Why do we like the music we like?

by Bernard D. Sherman (www.bsherman.net ; producer, Iowa Public Radio)

Notes towards an article I might write sometime soon - Some resources as I start to draw this together maybe:

1) Musical taste as a status marker. This is the reduction given by Steven Pinker in one of his books; it is the weakest moment in the book. But it's clearly part of the picture. Here's a problem that raises for classical music: - highbrow tastes used to be a marker of high status but not any more; now it's having eclectic tastes. See "The Rise of Fall of Highbrow Snobbery as a Status Marker" by RIchard Peterson - if you have enough status to pay the $30, OR be part of a university. See also the brilliant study of American musical taste called "Anything but Heavy Metal" - supports the above, but details it. If you don't want to pay the $14, here's the gist: the more educated a listener in modern America, the more tolerant and "eclectic" his/her musical taste tends to be (the eclectism is what marks status) - but that tolerance tends to exclude a few genres (notably rap, country, gospel, and heavy-metal). The author argues that these are the genres most preferred by the lowest-class people. Anyway, the gist is the same: today, the taste that marks high status is eclecticism, not highbrow-ism.

Of course, Pinker also points to reverse-snobbism - and here he makes a nice point - when the masses begin to love X, the tastemakers immediately start to hate it; unconsciously, that's for their own amour-propre. When The Shins (or whatever) got big, their fans ceased to take them seriously.

Anyway, the institutions of Classical Music were optimized for an era when highbrow did equate to status-marker. It is those institutions that must change to fit the new cultural world.

2) Musical taste as what has gotten burned into your neurons. This is known as the "Age 23" effect - what people really love in their early 20s retains special emotional power as they get older. This is why boomers collect late-60s records, and why there's still something about Mary (or John or whoever that early-20s crush-object was for you). The gist: today's 23 year olds are not going to be Gramophone subscribers.

3) Musical taste as group identification. Tyler Cowen makes this the total explanation for musical preference in his light by enjoyable freakonomic book, Discover Your Inner Economist. Of course, he vastly oversimplifies - other elements matter, as I argue elsewhere here - but he's right, the influence of other peoples' opinions matters more. Or as Judith Rich Harris might put it, our musical taste reflects that of the group we want to be part of.. Here's an abstract of the greatest sociological study of music ever: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/311/5762/854

This has been a problem for classical music in an obvious way: the popular kids don't like classical music. It also bears on the unrelated question of why some pieces become canonical - is it their intrinsic excellence, or just a kind of social influence-cascade? This research suggests that quality is PART of explanation, but well under half of it. More has to do with the influence of other peoples' opinions - if we're told that lots of people love X, we will tend to love X more than we would have.

Again for the canon: to some degree it's random and unpredictable which pieces will get the buzz. Here's a great blog posting about a study on the unpredictability of what will become a hit: http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2007/04/predicting_hits.html

4) Musical taste differences reflecting individual personality differences. I know of no research on individual differences affecting musical taste, but it'd be fun to study. Consider novelty: the need to hear something new vs. the stuff you've always loved. There is an actual gene knwon to affect how much people crave novelty - so when applied to music, this may vary between individuals. And consider other differences: Risk-taking. Aggressiveness. Depressiveness. Neuroticism. Extraversion vs. introversion.... I'd expect the Big 5 traits would influence whether you like, say, Bach or Handel more. No evidence, just a hunch.

5) Barriers-to-Entry vs. Hooks as influences on musical taste - though I don't know of anyone who agrees with me on it. Greg, for example, differs with me on the "hook" element of lyrics. But more on that later...

Anyway, in my view, it's all the above and more.