September 1, 2009

Methods to Alter Musical Preference

by Erik Austin Deerly

Abstract

It is possible for the composer or educator to use the Mere Exposure Effect—a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them—to create a situation whereby the listener’s musical preference is influenced or possibly even temporarily altered. However, creating a permanent change in musical preference is quite a different matter. While there is a general universality in the Mere Exposure Effect, the age of the listener is an important aspect to the effectiveness of the phenomenon in practical use. And while mere exposure can create a brief change in attitude, it cannot create a permanent change in the listener’s predisposition. Studies have identified target age groups where musical preferences are more often formed. This article summarizes the various methods known to alter the preference of the listener and investigates the implications to the composer and the educator.  Links between linguistics and music and listener choices are discussed, especially as they relate to musical preference.

Increased exposure leads to increased appreciation

The Mere Exposure Effect can be used as an approach to music composition in order to selectively create zones of comfort, or even discomfort, for the listener, and possibly influence the listener’s musical preference. First studied in detail by Robert Zajonc in 1968 using visual stimuli, he found that “mere exposure is a sufficient condition for attitude enhancement” (Zajonc, Attitudinal 15), whereby subjects express an otherwise undue liking or appreciation for stimuli merely because they are familiar with them. The influence of exposure on auditory preference was documented in 1979 by William Wilson, however the first study that directly focused on musical preferences as opposed to simple auditory stimuli, was developed by Albert LeBlanc in 1982. This area of study led Zajonc to revisit the subject in 2001 to conclude that exposure effects are “diffuse” (Zajonc, Gateway 226), leading to enhanced affect for stimuli other than those exposed previously. Additional studies by Jennifer Monahan and Larry Jacoby led to the notion that “previous exposure is thought to activate context-free representations of stimuli, resulting in perceptual fluency, which refers to rapid and efficient processing of previously encountered stimuli” (Szpunar 370). Comparisons by James Brentar in 1994 between musically untrained listeners exposed to different genres point to basic aspects which remain consistent across all listeners. Based on the early findings in the effectiveness of the Mere Exposure Effect in music, it appears possible for the composer to use it to temporarily influence the listener’s musical preference. Whether this is done subliminally or with the willing consent of the listener seems to make only marginal difference. However, creating a permanent change in musical preference is quite a different matter. Long term exposure and the effects on the brain can best be shown in research done with trained musicians. “There are two advantages to studying ‘brain’ plasticity in musicians: the complexity of the eliciting stimulus—music—and the extent of their exposure to this stimulus” (Munte 473).

Musical responses and biological changes

Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre demonstrated a direct correlation between emotional responses to music and cerebral blood flow changes. The study presented musical stimuli that produced the experience of “‘shivers-down-the-spine’ or ‘chills’” (Blood).  Subjective reports of chills were accompanied by biological changes, including increased blood flow in regions of the brain thought to be connected to the reward/motivation, arousal, and emotion centers.

These brain structures are known to be active in response to other euphoria- inducing stimuli, such as food, sex, and drugs of abuse. This finding links music with biologically relevant, survival-related stimuli via their common recruitment of brain circuitry involved in pleasure and reward. (Blood)

A 2002 study by Thomas Munte on the brains of trained musicians showed anatomical differences and structural changes in the brain thought to control memory and even coordination skills. One possible conclusion is that long-term exposure to pleasurable musical responses may alter the make-up of the brain. Studies where non-musicians have been exposed to repeated stimuli show a remarkably different result, as compared to the example of the trained musician. James Brentar’s study showed that in non-musician subjects presented with stimuli more than 16 times, a slight decrease in preference occurred. This over-saturation phenomenon has not yet been studied widely, however the current popularity of real-world applications of the Mere Exposure Effect will no doubt lead to more work in this area. An alternative account of associations between preference and exposure is provided by the two-factor model proposed by Daniel Berlyne and David Stang. Evaluations of supraliminally presented stimuli are shown to form an inverted U-shaped curve of arousal potential, suggesting that only stimuli in an intermediate sweet spot—not too complex and not too simple—was found to be evaluated most favorably. The two-factor model points out the difficulty of selecting the most useful stimuli in order to glean meaningful results: the optimal complexity varies by listener and thus large-scale testing results are not yet feasible, possibly due to the overwhelming cost.

