Experimental_Aesthetics_and_Liking_for_Music

7/30/2019 Experimental_Aesthetics_and_Liking_for_Music

1/44

Page 1 of 44 Experimental Aesthetics and Liking for Music

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,

2012. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter

of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber:

Copenhagen University Library; date: 27 December 2012

Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, ApplicationsPatrik N. Juslin

Print publication date: 1993

Print ISBN-13: 9780199230143Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: Mar-12DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001

Experimental Aesthetics and Liking for Music

David J. Hargreaves, Adrian C. North

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.003.0019

Abstract and Keywords

The study of aesthetics, involving the creation and appreciation of art andbeauty, has been approached in two distinct ways. Speculative aestheticsis concerned with high-level, abstract questions such as the meaning andnature of art, and is dealt with in the disciplines of philosophy, art history,and art criticism. Empirical aesthetics, on the other hand, is the scientificstudy of the nature of appreciation. Adherents of these two approachesmay well differ about the suitability of the scientific approach, about whatconstitutes a work of art and is therefore worthy of investigation, andeven about what constitutes an aesthetic response. This chapter focusesexplicitly on the second approach: the central concern is to review the widerange of empirical studies that have been conducted from various theoreticalpoints of view on the aesthetic response to music.

Keywords: aesthetic response, music, empirical aesthetics

19.1 Introduction

The study of aesthetics, involving the creation and appreciation of art and

beauty, has been approached in two distinct ways. Speculative aestheticsis concerned with high-level, abstract questions such as the meaning andnature of art, and is dealt with in the disciplines of philosophy, art history,and art criticism. Empirical aesthetics, on the other hand, is the scientificstudy of the nature of appreciation. Adherents of these two approachesmay well differ about the suitability of the scientific approach, about what
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy


2/44






constitutes a work of art and is therefore worthy of investigation, and evenabout what constitutes an aesthetic response. In this chapter, we focusexplicitly on the second approach: our central concern is to review the widerange of empirical studies that have been conducted from various theoretical

points of view on the aesthetic response to music.

Empirical aesthetics started very clearly with the publication of GustavTheodor Fechners Vorschule der esthetikin 1876. This shows thatexperimental aesthetics is one of the oldest topics in experimentalpsychology, which itself was in its early stages at that time. Fechnercharacterized his approach as aesthetics from below, by which he meantthat his starting point was the response to simple shapes, colours, sounds,geometrical forms, and so on. He considered that an understanding ofthese basic principles (p. 516 ) would eventually lead to an aesthetics from

above; that is, to an understanding of the broader aesthetic questions. Heused this approach in attempting to test the notion of the aesthetic mean,according to which beauty is associated with the absence of extremes. Themost pleasing sounds might be those which are neither too strong nor tooweak, for example. His respondents were presented with different-shapedrectangles in order to test the golden section hypothesis that the ratio of0.62 between the lengths of the longer and shorter sides may have uniqueaesthetic properties.

The results from studies in this tradition over the next few decades weregenerally inconclusive, and other areas of early research along related

lines, for example those that attempted to identify characteristic individualstyles of aesthetic appreciation, or apperceptive types, similarly failed tofulfil their promise (e.g. Binet, 1903). However, the field of experimentalaesthetics gained new maturity in the work of Daniel Berlyne (e.g. Berlyne,1974) in the mid 1960s. Berlyne developed what became known as the newexperimental aesthetics, to which we shall return later in this chapter.

