Science Explains Your Poor Taste In Music
We all still like Nickelback, right?
It’s music festival season in Chicago: a period of time when thousands of people pay top dollar to stand outside and sweat near each other, while listening to bands they may or may not care about.
I can honestly say that I’ve never had the inclination to attend such an event. Partly because I value my personal space, but moreso because when it comes to music, my tastes skew a tad (okay, a lot) old.
When I was growing up, my mom played cello in a 70s rock cover band. I was a fixture at all of their shows and over time, became a huge fan of the genre. This didn’t exactly enhance my social life — I couldn’t name a single Backstreet Boy, but if you needed someone to passionately analyze the lyrics of Harry Chapin’s hit song, “Cats In The Cradle,” I was your girl.
Ninety percent of the music we listen to is music we’ve already heard.
And it’s not like I didn’t try to get on board with the music my peers were listening to — I liked the Spice Girls and I knew a Hanson song. But for whatever reason, I preferred listening to James Taylor’s “Mexico” on repeat to branching out and experiencing new music. If we’re being honest, I still feel this way.
The fact that I prefer to rock out to the music I grew up with as a kid isn’t completely out of the norm — 90% of the music we listen to is music we’ve already heard. Repetition is familiar, which makes it comforting. Part of this is out of evolutionary necessity; humans are predisposed to be wary of anything new and to be receptive to things that we already know are trustworthy.
The other part has to do with how we mentally experience the music we hear over and over again. The more a person listens to a song, the more the boundaries between the music and the listener break dow. This is called “virtual participation” — because the person listening to the song has already heard the music so many times, they are able to anticipate what happens next, almost as if the listener is mentally calling the song into existence.
And the more you come into contact with something, the more likely it is that you’ll react positively to it. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the “mere exposure effect.” It affects the way people experience everything from pop music to political ads. That’s why repitition is such a huge part of music — choruses help sell songs.
This explains why a friend of mine still listens to Slipknot today, specifically when he gets frustrated at work. Another friend was raised abroad and has a huge weakness for Europop (specifically, B*Witched, Westlife and Five) — she likes to play it when she’s getting ready to go out. I have a friend who still listens to *NSYNC when she cleans and my husband recently copped to loving The Manhattan Transfer. None of this music would be categorized as “cool,” yet we continue to cling to it.
According to science, this is completely normal. Daniel J. Levitin, the director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University, believes that,
Fourteen is a sort of magic age for the development of musical tastes. Pubertal growth hormones make everything we’re experiencing, including music, seem very important. We’re just reaching a point in our cognitive development where we’re developing our own tastes. And musical tastes become a badge of identity.
In other words, all of the seismic emotional and mental shifts we experience during puberty have a soundtrack — and whatever it is we’re listening to at the time becomes emblematic of that point in our lives. Maybe that’s why whenever I hear Dispatch’s song, “Two Coins” I have a strong and sudden urge to go make out on a twin-size bed (just me?).
Ajay Kalia, a product owner for taste profiles at Spotify, performed a scientific study in which he determined that most people’s musical tastes fully mature in their mid-30s. Personally, I feel like my musical tastes were set in stone before I even entered high school. I will never be the girl at the music festival and I’ll never be the one recommending “chill pop” to my friends — but if anyone wants to have an in-depth conversation about Stevie Nicks’ contribution to rock, hit me up.