You May Also Like (41 page)

“proto-utopian carnival community”
: As Douglas Holt notes, this may be one of the most common forms of distinction. “Awareness of class differences in taste at the grounded level of preferences for and distaste toward particular cultural objects and practices need not take the form of lower class deference nor upper class disdain,” he writes. “In fact, it is
more typical
that those with lesser cultural capital resources are dismissive of, or antagonistic towards, the objects and practices of those with greater cultural capital resources” (italics added). See Holt, “Distinction in America? Recovering Bourdieu's Theory of Taste from Its Critics,”
Poetics
25, nos. 2–3 (1997): 93–120.

“People's image of the classification”
: Bourdieu,
Distinction
, 473.

“you can be a juggalo”
: Kent Russell, “American Juggalo,”
n+1
, no. 12 (Fall 2011): 29–55.

“the more serious kind”
: See Theodor Geiger, “A Radio Test of Musical Taste,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
14, no. 3 (Autumn 1950): 453–60.

The larger question is
: How does the way music is represented—by genre or otherwise—influence our feelings toward it? How often are we telling a sociologist, when he comes calling with a survey, what we like, versus simply what we know? In his essay “The Philosopher and the Sociologist,” Jacques Rancière accused Bourdieu of “transforming the test of musical taste into a test of knowledge.” The sociologist “will judge musical tastes
without having anyone hear music
.” Respondents, guessing at the nature of the inquiry, answer accordingly. Rancière,
The Philosopher and His Poor
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 187.

In one study, people liked
: From an experiment described by Paul Randolph Farnsworth in his book
Musical Taste
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1950), 64.

Tell people that Hitler
: See M. G. Rigg, “Favorable Versus Unfavorable Propaganda in the Enjoyment of Music,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology
38, no. 1 (1948): 78–81.

He once served subjects
: Paul Rozin, Linda Millman, and Carol Nemeroff, “Operation
of the Laws of Sympathetic Magic in Disgust and Other Domains,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
50, no. 4 (1986): 703–12.

There is a huge body of literature
: In a meta-analysis of exposure studies, Robert Bornstein found that the “exposure-affect relationship is robust and reliable.” Bornstein, “Exposure and Affect: Overview and Meta-analysis of Research, 1968–1987,”
Psychological Bulletin
106, no. 2 (1989): 265–89.

We translate this ease of processing
: The fluency effect does not actually require repeated exposure to work: People, for example, seem to judge statements as more true when they are presented in easier-to-read colors. See Rolf Reber and Norbert Schwarz, “Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Judgments of Truth,”
Consciousness and Cognition
8, no. 3 (1999): 338–42. The authors note, “One may worry, however, that participants in the moderately visible presentation condition may simply have judged some statements as ‘false' because they were unable to read them.” Pilot testing, however, revealed that not to be the case.

“I've seen that triangle”
: Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, “One More Time,”
Aeon Magazine
, March 7, 2014,
http://​aeon.​co/​magazine/​culture/​why-​we-​love-​repetition-​in-​music/
.

People in studies have tended
: See Piotr Winkielman et al., “Prototypes Are Attractive Because They Are Easy on the Mind,”
Psychological Science
17, no. 9 (2006): 799–806. In another study, Winkielman and colleagues examined an apparent contradiction: “On the one hand, composite stimuli (averages) should be easy to process, because they represent a good summary of the perceiver's previous experience (i.e., a category prototype). On the other hand, composite stimuli should be difficult to process, because they are maximally ambiguous with regard to the original faces composing them.” They noted an example of this in images of mixed-race faces, which some studies had found to be judged more attractive than others, while some studies had found the opposite effects. They suggest the discrepancy is explained by what category the images are judged by; for example, a Chinese-American man will be judged less attractive than other “Chinese” faces but perhaps more attractive than male faces in general. They note, “That is, mixed-race individuals should elicit more positivity when race is less salient and, ironically, attention to racial background could, via the disfluency it engenders, reduce positive feelings towards them.” They also stress that “motivational factors”—for example, how one feels about race—could play a part in their findings. See Winkielman et al., “Easy on the Eyes, or Hard to Categorize: Classification Difficulty Decreases the Appeal of Facial Blends,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
50 (Jan. 2014): 175–83.

birds or cars or shapes
: J. B. Halberstadt and G. Rhodes, “It's Not Just Average Faces That Are Attractive: Computer-Manipulated Averageness Makes Birds, Fish, and Automobiles Attractive,”
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
10 (2003): 149–56.

