Are musical tastes cultural or hardwired in the brain?

A new study out of MIT and Brandeis University suggests musical preferences are cultural in origin and not hardwired in the brain. (Learn more: mitsha.re/G24M302dDA9)
Video: Melanie Gonick/MIT
Still images: Josh McDermott and Alan Schultz
Audio of Tsimane' female singing: Josh McDermott
Audio files for experiments: Josh McDermott
Stock imagery courtesy of Pond5.com adapted by Melanie Gonick
Music sampled from, "Avec Toi" by Dana Boulé
freemusicarchive.org/music/Dan...
creativecommons.org/licenses/b...

[@TheMap1997]

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

[@geriquin2643]

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.

[@sbeast64]

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

[@sbeast64]

Interesting coincidence: people on youtube can't tell the difference between a joke and being serious.

[@Lukas-kh5gu]

....really? you are annoying. spinning it around doesn't work.

[@sbeast64]

Quadruple coincidence: Nobody cares.

[@inre1945]

@@sbeast64 that didn't sound much like a joke it was more like an elaborate insult which is different

[@Manny-fc8ym]

If the smiley wasn’t there it would’ve be ever so slightly less condescending

[@thedubstepaddict3675]

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

[@itsmegoomy2364]

I want more studies like this! This is cool!

[@shirshakbt]

So much respect for these researchers.

[@davidferrer6771]

Amazing!!!

[@lflee]

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

[@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885]

McDermott is talking about pitches whereas his other research has shown Harmonicity is hard-wired - based on natural overtone frequencies.

[@cheyenneFMA]

Nice Soundtrack!

[@woopygoman]

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

[@mangomariel]

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

[@Vinny339]

Thats pretty awesome and odd. I thought differently on this subject before.

[@PiolsFlorentino]

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

[@hezekiahporter5344]

very interesting video

[@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...

[@tonk_guy839]

Hommie you just just wrote a whole essay in a KZbin comment section. Not judging but… I am judging, man go outside

[@hofficalz]

I agree! It's also quite hard to decipher music taste (considering there are lots of different genres of music and a huge variety of instruments) based on two tonal sounds. Yes, voice is an instrument, but music is rarely made with only one instrument instead of several ones combined. I also have to say it did leave a sour taste in my mouth as the speaker in the video said several times they were unsure if the test subjects understood the assignment. It is the scientists' job to make sure the subjects understand what they're meant to do

[@HeyItsKora]

@@tonk_guy839 what can I say, I'm passionate about music, I studied music, I live and breathe music. The question raised in this video is one I've been pondering ever since I was first introduced to alternative tuning systems and atonal/microtonal music years ago during my degree. I meant it, I got super excited when I came across this video, especially given it's by MIT. But yeah I was disappointed, and felt like sharing my thoughts on how the experiment could have been improved, as a music 'scholar' so to speak. I'm surprised you took my comment, given I tried to be constructive and productive, and extrapolated that I don't spend enough time outside... What are comments sections for if not constructive discussion...? Should I have done like most other people on the internet do and just said "this is shit you suck" instead?

[@HeyItsKora]

@@hofficalz Completely agree with you too. When I first pondered this question is was because I was introduced to alternative tuning systems and atonal music (like the 5-tone pelog scale used in gamelan), I first thought "how do people like this?? It just sounds nasty to my ears!" but I later realised you don't need to look as far as non-western musical standards to find this kind of thing. Within the west there are many examples of this too, for example many metal genres, metalcore, death metal, etc; these grew out of western culture, and are a perfect analogue. Some people love heavy metal music, but other people react exactly how I reacted to first hearing gamelan "it's just a loud racket with screaming over the top!". So indeed yeah it's really a tough question to crack because of how subjective music is. I would really really love to see more research go into the objectivity vs subjectivity of music debate. Several times over the past decade I have flipped between believing one, and then the other, as I think about it more and more, and discuss it with other musicians. It is really fascinating to think about and discuss.

[@tonk_guy839]

I’m very sorry, I don’t remember leaving this comment and I usually don’t try to get in internet feuds. I too am very passionate about music and I want to study it when Im older. I read your comment now and you said some very interesting things. I think that a scoring system instead of a ranking system with time in between playing of the sounds is a much better and more objective (?Not sure if that’s the right word) way of collecting the data.