Since the 1960s and 1970s, the field of music psychology has grown veryrapidly in a number of new directions (e.g. Hargreaves, Miell, & MacDonald,2002). The early emphasis on psychometrics, psychoacoustics, and cognitive

psychology became seen as having an over-emphasis on the minutiae ofmusical behaviour and experience, as frequently using artificial experimentalparadigms based in the laboratory rather than in real life, and as havinga limited range of participants. This is particularly true of experimentalaesthetics: most studies in this tradition have dealt with musical elementssuch as tones, intervals, and scales, rather than with real-life experiences
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2052http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2052http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2019http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2020http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy


3/44






of music. In the last two decades or so, this approach, though no lessimportant, is no longer as central within music psychology, and the disciplineas a whole has diversified into several sub-disciplines. Alongside thecontemporary cognitive psychology of music (e.g. Delige & Sloboda, 1997),

whose scope has broadened to include a much wider range of phenomena,we can identify the developmental psychology of music (e.g. Hargreaves,1986; McPherson, 2006) and the social psychology of music (e.g. North &Hargreaves, 2008). In the latter book, we stress the importance of the real-life applications of music psychology, and outline several areas in which thisis being done.

In this chapter, we draw on experimental aesthetics to a considerableextent. But we also take on board the social and developmental perspectivesby adopting a much broader approach to the role of social and cultural

factors in aesthetic responses to music, and have particular interest in howthese responses develop across the lifespan. We begin by sketching thebroad scope of the field, and looking at some definitions that have beenproposed of different aspects of responses to music, and briefly outlinesome of the main methodological approaches. We then present a conceptualframework for the study of music listening that has been developed byHargreaves, Miell, and MacDonald (2005), which we call the reciprocalfeedback response model. This has at its heart the interaction between themusical stimuli (the traditional province of experimental aesthetics), thesituation in which listening takes place (which is usually ignored in mostexperimental aesthetic studies), and the characteristics of the listener. Thismodel forms the basis of the organization of the rest of the chapter, whichlooks in turn at different aspects of the music, of the listening situation, andof the listener.

(p. 517 ) 19.2 Definitions and methods

The terms aesthetic response and affective response are sometimesused interchangeably in the literature, and sometimes not. Some observers,such as perhaps the critic, see the former as intense, subjective, andpersonalas existing at a high intellectual level, and as requiring a fairly

sophisticated level of knowledge and experience, such as might occurwhen a sophisticated connoisseur experiences a sublime work of art.Affective responses, on the other hand, are those that involve moods andemotions, and are generally regarded as being more superficial. The termappreciation can be thought of as encompassing both of these; it providesa general description of the response to music that includes both aesthetic
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2053http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2089http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2046http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2054http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2053http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2089http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2054http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2046http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2029http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy


4/44






and affective components. Many researchers in experimental aestheticsimplicitly take this latter view, referring to more or less any reaction that anyperson might have to any work of art, defined in the broadest possible terms.Our own principal interest has been in trying to account for everyday likes

and dislikes in music rather than rarified reactions.

On a more pragmatic level, one notable aspect of the literature on likingfor music, and particularly that on experimental aesthetics, is that it hasdeveloped in parallel to, rather than in conjunction with, that concerningmore fine-grained emotional responses to music. At present, there exists aliterature on liking for music and, in effect, a largely separate literature onspecific emotional responses to music. One of the tasks that we attemptedto accomplish in our recent book, The social and applied psychology ofmusic (North & Hargreaves, 2008), was to propose an explicit means of

forging links between the two fields. What is interesting about this in thecontext of the present chapter is that we proposed that the concept thatmay establish a bridgehead between liking for and emotional reactions tomusic is that of physiological arousal. As we will see shortly, physiologicalarousal, as defined by researchers within the new experimental aesthetics,has enjoyed some success as a predictor of musical preference; and somemore recent work (e.g. North & Hargreaves, 1997) has applied liking formusic and arousal induced by music to fine-grained emotional reactions,such as the extent to which a given piece of music may be experienced as,for example, exciting, relaxing, boring, or unsettling. In short, the literatureon experimental aesthetics may have the, as yet largely untapped, potentialto also explain emotional reactions.