The listener’s predisposition

Michael Cole explores social, genderal, cultural, and environmental differences between listeners and demonstrates a natural interaction between listener and music, listener and context, and context and music in Cultural Psychology. A once and future discipline. Building on early work by Paul Farnsworth, Cole found that the while the listener may be exposed to music and informed about it, the strongest factor in determining preference remains musical prejudice, which is not easily or quickly altered. Various studies by David Rubin, Horst Stipp, and C. Victor Fung suggest that a listener’s core musical preferences are determined between the period of puberty though the late 20′s. During those formative years, favorites are chosen based in large part by emotional responses and reinforced by the preferences of peers. However,  J. Craig Peery’s work with children showed that it is also during this time that an increased exposure to a musical style can strengthen the preference for that music, and a strong memory association will be created. Raymond Cattell believed that music preferences reveal insight into the personality of the listener whose unconscious mind is often otherwise overlooked. Using factor analysis to deal with the large quantity of data, Cattell identified 12 musical preferences, mapping each to a specific personality characteristic. While Cattell believed music preferences to be a window into the unconscious mind, most researchers have regarded music preferences as evidence of more obvious personality traits.  Studies by Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling have recently taken into account more real-world behavior within social and personality psychology. It is in this real-world behavior that the importance of the listener’s predisposition has come to light. While there is a general universality in the Mere Exposure Effect, the age of the listener is thought to be an important aspect to the effectiveness of the phenomenon in practical use. And while mere exposure can create a brief change in attitude, it cannot create a permanent change in the listener’s predisposition. In order to effect a more permanent change we have to look beyond the Mere Exposure Effect. It seems reasonable to start with two questions: who might want to permanently influence the listener’s musical preference, and why? Let us look at the role of the educator. Whether the course is a survey-level appreciation course or an advanced private lesson in music composition, the teacher must often persuade the student to leave a zone of comfort—the familiar—in order to foster growth and realize untapped potential. It is a routine necessity for the teacher to influence music preference—sometimes on the minute scale and sometimes more grandiose. But what of the performer? It has been suggested by Brent Hugh that the musician should have a natural interest in influencing the audience’s musical preference, especially in regard to the decline in popularity of one genre or another. While it cannot be denied that the working musician has a stake in music popularity, it must be noted that if the audience has already paid to attend a concert—or even bothered to show up for that matter—then they are most likely already fans of the genre. I suggest the musician who wishes to change minds and sway preference must take on the role of educator to one degree or another; there are of course numerous examples of this—Yo-Yo Ma, Kronos Quartet, Laurie Anderson, etc. Sometimes musicians create a classroom within their performance. Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project is an excellent example of this. Others simply lecture and workshop.

The Mozart Effect

Claims in 1993 by Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky received widespread attention in the world of education and popular media. They suggested that listening to Mozart for ten minutes caused college students to score eight to nine points higher on spatial IQ tests. The Mozart Effect, as it came to be known, quickly grew in popularity, boosted in part by a news media eager to report on discoveries that promised genius children. In stark contrast to the Mere Exposure Effect, claims by Rauscher et al. suggested that participants’ performance on spatial-temporal tasks were temporarily enhanced after listening to very specific music: Mozart or Schubert, rather than silence, or any other music. Reports in the popular press indicated that the general public were giving consideration to the possibility that The Mozart Effect would improve other abilities as well, including everything from airplane pilot performance to structural engineering. “Based on these findings, Georgia Governor Zell Miller recently budgeted for a compact disc or cassette for each infant born in state…. Unfortunately, the media have not been careful to distinguish these disparate findings” (Nantais 370). Despite many followup publications in support of The Mozart Effect, legitimate criticism arose and continues, suggesting flawed methodology may have skewed the results. For example, the method for obtaining a baseline prior to the actual exposure may have inadvertently overexposed the subjects, creating learning by repetition rather than a priming of spatial processing. In a 2002 study focusing on music tempo, Gabriela Husain, William Thompson, and E. Glenn Schellenberg reported that four versions of the same Mozart sonata (fast, slow, major, minor) had differing effects on spatial skill.

Enthusiasm for their application to classroom practice should be tempered by an awareness that their lack of sound empirical support makes it likely that their application will have little real power to enhance student learning beyond that stimulated by the initial excitement of something new. Of course, future research may shed new light on these theories, and students, teachers, researchers, and theorists should remain open to new evidence. (Waterhouse 222)

While there appears to be a lack of validating evidence for The Mozart Effect at this time, the debate has brought the potential of music and music education into popular culture at a critical time.

