What is ‘open-earedness’,and how can it be measured?

Abstract

Recent years have seen some fundamental changes in the study of responses to music: the growth of neuroscientific approaches, in particular, is throwing new light on the role of imagination, affect and emotion. One focus has been on the nature of musical preferences in relation to other affective and cognitive judgements, and another has been on the issue of changes in musical preference across the lifespan. One explanatory concept which has proved useful in this respect is that of ‘open-earedness’, first formulated by Hargreaves in the suggestion that ‘younger children may be more “open-eared” to forms of music regarded by adults as unconventional; their responses may show less evidence of acculturation to normative standards of good taste than those of older subjects’. Louven recently published a critique of the ways in which this concept has been operationalized in subsequent research, proposing his own definition. In this paper we take a broad ranging view of ‘open-earedness’, proposing four different possible definitions, and ways in which these can be operationalized and measured. We use some data from a new test of preferences for musical genres and clips to test some of these operationalizations: the results suggest that the similarities between these four definitions are probably greater than the differences between them, but that they nevertheless provide a richer and more nuanced concept of open-earedness than hitherto.