Another feature of our own approach to the subject (reviewed in more detailin North & Hargreaves, 2008) has also been to use real music, real people,and real contexts as much as possible. Since statistics on CD sales, radiostation listening figures, and Internet downloads make it clear that these aredominated by pop music, and also show that classical music represents aminority interest among the general population, our own focus has been onpop music, despite the predominance of classical music in the developmentof Western music as a whole, and in a great deal of psychological research

that uses real musical stimuli. Any representative view of music psychologyshould be based on the widest possible range of listeners and musical forms,and the term preference is accordingly used in a neutral sense to refer toa persons liking for one piece of music as compared with another. Musicaltaste is similarly used to (p. 518 ) refer to the overall patterning of anindividuals preferences, in whatever genre they might be.
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2089http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2049http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2089http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy


5/44






We can distinguish between two main methodological approaches toresearch on responses to music, which might be called experimentaland naturalistic approaches (cf. Sluckin, Hargreaves, & Colman, 1983).The former approach uses stimuli such as electronically generated wave

forms, intervals or tone sequences played under laboratory conditions;participants responses are assessed by means of standardized rating scales,questionnaires, and the like. The naturalistic approach, on the other hand,uses real music that is played under conditions that are designed to beas lifelike as possible; and responses can include a much wider variety ofmethods. These have been comprehensively reviewed by Abeles and Chung(1996), and there is no need to repeat this here. Suffice it to say that theycategorize the main approaches as verbal reports (including open-endedtechniques such as interviews, narratives, or diaries) andphysiologicalmeasures such as heart rate, respiration rate, galvanic skin response,

electroencephalograms, and blood pressure. In some of our own research,which is conducted in real-life listening situations such as shops, restaurants,or the workplace, response measures have included waiting times, salesfigures, or productivity ratings.

19.3 The Reciprocal Feedback Model of Responses to Music

Hargreaves, Miell, and MacDonald (2005) proposed a reciprocal feedbackmodel of musical response, which is shown in Figure 19.1. This describessome of many specific aspects of what we see as the three maindeterminants of a specific response to a given musical stimulus: the music,the listening situation, and the listener. This three-fold description forms thebasis of the organization of this chapter, as we said earlier, and although wewill provide a much more detailed review of the research in each of the threemain areas, it is nevertheless useful to provide a brief preview of the maincontents of the model here.


6/44






Fig. 19.1 Reciprocal feedback model of musical response.

Responses to music are many and varied, as the previous section makesclear, and Figure 19.1 includes just three of the main areas of psychologicalinvestigation. The fivephysiological measures listed above are oftenassociated with the arousal level of the autonomic nervous system, and weshall see later that arousal forms the basis of one of the most prominentapproaches to aesthetic responses to music, namely that of Daniel Berlyne.The box lists two behavioural manifestations of arousal level, namelylisteners level of engagement with the music, and the extent to whichthey actively control their listening as distinct from responding passively.

Contemporary listeners take active control of the genres, styles, artists,and pieces they hear on their radios, iPods, or CD players, and they do so inorder to manage their mood states; in doing so they are likely to be highlyengaged. When exposed to the piped music in a supermarket or (p. 519 )restaurant, on the other hand, their level of engagement may be so low thatthey are not even aware of its existence.

The cognitive psychology of music, which deals with the internalized rules,strategies, and operations that people employ in creating and respondingto music, has generated a number of its own specific measures of response,

which are operationalized in terms of aspects of musical attention, memory,perceptual coding, and expectation. These are usually, though not always,employed within experimental rather than in naturalistic studies, andtypically involve listeners responses to tones, intervals, scales, melody,harmony, and other aspects of musical structure. Aesthetic responses tomusic usually have both cognitive and affective aspects: although they arepartly dependent on listeners cognitive discriminations and evaluations


7/44






of different stimuli, the affective components are their main determinant,involving emotional responses and their effects on mood, which form animportant part of musical likes and dislikes. The contents of this handbookclearly illustrate the importance of research on the emotional effects of

music in the last decade, which has grown very rapidly in the few years thathave elapsed since the publication of Juslin and Slobodas (2001) originalvolume.

