my dad's
collection (nor mine at least for my teen years). Now I listen to everything
from synthwave to Chinese opera. I don't know why but I think it's because the
variety of music my parents consumed exposed me to different structures in
music even if it's of the same genre. So I think I pick up on that commonality
that all music seems to contain. I think it's not so much tastes that matter
but how much variety you get in exposure to music to be able to appreciate
music you've rarely, if ever, heard.

~~~
dozzie
> [...] but also had plenty of cassettes of Louis Armstrong.

Sorry for the stupid association:
[http://fma.wikia.com/wiki/Alex_Louis_Armstrong](http://fma.wikia.com/wiki/Alex_Louis_Armstrong)

I just happen to like anime more than music.

~~~
norea-armozel
I think Satchmo would approve.

------
pjlegato
Their data also equally supports the exact inverse conclusion: that people do
have innate biological musical preferences for certain intervals, but remote
and isolated cultures can override these and train people to be indifferent to
them.

------
emodendroket
A lot of extrapolation here.

------
6stringmerc
Well, I can understand how the principle being asserted would apply to
cultural preferences with respect to scales & modes...but beyond that, eh, not
so much.

------
mjt0229
Oh, great! Something else my daughter can blame me for.

------
Mc_Big_G
Didn't read the article, but how is this not obvious?

------
PaulHoule
So you really can blame baby boomers for nickelback.

