How We Get Imprinted with the Music We Like: From Bloom*s *How Pleasure Works*
The following passage comes from Paul Blooms HOW PLEASURE WORKS: THE NEW SCIENCE OF WHY WE LIKE WHAT WE LIKE.
“We know that some of our tastes are established early in development. In one experiment, mothers played certain musical pieces (pieces from Vivaldi, songs by the Backstreet boys, and so on) to their babies in the womb and didn’t play those pieces again until the babies’ first birthday. This experience had an effect –the one-year olds tended to prefer the music that they had heard before they were born.” (p. 127)
“Another factor in determining how much you like a song, or a musical genre more generally, is how old you are when you first hear it. In 1988, the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky did an informal experiment to look at this, contacting radio stations and asking them when most of the music that they play was first introduced and what the average age of their listeners was. He found that most people are 20 or younger when they hear the music they’re going to want to listen to for the rest of their lives. If you are older than 25 when some new form of music is introduced, you are unlikely to enjoy it. As Sapolsky put it, ‘Not a whole lot of seventeen-year-olds are tuning in to the Andrew Sisters, not a lot of Rage Against the Machine is being played in retirement communities, and the biggest fans of sixty non-stop minutes of James Taylor are starting to wear relaxed jeans.’”
July 31st, 2010 at 10:24 am
This is a pretty short passage. (very provocative) Is the full piece an article or a full length book?
July 31st, 2010 at 10:24 am
But what if I want to discover a new kind of music that I like, huh? What if?
July 31st, 2010 at 11:03 am
It’s a book. But it covers A LOT of ground. I’ll be posting a few other things from it, and you’ll see that it isn’t all about things quite close to this.
July 31st, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Look forward to hearing more. This is an interest of mine.
My older siblings, as well as my Mother, played music that really stuck with me. Additionally, some movie and TV theme songs from my “early youth,” I find preferring to some that was popular with my own teen contemporaries.
Wonder if some of it has to do with music NOT being associated with the traumas and difficulties of adolescent development – i.e., music without negative emotional strings attached, maybe evoking a certain happy innocence.
Years later, when I heard that music again (the ones from Mom and siblings), and as importantly, knew their meaning or context, whole new experiences sprung forth, as I tried to “reenact” in my mind what was going on in the world of which I was then unaware.
John Updike in his series of Rabbit novels (pub. in 1960, 1971, 1981, 1990 and 2001) makes a point of mentioning songs played in the era, mostly on the car radio of the novels’ protagonists. These references are powerful links to a time, and maybe somehow he knew that such evocation would nostalgically affect later readers.
Generations in my extended family born in 1974 and 1998 are avid Beatles fans – go figure!