Can Music We Don't Really Like Bring Us Together?

The sixth in a series

Music, like food, is rooted in biology, and it is like breathing, all pervasive. But are certain aspects of our reactions to music universal as human beings? And is there some way that it can help bring us together across cultural divides?

When PAN wandered the mountains of ancient Greece, did the shepherds tending their flocks, or even the wood-nymphs (including Syrinx) take to his panpipe music at their first listen? 

Modern science tells us that music is a fundamental part of our evolution, as humans probably sang before they spoke in syntactically guided sentences. Music is strongly linked to motivation and human social contact. While only a few people may be able to play music, almost all of us can at least sing or hum a tune.

A team of researchers from McGill University Montreal, Technische Universität Berlin, and the University of Montreal arrived at this conclusion after traveling deep into the rainforest to play music to a very isolated group of people, the Mbenzélé Pygmies, who live without access to radio, television or the internet.

They then compared how the Mbenzélé responded both to their own music and to unfamiliar Western music, with the way that a group of Canadians responded to the same pieces.

The researchers explain, in a recent article in Frontiers in Psychology, that although the groups felt quite differently about whether specific pieces of music made them feel good or bad, their subjective and physiological responses to how exciting or calming they found the music to be appeared to be universal.

Dr. Hauke Egermann

The researchers arrived at this conclusion by playing 19 short musical excerpts  (11 western and 8 Pygmy) of between about 30 and 90 seconds to forty Pygmies in the Congo and then to forty Canadians in Montreal.

"Our major discovery is that listeners from very different groups both responded to how exciting or calming they felt the music to be in similar ways," says Hauke Egermann, who is currently based at the Technische Universität in Berlin.

Can people learn to love music they don’t like?

We all can readily identify music we hate. But can we intentionally transform our visceral response to different types of music?

Researchers at Australia's University of Melbourne say that the more dissonance (which they describe as "perceived roughness, harshness, unpleasantness, or difficulty in listening to the sound") that we hear in music, the less we enjoy said music.

However, the more we're exposed to a certain kind of music — either through intentional engagement or simple osmosis in whatever culture we're immersed in — the more we like that music.

The team played both "pure tones" and various chords for participants -- a mixed group of trained musicians studying at the school's conservatory and members of the general public -- and had them rate the sounds for perceived dissonance, and for familiarity, on a five-point scale.

Trained musicians, perhaps predictably, were more sensitive to dissonance than lay listeners. But they also found that when listeners hadn't previously encountered a certain chord, they found it nearly impossible to hear the individual notes that comprised it. Where this ability was lacking, the chords sounded dissonant, and thus, unpleasant.

Sarah Wilson

The ability to identify tones and thus enjoy harmonies was positively correlated with musical training. Said study co-author Sarah Wilson "This showed us that even the ability to hear a musical pitch (or note) is learned." 

From a practical standpoint, the results seem to suggest that we can train ourselves to better appreciate music. This includes the unfamiliar traditions, (assuming this is not just a clever way of promoting the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music) is great news for those who've been wanting to get into jazz or other musical genres.

This is reason enough for inquisitive people to "sample" classical music in non-traditional venues or based on various forms of popular culture such as motion pictures, themed programs or Broadway musicals. There may be a great opportunity to grow audiences for classical music, based on the way we all process music in our brains.

We're sure PAN will be right in the mix, as he tries to use these new scientific insights in his romantics efforts in the woods and fields of Arcadia.