The music itself can be analysed in many different ways, and it is impossibleto provide anything like a comprehensive account here; but for the purposesof the (p. 520 ) model we have listed just four of the main factors that havebeen to subject of empirical investigation. Musicologists before and sinceMeyers (1956, 1967) seminal work have grappled with the problem ofdefining musical style, and musicologists as well as psychologists have

conducted empirical research on style and genre (e.g. Hargreaves & North,1999). The box lists some of the terms used by Nattiez (1990), who proposesdifferent levels of musical style ranging from the very culture specificthrough to the completely non culture specific: thus, he moves from aspecific work by a particular composer, to a style during one phase in the lifeof a composer, to intermediate genres and idioms, to systems of referencewithin which styles are defined (e.g. tonality), and then through to theuniversals of music (e.g. pitch, rhythm).

We shall deal later in the chapter with the extensive body of psychologicalresearch in experimental aesthetics, particularly that deriving from the

theoretical work of Berlyne (e.g. Berlyne, 1971). In brief, Berlyne suggestedthat the listener collates the different properties of a given musicalstimulus, such as its complexity, familiarity, or orderliness, and that thesecollative variables, which are listed next in the box, combine to producepredictable effects on the level of activity, or arousal, of the listenersautonomic nervous system. We shall also see later that Berlynes arousal-based approach was challenged in the 1980s by Martindales group (e.g.Martindale & Moore, 1988), who argued that preference is determined by theprototypicalityof different stimuli, and not by arousal.

Finally, theperformance contexts in which music can be heard vary widely.The development of global digital technology means that live, broadcast,or recorded music can be heard in an almost infinitely wide range ofsettings. The development and miniaturization of high-capacity digitalportable players such as the iPod mean that listeners carry their entire musiccollections with them wherever they go, and research by Sloboda, ONeill,


8/44






and Ivaldi (2001) and North, Hargreaves, and Hargreaves (2004) has clearlydemonstrated the ubiquity of music listening in the everyday lives of manypeople in the UK at least. It is clear that this interaction between aspects ofthe music, and extra-musical aspects of the situations in which it is heard,

are of great importance in explaining aesthetic responses to music.

This takes us on to the situations and contexts within which music is heard:the link between the music and situations and contexts boxes in Figure19.1 shows that different genres and styles are seen as appropriate orinappropriate to varying degrees in particular listening situations. Situationsand contexts can vary in many respects, of course, and some of the keyaspects of this are shown in the figure. We have drawn elsewhere onDoises (1986) four levels of analysis in social psychology, namely theintraindividual, interindividual/ situational, socio-positional, and ideological

(Hargreaves & North, 1997; North & Hargreaves, 2008). Our main focus hereis on the third of these, which considers relationships between individualswith reference to differences in their social position, such as their groupmembership (e.g. the particular music that is associated with a sports clubor a school), or with reference to larger social institutions, such as politicalmovements or national charity campaigns.

Research in the social psychology of music is beginning to show how thesespecific social and institutional contexts exert a powerful influence on theresponses to music within them, and we have undertaken many of thesestudies ourselves (see (p. 521 ) North & Hargreaves, 2008). These studies

have taken place in everyday settings including restaurants, bars, banks,shops, computer assembly plants, exercise and relaxation clubs, and on-holdtelephones, and have shown some of the influences on behaviour, including:consumer product choice and shopping; work efficiency; time perception inwaiting in queues; the speed of eating and drinking; moods and emotionalstates; and so on. These behavioural effects have also been clearly shownto be influenced by other features of the immediate situation, including thepresence or absence of others and/or simultaneous engagement in otherongoing activities (North, Hargreaves, & Hargreaves, 2004).

