Your Taste In Music May Be More Cultural Than Cognitive

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Your taste in music, however, may have more to do with your cultural environments according to recent studies, for which your preferences may be determined by how culture influences you and conditions the brain.

Your taste in music is caught

In a study published by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the journal Nature, reveals their findings on the research conducted on a remote Amazonian community that gave evidence regarding the origin of musical tastes as cultural in origin.

Josh McDermott, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of brain and cognitive science at the MIT, points out that preferences for consonant sounds differ across different nations and cultures, of which it is most prevalent in Western cultures.

According to McDermott, this includes the combination of notes using the chords G and C that is often heard in pop music.

“This indicates that the preference for consonance depends on exposure to particular types of music, probably those that feature harmony in which some combinations of notes are prioritized over others,” says McDermott. “If it were ‘hardwired,’ one would not expect such dramatic cultural variation; everyone would be expected to have a robust preference.”

Study variables and findings

McDermott and his research team travelled all the way to the remote Tsimane village in the Amazon region northwest of Bolivia. They chose the community due to its very limited access to the modern world and exist with their traditional way of living.

The study involved some 100 Tsimane villagers where they were asked to rate sounds based on pleasant levels, some of which were combinations that form a consonant chord and some were dissonant chords.

In order to establish that the participants are able to understand the audio test, McDermott and his team made a series of unrelated control tests, which included a similar test with the same number of Western subjects.

The results of the tests actually did provide significant results, where the Tsimane villagers were able rated both audio types equally pleasant, compared to the Western control counterparts who rated the consonant chords pleasant and considered unpleasant the dissonant sounds.

The Western group rated the dissonant chords to be more downtrodden while the consonant chords more upbeat and harmonic.

“By the time we conducted the study, I had become aware that consonance preferences even among Westerners vary considerably, being stronger in people who have played an instrument,” says McDermott. “So I knew the preference could at least be modulated by experience. Still, it was striking to see the degree of variation across cultures.”

“We need to accept and document the differences in how other cultures hear the world. The opportunities to do so are rapidly diminishing with the diffusion of Western music around the world, and I think we need to seize the opportunity to do as much as we can before the window closes,” McDermott added.

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