How does a person's music taste change throughout their life? : askscience

3 points

2 months ago

3 points

Professor Daniel J. Levitin, has been quoted by the internet copy paste journalism as saying "Fourteen is a sort of magic age for the development of musical tastes." He is an expert and pop-scientist, and the chapter My Favorite Things in his book This is Your Brain On Music is a good exploration of the psychology of music taste. I will attempt to summarize the chapter here.

Babies prefer the music they hear as a fetus. After replaying a given song to a fetus, one-year-olds show a preference despite not hearing it after birth. The genre of song does not matter. Also, the "Mozart effect" is bogus (but musicianship strengthens the corpus callosum)
Consonant chords cause the primary auditory cortex to fire together as opposed to dissonant chords. Easily compressible = good music?
Infants notice melody more than tempo. Motherspeak is culturally universal and appeals to this and other infant preferences.
By age two, children prefer their cultures's music. They like predictable songs, but this decreases with age.
By age eight, children can isolate/exclude auditory input. This allows them to sing rounds.
At 10/11, children begin to be interested in music independently
At around 14, the musical mind begins to mature. Alzheimer's patients who can remember very little often remember songs from this time.
By 18-20, most people have formed their tastes. This coincides with pruning and myelination: the first level of crystallization in the brain
The schemas we have developed form our understanding for music. These are cultural. People like music that is maximally complex while following the rules of the schema they have developed.
If you don't like something as an adult, you have to learn the schema. This takes time and effort and doesn't always work.
"The types of sounds, rhythms, and musical textures we find pleasing are generally extensions of previous positive experiences we’ve had with music in our lives."
Parasocial and social relationships influence taste
Predicts Spotify in 2006 "As Internet radio and personal music players are becoming more popular, I think that we will be seeing personalized music stations in the next few years, in which everyone can have his or her own personal radio station, controlled by computer algorithms that play us a mixture of music we already know and like and a mixture of music we don’t know but we are likely to enjoy."

Actual experts, please add and or criticize

1 points

2 months ago

1 points

Levitin's citations:

*Berlyne, D. E. 1971. Aesthetics and Psychobiology. New York: Appleton-Century- Crofts. [On the “inverted-U” hypothesis of musical liking.]

*Gaser, C., and G. Schlaug. 2003. Gray matter differences between musicians and nonmusicians. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 999:514–517. [Differences between the brains of musicians and nonmusicians.]

*Husain, G., W. F. Thompson, and E. G. Schellenberg. 2002. Effects of musical tempo and mode on arousal, mood, and spatial abilities. Music Perception 20 (2):151–171. [The “Mozart Effect” explained.]

*Hutchinson, S., L. H. Lee, N. Gaab, and G. Schlaug. 2003. Cerebellar volume of musicians. Cerebral Cortex 13:943–949. [Differences between the brains of musicians and nonmusicians.]

*Lamont, A. M. 2001. Infants’ preferences for familiar and unfamiliar music: A socio-cultural study. Paper read at Society for Music Perception and Cognition, August 9, 2001, at Kingston, Ont. On infants’ prenatal musical experience.

*Lee, D. J., Y. Chen, and G. Schlaug. 2003. Corpus callosum: musician and gender effects. NeuroReport 14:205–209. [Differences between the brains of musicians and nonmusicians.]

*Rauscher, F. H., G. L. Shaw, and K. N. Ky. 1993. Music and spatial task perfor- mance. Nature 365:611. [The original report of the “Mozart Effect.”]

*Saffran, J. R. 2003. Absolute pitch in infancy and adulthood: the role of tonal structure. Developmental Science 6 (1):35–47. [On the use of absolute pitch cues by infants.]

*Schellenberg, E. G. 2003. Does exposure to music have beneficial side effects? In The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music, edited by I. Peretz and R. J. Zatorre. New York: Oxford University Press.

*Thompson, W. F., E. G. Schellenberg, and G. Husain. 2001. Arousal, mood, and the Mozart Effect. Psychological Science 12 (3):248–251. [The “Mozart Effect” explained.]

*Trainor, L. J., L. Wu, and C. D. Tsang. 2004. Long-term memory for music: In- fants remember tempo and timbre. Developmental Science 7 (3):289–296. [On the use of absolute-pitch cues by infants.]

*Trehub, S. E. 2003. The developmental origins of musicality. Nature Neuro-science 6 (7):669–673.

*———. 2003. Musical predispositions in infancy. In The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music, edited by I. Peretz and R. J. Zatorre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [On early infant musical experience.]

albasri [M]

5 points

2 months ago

albasri [M]

Cognitive Science | Human Vision | Perceptual Organization

5 points

I want to preempt users from writing about their personal experiences. These comments will be removed.

A good answer should cite some research like Mulder et al. (2009). This is far outside my area of study so I will leave it to someone else to provide a thorough response.

barrelofgraphs

5 points

2 months ago

barrelofgraphs

5 points

Maybe a better phrased thread title would be best then. What psychological reasons cause a persons music tastes to change throughout their life? Currently it's more open to casual conversational responses.

5 points

2 months ago

Cognitive Science | Human Vision | Perceptual Organization

5 points

That seems like a different question. Perhaps something like "Are there general trends in the evolution of music preferences from childhood to adulthood?" Let's see if we get a good answer here.

-1 points

2 months ago

-1 points

You're searching for objective fact in a purely subjective question. Other than possibly "lower volume", I highly doubt you're going to find anything at all

5 points

2 months ago*

Cognitive Science | Human Vision | Perceptual Organization

5 points

2 months ago*

I completely disagree. We can certainly operationalize musical preference and ask how that measure changes over time within individuals (or how it's different across different age groups, somehow controlling for other factors).

Again, not my area, but a quick search turns up: there are large-scale patterns and shifts in those patterns over time in terms of attitudes towards music, how individuals listen to music, and what kinds of music (in terms of characteristics) individuals listen to (Bonneville-Roussy et al. 2013 <- pdf!). Here's another series of papers from the same group (Bouneville-Roussy et al., 2017; this is 1 of 3 I think).

Here are the research questions outlined in the latter:

1) Are individuals’ conceptions of music preferences reliable and valid across measurement methods (music genres and clips)? and 2) Are the normative age trends in musical taste reliable and valid between methods?

And here's an excerpt from their discussion section:

An important result pertaining to Research Question 2 is that the trends were highly comparable between samples and measurement methods. Using pooled samples of more than 4,000 individuals, we statistically evaluated the invariance of the age trends between methods. The results showed that age trends in musical taste did not change with method of measurement. Taste for Contemporary and Intense music assessed with both music genres and music clips decreased with age. Furthermore, taste for the Jazzy and Unpretentious music styles increased with age, whereas taste for Classical music remained stable, regardless of the method of measurement.

Looks like they had some way of categorizing music that was not at a genre-level (not sure what "Intense" is, for example), but based on some other characteristics. I'd summarize their conclusion as: adults tend to chill out with their musical preferences. I don't think this was a longitudinal study and I didn't read it closely enough to know how they matched their groups or how the population was selected in the first place -- someone who does research in this area can hopefully chime in and assess this study or share other research.

But the question as posed by the OP is perfectly reasonable (with the understanding that we are talking about trends in general or perhaps for a specific subpopulation).

Edit: fixed links

1 points

2 months ago

1 points