Liking for Musical Styles

Abstract

This paper reports two experiments on liking for musical styles. The first study investigated the relative extent to which liking for musical excerpts is associated with liking for the styles in which they are performed and for the pieces on which they are based. Fifty subjects were presented with 24 short musical excerpts comprising 5 original pop music pieces and 19 ‘cover’ versions of them in different musical styles. The results indicated that subjects' liking for the excerpts was more closely associated with their liking for the musical styles than for the pieces themselves. Given their apparent importance, the second study investigated whether liking for musical styles could be explained in terms of subjects' voluntary and involuntary exposure to them. This was done in the context of the preference-feedback hypothesis. Subjects were presented with 30 musical styles which were rated for either ‘liking’ or their degree of familiarity to subjects personally (voluntary exposure) and their prevalence in British culture (involuntary exposure). The results supported the prediction of the preference-feedback hypothesis that there should be a positive relationship between liking and voluntary exposure, although the prediction of an inverted-U relationship between liking and involuntary exposure was not confirmed.