“A first encountered stimulus”
: Mario Pandelaere et al., “Madonna or Don McLean: The Effect of Order of Exposure on Relative Liking,”
Journal of Consumer Psychology
10, no. 4 (2010): 442–51. A similar “first is strongest” effect has been found in brain-imaging studies in which subjects were exposed to an odor that was paired with a visual object; that association generated more brain activity than when the odor was later paired with another object. The first smell is the one
we remember. See Andreas Keller, “Odor Memories: The First Sniff Counts,”
Current Biology
19, no. 21 (2009): 988–89.

The problem with that analysis
: Robert Zajonc, “Mere Exposure: A Gateway to the Subliminal,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
10, no. 6 (Dec. 2001): 224–28.

“The first time he played it”
: The acid house story is drawn from Tim Lawrence's interesting article, “Acid—Can You Jack?,” retrieved from the Web site
DJHistory.​com
; and also from Bob Stanley's excellent history of pop music,
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 466.

especially the things we disliked
: As one journal article notes, “While the mere exposure effect robustly leads to more liking for stimuli that are novel and neutral in connotation, this research suggests that with initially negative attitudes repeated exposure may strengthen these negative affective reactions.” See Richard J. Crisp, Russell R. C. Hutter, and Bryony Young, “When Mere Exposure Leads to Less Liking,”
British Journal of Psychology
100 (2009): 133–49.

There is no exact formula
: See, for example, Daniel Berlyne, “Novelty, Complexity, and Hedonic Value,”
Perception and Psychophysics
8 (1970): 279–86.

When the Beatles' catalog is arranged
: Adrian North and David Hargreaves,
The Social and Applied Psychology of Music
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 83.

“As the condiment becomes stronger”
: Howard R. Moskowitz, “Engineering Out Food Boredom: A Product Development Approach That Combines Home Use Tests and Time-Preference Analysis,”
Food Quality and Preference
11, no. 6 (Nov. 2000): 445–56.

If, as Moskowitz argued
: From a conversation with the author, but see also Moskowitz, “Engineering Out Food Boredom.”

colas were popular because
: In blind taste tests, people have often preferred Pepsi. One study argues that when consumers drink the two beverages blind and then are asked to analyze why they liked each one, they rely on established heuristics for things like soda, one of which might be “sweeter is better.” As they write, “The greater ease of participants in verbalizing their positive reasons for Pepsi than for Coke indicates that the former cola possesses characteristics that provide a more plausible basis for experienced pleasantness.” It is, in essence, easier to talk about why we might like Pepsi than why we might prefer Coke. Theoretically, that processing fluency, rather than the beverage itself, might explain our liking. See Ayumi Yamada et al., “The Effect of an Analytical Appreciation of Colas on Consumer Beverage Choice,”
Food Quality and Preference
34 (June 2014): 1–4.

Music scholars have even used
: P. A. Bush and K. G. Pease, “Pop Records and Connotative Satiation: Test of Jakobovits' Theory,”
Psychological Reports
23 (1968): 871–75. The study about which they used the word “satiation” is Leon Jakobovits, “Studies of Fads: I. The ‘Hit Parade,' ”
Psychological Reports
18 (1966): 443–50. Bush and Pease argued that Jakobovits's observed pattern was more complicated than he presented and might have represented a statistical artifact: “We suggest that the use of change in mean ratings in the kind of situation presented here may be unrealistic. Consideration of changes in the distribution of ratings and changes in ratings of individuals may be necessary to give a picture of the effects of repeated presentation of ‘pop' records which is not misleading.” Jakobovits,
for his part, noted that the disliking engendered by overexposure could be corrected over time. “Therefore, one would expect that a song, which enjoyed high popularity and received extensive massed exposure, should be able to be ‘revived' after some time and that this second popularity should be higher than that for another song, which was not as highly popular during its first life span.” There are many examples of this; to name one, the use of Journey's “Don't Stop Believin' ” in
The Sopranos, Glee
, and
The X Factor
among other shows, which resurrected its popularity; in the U.K., the song actually charted higher in 2010 than upon its initial 1981 release.

