Why Do I Like the Music I Like?
I asked myself that question recently. My answer was like yours probably: “Duh, who cares, what’s the problem?”
I was sampling cuts on a new album from Lucinda Williams, liking some songs, not others, and wondered: what am I responding to? Are there hidden triggers? Certain families of melodies, chord changes, tones that I prefer, and others I reject, without knowing?
Horrors. Is it possible I’m…predictable? Easily manipulated?
I looked into it. Here’s some of what I learned (with apologies to musicians and music majors).
It’s fairly intuitive why we like what we like. Our taste in music can be summed up as: music’s intrinsic qualities (rhythm, melody, tone, etc.) filtered through extrinsic qualities — our ears, brains, memories & quirks.
About those extrinsic qualities: We develop our musical preferences through (1) repeated exposure to certain kinds of music as we grow up — what our culture exposes us to through home, school and church/synagogue/mosque. Then multiply, divide and put those influences in a blender with (2) what we latch onto at crucial times of our development – what we listen to during hormonal spikes, highly charged moments, and by what people we admire like. Age 13 anyone?
All that puts us on a path. Hopefully, we continue to grow and search and try new stuff. That’s what triggered this question in the first place.
It’s also fairly complex why we like what we like. Cue the music. Its soundwaves reach the ear. The cochlea encodes them. Through auditory pathways the information is sent to the auditory cortex. It’s in the vast regions of the auditory cortex that aspects of the soundwaves are processed: standard pitch, timbre, rhythm, the sound of it.
According to Prabir Mehta of the Science Museum of Virginia, the auditory cortex stores all the sounds you’ve heard in your entire life, from your mommy’s lullaby to your buddy’s astonishing belch to your neighbor’s lawnmower to Radiohead’s I’m Not Here.
So our tastes are unique partially because our storehouses are different.
Every new sound, every new song we hear is filtered through the auditory cortex; it is catalogued before it reaches the accumbens nucleus, the seat of reward and pleasure: it’s here that the brain decides whether it likes this sound or not, based on all the other closely related sounds. During this process some of the deepest regions of the brain are engaged; the limbic system, which is involved with emotional processing, and the hippocampus, memory. Dopamine, the pleasure chemical, is released. Or not, I guess.
But the decision about whether we like a song also involves expectation. We humans are hardwired for pattern recognition. It is an essential tool for survival. (I smell smoke. Is the jungle on fire or is it Zog’s cigar? I hear the snap of a branch. Is it Zog stumbling home drunk or it a sabre-toothed tiger?) So we have certain subconscious expectations of every song we hear for the first time: how it will progress, how themes will be resolved. We embrace or reject it in micro-reactions. Which is why we instinctively reject music we’re not familiar with, especially from other cultures. The patterns are not familiar.
Clues from the Music Genome. To make the service more appealing and useful to its listeners, Pandora created the Music Genome Project. Every song on Pandora is analyzed and broken into 450 “genes” by actual human beings before it’s placed in the Pandora library. As explained by the chief engineer of the Project, Neil Gasser: “What are the hundreds of factors of rhythm and harmony, melody and form, rhythm and sound, and lyrics and production? How can we objectively break those down? What is the shape or contour of the melody? What are the kinds of chord progressions used?”
I wouldn’t list all 450 even if Pandora made them available. Here are a few: arrangement, beat, form (the structure), harmony, lyrics, melody, orchestration, rhythm, syncopation, tempo, vamping, voice.
Wait. Vamping? I looked it up. A vamp is a short passage of instrumental music that is played as many times as needed to create time for some purpose. Club music is full of vamping, appropriately enough, but it also plays underneath a dialogue interval or James Brown going “HAH!” It’s a good example of how deep in the weeds the Pandorans go.
But for a glimpse into music’s gearbox, we can’t ignore…
Consonance & Dissonance. Certain musical intervals, like the octave, are so mathematically precise, they border on perfection (so I’m told). In the west, our ears are trained to find such intervals pleasant. Certain sounds feel soothing and beautiful, and others sound sour, wrong.
The dictionary definition of consonance is “a combination of notes which are in harmony with each other due to the relationship between their frequencies.” The writer Hallie Golden cites the main interval in Twinkle Twinkle Little Staras a good example.
It was long believed that our preference for consonance is hard-wired in our lizard brains, but recent studies show that it’s actually not biology but learned behavior. Primitive, isolated tribesfolk were played dissonant and consonant music for the first time, and reactions were split. We in the west definitely prefer consonance, and one study indicated that may be because for the earliest instruments, like pipes, it was easier and more natural to play consonant tones.
Dissonant intervals can sound harsh and sour and unfinished, but there’s more to dissonance than meets the ear.
The example Golden supplied puzzled me at first: the choral notes heard as the clouds part at the very opening of The Simpsons. Maybe due to familiarity, it doesn’t sound dissonant to me, but there you are. This opening phrase is based on the tritone (an augmented 4th interval), otherwise known as The Devil’s Interval. (D’oh!)
But dissonance is also subjective, and a matter of context: A musical ornament called an appoggiatura can cause a reaction in people’s brains that basically makes a song sad: it’s a sometimes dissonant note that resolves into a main note. In an otherwise consonant, harmonious, “lovely” work, one slightly dissonant chord can really wallop your ears and mood. Bach and Mozart both weave in notes of dissonance. One technique of Bach’s is to create harmonious chords with slightly unstable intervals; a note is prolonged while the rest of the music gallops on – a suspension, a dissonance of sorts, though your western mind is able to anticipate or interpret the pattern and is confident it will be resolved.
Of course, we commonly hear, and grow accustomed to, dissonance in world music, western jazz, some modern classical orchestral music and rock guitar solos.
Music is deeply personal. It’s pretty cool to think my library of sounds, my auditory cortex, is unlike anyone else’s in history. No one has the same exact taste in music as I do. What’s even cooler is the other side of that coin: how similar taste in music can spark friendships and love affairs. And the other side of that coin: how much it hurts when a friend or colleague goes and dumps on one of your favorite songs, albums or artists. When they go way beyond critique, and just blast it, dismiss it.
It stings. Music isn’t just deeply personal; it’s important.
Oh yeah? You suck, Zog.
Nuance Cubed 