[@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?

[@niabride7636]

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

[@snackspositive]

They should have taken better sound samples. like, for example a C maj and a C dim

[@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885]

Another study kzbin.info/www/bejne/b3eaooiir5ajbNE&feature=emb_logo tested a tribe in Cameroon - that had never heard Western music - and diminished chords were considered scary while major is considered happy and minor is sad. So it's not just an inherent preference for the pitches but rather that humans like to have a variety of emotions in music to make it enjoyable. McDermott has also proven that it's the natural frequency overtones defining what is considered consonance or dissonance - not the pitches themselves. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090319132909.htm Mafa Tribe Fritz, T., Jentschke, S., Gosselin, N., Sammler, D., Peretz, I., Turner, R., Friederici, A., & Koelsch, S. (2009). Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music Current Biology, 19 (7), 573-576 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.02.058

[@batteredskullsummit9854]

And the circling is worth it Finding beauty in the dissonance

[@albe4190]

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.

[@moviechilltime123]

That is the definition of culture. Culture does not just mean the culture of a state or village, just a group that gets together and does the same things/ has the same tastes/ acts as a cultural force in relation to other cultures. You are right that culture changes and that people have an elastic culture within themselves which adjusts to other culture

[@Cr4y7-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

[@FernieCanto]

That would only drive the point home even further: if you have to "meditate" on the "unpleasantness" of certain sounds, that only means the unpleasantness is not inherent to the sounds themselves; we make it all up.

[@RedPearlPrincess10]

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.

[@cheeseandonions9558]

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.

[@fuzakerunateme8302]

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

[@HanBurritoz]

The video fully gives an answer to the question in the title.

[@Philrc]

There are lots of dubious aspects to this video. Even the title is badly worded: 'musical tastes'. differ even within a culture. That is self-evident- Firstly even in the Western music tradition what was considered consonant or not has changed over time. Also there isn't a simple dissonance / consonance opposition with one being considered 'good' and the other 'bad'. . 'Dissonance' isn't always equivalent to 'unmusical'. Dissonance is needed if your music isn't gong to be too bland. If you look at a Bach score you will see he puts all kinds of 'dissonant' intervals together frequently. . F# with G for example. It's these 'clashes' that bring interest and life to the music . Also, as I said, what we consider consonant or not changes. F# and G could be seen as part of a G major 7 chord, which these days to our ears sounds like a cool laid back jazzy chord, but in Bach's or Mozart's time would have stood out to listeners as a more glaring dissonant 'clash'. ( an interesting side issue of that fact is that maybe we can't now experience past music the way it was experienced by listeners when it was first written.). Again, if you want to test *musical* tastes then you can't just play people combinations of notes. There is a difference between 'sounds' and 'music'. And...what a boring conclusion. Anyone could have told you that without leaving the house. just by listening to the music of different cultures and doing a tiny bit of reading. Yes music is culturally conditioned (yawn). ( even though there is a physical base to music based on the harmonic series and most cultures seem to have figured out a few similar, shared things such as the pentatonic scale) MIT must have a lot of money to waste.

[@FernieCanto]

"And...what a boring conclusion. Anyone could have told you that without leaving the house. just by listening to the music of different cultures and doing a tiny bit of reading." Except not really. Not even that "tiny bit of reading" could stop Leonard Bernstein, for example, from making his Harvard lectures to say that Western tonal music is inherently superior to any other musical system, and music can only sound good as long as it adheres to it somehow. This view is *very* prevalent among academia, and it leaks into popular music, in which many people can shun all forms of experimental and avantgarde music as "*not music*". Note: not just difficult to listen to, but *not music*. If I had a dime for every time I heard that phrase, I'd never have to work again in my life. "If you look at a Bach score you will see he puts all kinds of 'dissonant' intervals together frequently. . F# with G for example. It's these 'clashes' that bring interest and life to the music." And that's exactly the problem. Western music usually treats dissonances as temporary "tensions" that have to be "released" somehow. That's the root of the entire concept of resolution. It took a long, long time for musicians to start exploring dissonance for its own sake, free from the necessity of resolving it. You can only get to that point once you accept that "dissonances" are not inherently tense. "even though there is a physical base to music based on the harmonic series and most cultures seem to have figured out a few similar, shared things such as the pentatonic scale" I.e. the greatest lie ever told. I mean, if the Western diatonic scale is so beautifully derived from the harmonic series, why does the 7th partial sound out of tune? If the harmonic series is such a perfect natural construct, why would we need to "round" some of those partials up or down to construct our harmony? That's complete nonsense. If we really used the harmonic series as the basis for our harmony, we should be using microtonality all over the place. But no, that sounds "weird" and "ugly" and "it's not music". Also, it's true that many cultures use pentatonic scales, but those aren't always *the* pentatonic scale we use in Western music. That's a pretty common deception. What we have in our culture is this watered down idea that "yeah, music is culturally conditioned, but our culture is the better one anyways". The truth is, every musical system has its inner beauty, and it's the musician's job to find it. If the musician is incapable of exploring a system and finding its worth, then he's not that competent. But worse than the musician that is incapable is the musician that's *unwilling*. That is the kind of mentality that has to be extinguished from our culture. Of course we'll always have our preferences and our distastes, and it's necessary to accept that. But those who dismiss an entire system of music as being "not music"? Fuck them.

