Why we like the music we do

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-07/miot-wwl071216.php

Public Release: 13-Jul-2016
Why we like the music we do
New study suggests that musical tastes are cultural in origin, not hardwired in the brain
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In Western styles of music, from classical to pop, some combinations of notes are generally considered more pleasant than others. To most of our ears, a chord of C and G, for example, sounds much more agreeable than the grating combination of C and F# (which has historically been known as the "devil in music").

For decades, neuroscientists have pondered whether this preference is somehow hardwired into our brains. A new study from MIT and Brandeis University suggests that the answer is no.

In a study of more than 100 people belonging to a remote Amazonian tribe with little or no exposure to Western music, the researchers found that dissonant chords such as the combination of C and F# were rated just as likeable as "consonant" chords, which feature simple integer ratios between the acoustical frequencies of the two notes.

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In 2010, Godoy, an anthropologist who has been studying an Amazonian tribe known as the Tsimane for many years, asked McDermott to collaborate on a study of how the Tsimane respond to music. Most of the Tsimane, a farming and foraging society of about 12,000 people, have very limited exposure to Western music.

"They vary a lot in how close they live to towns and urban centers," Godoy says. "Among the folks who live very far, several days away, they don't have too much contact with Western music."

The Tsimane's own music features both singing and instrumental performance, but usually by only one person at a time.

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The researchers also performed experiments to make sure that the participants could tell the difference between dissonant and consonant sounds, and found that they could.

The team performed the same tests with a group of Spanish-speaking Bolivians who live in a small town near the Tsimane, and residents of the Bolivian capital, La Paz. They also tested groups of American musicians and nonmusicians.

"What we found is the preference for consonance over dissonance varies dramatically across those five groups," McDermott says. "In the Tsimane it's undetectable, and in the two groups in Bolivia, there's a statistically significant but small preference. In the American groups it's quite a bit larger, and it's bigger in the musicians than in the nonmusicians."

When asked to rate nonmusical sounds such as laughter and gasps, the Tsimane showed similar responses to the other groups. They also showed the same dislike for a musical quality known as acoustic roughness.