We suggest that people now use music as a resource in order to achievecertain psychological states in different everyday situations, and this isshown in the reciprocal feedback relationship between situations andcontexts and the listener shown in Figure 19.1. We shall return later inthis chapter to the issue of what we have called arousal-state goals, whichare specific to particular environments. We shall also return to look in more


9/44






depth at those factors that are listed in the listener box, which includeindividual difference factors such as age, gender, and personality above thehorizontal line in Figure 19.1. Below this line are other individual factors thatare more specifically related to music, including musical training, knowledge,

and experience. The relationship between musical preferences and tastes,which we defined in Section 19.2, are closely interrelated. Most peoplehave immediate, short-term reactions to particular pieces in particularsituations, and these reveal distinctive patterns of preference; over timeand across situations, these accumulate and combine to form medium-termand longer-term taste patterns, which are fairly stable (see also Chapter 24,this volume). The long-term development of these patterns can become animportant part of individuals self-concepts, which gives rise to the notion ofmusical identities (Hargreaves, Miell, & MacDonald, 2002).

Although these medium- and long-term patterns are fairly stable, theycontinually develop and change as listeners hear new pieces and styles: thisis shown in Figure 19.1 as a reciprocal feedback relationship between themusic and the listener. Individuals initial responses to new music are basedon their long-term taste patterns, but these responses themselves feedback into the system and change the longer-term patterns, such that thepreference or identity system is in a constant state of evolution and change.

19.4 The music: structural factors and situational influences

19.4.1 The new experimental aesthetics

As we explained earlier, the research that followed Fechners (1876)pioneering studies of aesthetics from below were generally inconclusive,and interest in experimental aesthetics declined until the mid 1960s,when Daniel Berlynes work led to a distinct (p. 522 ) revival of interestwith a new focus. Berlynes new experimental aesthetics adopted a neo-behaviouristic, psychobiological approach, with an emphasis on the roleofarousal in the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS), which isresponsible for the degree of physiological arousal we experience. This isthe major determinant of aesthetic response, according to Berlyne, along

with what he called the collative properties of stimuli, which exist alongsidetheir psychophysical (intrinsic physical) properties, and their ecologicalproperties (their signal value or meaningfulness). Art objects were seen toproduce pleasure by manipulating the level of arousal of the observer, and todo so by properties such as their complexity, familiarity, and surprisingness.The observer collates information from these different properties, and the
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2036http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2052http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2036http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2052http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-24#http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-div1-112http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy


10/44






resulting level of arousal determines the likelihood of further exploration ofthat stimulus.

Berlynes (1971) theory, which dominated research efforts for three decades,

states that preference for artistic stimuli such as music is related to theirarousal potential, which is determined by their collative properties.Music with an intermediate degree of arousal potential is liked most,and this degree of liking gradually decreases towards the extremes ofarousal potential: this is expressed as an inverted-U relationship betweenpreference and stimulus arousal potential (see Figure 19.2). This was clearlyrelated to the well-known Wundt curve (Wundt, 1874) as well as to thearguments of Fechner, Plato, and Aristotle.

Fig. 19.2 The inverted-U relationship between liking for music and its arousal-evoking qualities.

The theory was supported by the results of a number of laboratory studiescarried out between the 1960s and early 1980s, which provided evidenceof an inverted-U relationship between liking for pieces of music and theircomplexity. For example, Vitz (1966) found an inverted-U relationshipbetween the information content of tone sequences, and subjects ratingsof their pleasantness, and Crozier (1974) and Simon and Wohlwill (1968)

found similar results following similar lines of investigation. McMullens(1974) (p. 523 ) school-age subjects preferred melodies of intermediatecomplexity, defined in terms of their informational redundancy and of thenumber of pitches from which they were constructed, to those of high orlow complexity, and McMullen and Arnold (1976) found that preferencefor rhythmic sequences was an inverted-U function of their redundancy.Heyduks (1975) optimal complexity model was supported by his results
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2057http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2074http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2073http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2112http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2057http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2074http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2073http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2102http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2027http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2110http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2112http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2009http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy


11/44






from subjects preference ratings of four piano compositions that werespecially constructed to represent different levels of objective complexity,and Steck and Machotka (1975) found further evidence to support theoptimal complexity model. They also suggested that complexity preferences

are relative, not absolute, since the shapes of the preference curves forsounds of varying complexities were determined by the overall stimulusrange, rather than by the absolute complexity levels of the stimuli.

