Everyone is a music lover. But certain combinations of notes tend to sound better than others. These combinations are the reason why pop music sounds like "highly consonant major chords" and are believed to sound appealing. Some 12-tone compositions tend to make listeners uneasy, it was thought.
However, new research shows that it is not merely combinations of music that make them sound pleasing, but because we tend to drown in them from an early age, according to a new study from MIT and Brandeis University.
"Overall, the results of this exciting and well-designed study clearly suggest that the preference for certain musical intervals of those familiar with Western music depends on exposure to that music and not on an innate preference for certain frequency ratios," said Brian Moore, a professor of psychology at Cambridge University, who was not involved in the study.
Scientists carried out their tests on people in the Amazon Rainforest. MIT assistant professor Josh McDermott and Brandies professor Ricardo Godoy exposed members of the Tsimane tribe to assess whether they preferred consonant chords over dissonant ones. The tests were conducted on people in La Paz, as well as American musicians and non-musicians.
The leaning towards "more consonant intervals" seemed to differ among the five groups.
"In the Tsimane it's undetectable, and in the two groups in Bolivia, there's a statistically significant but small preference," McDermott told MIT News. "In the American groups it's quite a bit larger, and it's bigger in the musicians than in the nonmusicians."
The Tsimane are quite familiar with musical concepts: they were able to distinguish between consonant and dissonant chords. But the music they make generally involves only one instrument or voice playing at a time, and presumably they had no preconceptions as to which type of interval sounded "better."
Hence, it's all about your upbringing. If you have listened or got attuned to a certain kind of music through your growing years, you turn to it like a plant to light!
The findings were published in Nature, July 13.
