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.

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.

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).

Shouldn't this article have appeared in Nurture magazine?

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.

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.

A countervailing – and edifying – view from Boethius, who is always worth reading: http://www.cengage.com/music/book_content/049557273X_wrightS...

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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?

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

undefined

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.

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.

A lot of extrapolation here.

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.

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

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

So you really can blame baby boomers for nickelback.

undefined