[@Philrc]

Fernie Canto You know I've just got in from work and I can't be bothered to write a detailed reply; I think even if I wasn't tired I couldn't be bothered. I'll just say that from what I have gleaned of your increasingly angry rant you seem to have *entirely misunderstood* what I was saying.

[@FernieCanto]

kha sab And I should just silently accept that, because KZbin comments, right?

[@Philrc]

Fernie Canto eh? What the fuck are you talking about?

[@FernieCanto]

kha sab I'm talking about me having "entirely misunderstood" you. I mean, if you're going to say that, at least wait until you're able to elaborate.

[@sethjohnson4692]

cool

[@cliffordbaynes3783]

Cultural. I didn't *like classical music until I found Vivaldi. *like defined by enjoying playing a repetitive track. I even enjoy the Italian composers more so than I do the German composers.

[@RememberGodHolyBible]

consonance is biologically heard in context like gasping for fear over laughter, how we interpret it has to do with context to what else is going on. What is cultural is the definition of pleasant and unpleasant with out of context intervals. Also was tuning considered? Were these justly tuned, to what fractions if so? Also pleasant and unpleasant are the wrong words to ask them. Tense or relaxed is better, not what they did, but it needed to be in the context of a musical piece. This seems to be a poorly done experiment by the way they describe what they did.

[@guilhermemagri8110]

This content is amazing! Really important for the community. But i have to appoint something that called me up. The guy in the video put the western culture as the "developed Western culture". Western culture is not the "developed" culture, is just another culture. We are all in the same "developement stage".

[@adpadpyt]

Man in this society they have not so much music and any new music is a song of angels for them :). Even russian music.

[@13realmusic]

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

[@mg640060]

uhh can you fix the description, it's spelled Brandeis

[@DavidGonzalez-nb3lp]

Both

[@uselessgoblin]

wait but i liked them both as well am i not from America

[@iliyaHP]

ممکنه

[@cliffordbaynes3783]

What would have been more interesting is to see what American listeners dislike in these indigenous peoples' prefered harmonic sound groupings.

[@TheYoungKilljoy]

What is the "Western"? Those are Bolivian people.

[@guyincognito143]

It all comes down to IQ.

[@Minptahhathor]

Are you serious? 💀😹

[@guyincognito143]

@@Minptahhathor dumb people enjoy dumb music.

[@themanwhoknewtoomuch6667]

"But but Western music is superior." Every dumb Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson fans.

[@workpine9195]

Holy moly now this is a bad study

[@batteredskullsummit9854]

I actually prefer music that incorporates dissonant chordings, as well as odd meters, polyrhythyms, etc. because I find the majority of western popular music bland as hell, like a mayo and white bread sandwich. Give me Tool over Nickelback 10 times out of 10. Dissonance gives spice to music when used appropriately. For that matter, I find a lot of classical music to be boring as all hell. Great, another arpeggio in a major scale. Yawn. Oh boy here comes the G chord! Again! Zzzzzzz. NO! I want that good shit. Give me Stravinsky! THAT'S music that will pull you in! None of that frilly early 1700s harpsichord bullshit.

[@Minptahhathor]

Some soundtracks slap tho, don't know if that's considered classical or just a variation of it, but Soundtracks>classical music.