Music and linguistics

Aniruddh Patel’s Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis demonstrates a correlation between the syntax of language and music. Patel “proposed that linguistic and musical syntax share neural processes (instantiated in overlapping frontal brain areas) which serve to activate domain-specific syntactic representations in posterior brain regions as part of the process of structural integration” (Patel, ICMPC8 797). This framework is now motivating more research in the field of language and music. Studies examining music and language in children during language acquisition link auditory processing to literacy skills. Research by both Donald Abrams and Nina Kraus suggests that those children who respond earlier to phonetics display higher reading skills.  The language-analogy model suggests that the musical vocabulary of a particular style—the tonal, melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic gestures that distinguish it from other musical styles and communicate its musical meaning—are learned the same way the grammar and vocabulary of a language are learned. It has long been suggested that the patterns of rhythm and sound of a culture’s spoken language has influenced and been influenced by that of its music. Recent empirical data published by Patel and others now supports this notion.

From the perspective of learning about linguistic and musical systems during development, where might we expect to see overlap and divergence? Here we focus on the acquisition of tacit competence; that is, musical and linguistic knowledge, rather than the skills required to produce these systems. Both (spoken) language and music are generated from a finite set of sounds (notes or phonemes), carved out of a larger possible set of sounds. These sounds are organized into discrete categories, facilitating representation and memory. (McMullen 289)

From a developmental perspective, musical and linguistic processes are intertwined—mentally and physically, in our brain’s wiring—which suggests a codependent relationship. An active listener becomes familiar with the vocabulary of a musical style through repetitive listening, learning how to distinguish that style without the need of formal musical training. Music is learned exactly the same way as language; an unfamiliar musical style sounds as meaningless to a young listener as a foreign language heard for the first time. If the educator or composer is to cause a change in the musical preference of this listener, the pedagogy must include methods to engage the listener at a linguistic level. For example, Patel has shown a connection between musical rhythm and linguistic rhythm. It stands to reason then that sight-singing be done concurrently with sight-speaking. Further, if a student is learning a passage of Germanic music, it might make sense to also spend time speaking in the rhythm of that language;  I am suggesting a more holistic approach to music education, where the subject is taught in the context of supporting humanistic disciplines, rather than as an isolated field of study.

The listener in real-world context

There are many reasons the casual listener chooses music: as companion, for workout, to distract, for dance, to wake in the morning, to wind down after work, etc. Musicologists and cognitive scientists have long pondered the question of musical preference. In an attempt to provide a unified theory for personalty and musical preference, a series of six studies by Peter Rentfrow was recently published. Over 3,500 individuals’ musical preferences were studied to reveal four basic listener personality types: reflective and complex; intense and rebellious; upbeat and conventional; energetic and rhythmic. This work builds on Cattell’s early studies on music preferences and the unconscious mind, however Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling place the listener in real-world context. Their studies attempt to account for everything from religion to cognitive abilities. Not surprisingly, the studies show music choices to be intensely personal and often about signifying to one’s peers. “‘Adolescents, in particular, use music as a way to fit into groups, as a way to manage people’s impressions of them,’ says Rentfrow. ‘It’s a badge, if you will, of their identity’” (Benson). By contrast, research by Alinka Greasley and Alexandra Lamont focuses more on the way in which music is used by the listener. In their 2009 study, Experience Sampling Methodology was successfully used to show that listeners who become more engaged in their listening experience are more likely to take an active role in their musical choices, and more likely to make use of music to evoke or enhance specific emotions. The study allowed for both the casual listener as well as those more engaged. Quantitative data was collected on what listeners were doing while hearing music. The research shows that less musically engaged listeners are less aware of the ways in which they use music. The study gathered data showing everyday musical behavior in detail.

In conclusion

Based on the sum of findings mentioned, an active listener is more likely to develop personal musical preferences and make choices based on emotion and context. This listener will have a developed musical vocabulary corresponding to each preferred style and will use music to alter mood and emotion as needed. The more active the listener becomes within a certain genre, he may become a lay-expert on the style, with the ability to recognize the music by its specific vocabulary. While a composer might be able to use the Mere Exposure Effect to temporarily influence the listener’s musical choice, this change will not be long lasting and the listener will fall back into a zone of selected comfort. The natural connection between musical and linguistic processes offers a portal through which the educator can augment the listener’s knowledge of and involvement with music. Further, by focusing on why listener choices are made and the context in which listeners use music, the educator or composer can better engage them. Music educators wishing to facilitate a long-lasting change in musical preference are well advised to consider musical genres as separate languages, and to take advantage of the link between auditory processing and linguistics. Immersing the student in both the spoken and musical language can foster change and growth by taking advantage of the brain’s natural wiring. Thus, music might best be learned as a subset of and in conjunction with the supporting humanistic disciplines, especially language.

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