“a vast amount of brain space”
: Michael Pollan,
The Omnivore's Dilemma
(New York: Penguin, 2006), 4.

So we fall back on exposure
: The causal chain between liking and familiarity and preference can get convoluted. As one experiment on familiarity and musical choice concluded, “The results also confirm that liking does not drive the strong relationship between familiarity and preference. In fact, familiarity predicts choice above and beyond liking, has a stronger direct effect on choice than does liking, and in some tests has even more explanatory power than does liking.” See Morgan K. Ward, Joseph K. Goodman, and Julie R. Irwin, “The Same Old Song: The Power of Familiarity in Music Choice,”
Marketing Letters
25 (May 2013): 1–11.

It saves us time
: The music critic Alex Ross, in wondering why modern audiences seemed more resistant to modern classical music—where they embraced more innovation in other fields—hints at the effect of exposure and familiarity when he writes, “Rather, modern composers have fallen victim to a long-smouldering indifference that is intimately linked to classical music's idolatrous relationship with the past. Even before 1900, people were attending concerts in the expectation that they would be massaged by the lovely sounds of bygone days. (‘New works do not succeed in Leipzig,' a critic said of the premiere of Brahms's First Piano Concerto in 1859.)” What is good in classical music has been what has been familiar—for a few hundred years. Ross, “Why Do We Hate Modern Classical Music?,”
Guardian
, Nov. 28, 2010.

It would be strange
: But this raises a question. Were Holbrook and Schindler, as Rancière had accused Bourdieu, simply issuing a kind of musical recall test, quizzing people more on what they knew than what they liked? Given enough exposure to “Sledgehammer,” would an older person not come to prefer it to “Smoke Rings”? How could younger people prefer the Mills Brothers' tune when there is in fact little chance they have ever heard it?

although the long-held idea
: See, for example, Karsten Steinhauer, Erin J. White, and John E. Drury, “Temporal Dynamics of Late Second Language Acquisition: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials,”
Second Language Research
25, no. 1 (2009): 13–41. See also Stefanie Nickels, Bertram Opitz, and Karsten Steinhauer, “ERPs Show That Classroom-Instructed Late Second Language Learners Rely on the Same Prosodic Cues in Syntactic Parsing as Native Speakers,”
Neuroscience Letters
557, pt. B (Dec. 17, 2013): 107–11.

“taste freeze”
: This phrase comes courtesy of Brian Whitman at the Echo Nest.

“The events and changes”
: Howard Schuman and Jacqueline Scott, “Generations and Collective Memories,”
American Sociological Review
54, no. 3 (1989): 359–81.

By this analysis
: The Minutemen's Mike Watt, in the documentary
We Jam Econo
,
neatly encapsulated the idea of generational determinism: “You can't help when you were born, and what you are into. Some people were born before, some after, some during.” People take it for granted that the “during” was their coming of musical age.

He had wrestled with the problem
: “The idea that all music is equal and deserves equal rights is somehow fundamentally a democratic idea; as is the corresponding idea that the public, and not some small cadre of experts, is the best judge of musical quality,” wrote Zapuder on his blog. “But the fact that some music not only attracts more listeners, but also seems to mean more to more people over a longer period of time, indicates that there is actually something fundamentally unequal about music as well.”
Play Listen Repeat
(blog), Pandora, Feb. 25, 2009,
http://​blog.​pandora.​com/​2009/​02/​25/​imagine_​that_​yo/
.