In these studies, objectively determined stimulus complexity is seen as themain determinant of arousal potential, although other studies sought todemonstrate an inverted-U relationship between liking and familiarity (seeHargreaves, 1986). The evidence for this version of the inverted-U is lessclear, and findings that are inconsistent with the theory have sometimesbeen explained by their failure to include a full range of stimulus familiarity.

We will not repeat details of these findings and arguments here, since theyare reviewed extensively elsewhere (see reviews by Hargreaves, 1986, andFinns, 1989). From the social psychological point of view, our own primaryinterest has been in whether an inverted-U relationship between liking formusic and its arousal potential can be demonstrated in everyday musiclistening circumstances.

Three naturalistic studies of the relationship between familiarityand musicalpreference produced evidence in support of the inverted-U curve. Theseused the repeated exposure paradigm, which was frequently employed inresearch based on Zajoncs (1968) mere exposure hypothesis, which held

that mere repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus is a sufficientcondition for the enhancement of his attitude toward it (p. 1). The more youhear or see something, in other words, the more you like it. This of courseran counter to Berlynes view, which exerted far more influence on thecourse of subsequent research. Broadcasters and recording companies havea keen commercial interest in the effects of repeatedly playing pop songsand advertising jingles, for example, on audience reaction, and these threestudies were in this tradition. Erdelyi (1940) found an inverted-U relationshipbetween the extent of the plugging of 20 records on the radio and sales ofthe sheet music for those records, which suggests that as plugging increased

listeners familiarity with the records, so the popularity of the latter roseand then fell. For 18 of those 20 songs, he found that variations in pluggingsystematically precedes sales (p. 500) by about two weeks, which showsthat the plugging seems to cause changes in the popularity of the music, asBerlynes theory predicts.
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2113http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2032http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2113http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2038http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2046http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2046http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2107http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy


12/44






Direct predictions about the effects of repetition on liking can be made fromBerlynes inverted-U theory if we draw a distinction between objective andsubjective complexity: the latter is the listenersperception of the complexityof the music rather than an objective property. If the initial level of subjective

complexity of a piece of music falls below a listeners optimum level, as inthe case of a sophisticated critic listening to a very simple melody, repetitionshould have the effect of shifting liking (p. 524 ) further down the descendingpart of the inverted-U curve; that is, it should decrease liking still further.If the initial subjective complexity level is higher than the optimum for thelistener, however (e.g. in the case of a child or non-musician listening toa highly complex piece), repetition should serve to shift liking further upthe ascending part of the curve; that is, liking should show an increase.Hargreaves (1986) carried out a systematic review of ten studies of theeffects of repetition that provided evidence for and against the theory, and

found that about half of them supported the inverted-U hypothesis, whilstthe other half showed a positive monotonic mere exposure relationshipbetween familiarity and liking, to which we referred above. This 5050 splitin support for the competing theories could be explained as a result ofdifferences between the experimental designs, procedures, and samplesin the various studies; Hargreaves concluded that the inverted-U curve isthe most general form of the relationship between liking and subjectivecomplexity, and that mere exposure effects are represented by the risingpart of the curve.

Eerolas (1997) studies of the objective complexity of the 12 UK albums byThe Beatles used computerized techniques to score each of the songs andto calculate an overall complexity score for each album, and compared thatfigure with the number of weeks that the album stayed in the chart after itsrelease. The results supported the idea of an inverted-U relationship betweenliking, complexity, and familiarity. Albums of lower complexity peaked earlyin the charts, but then failed to sustain this early level of sales. Please PleaseMe, for example, showed high sales figures when first released, and in thefollowing weeks and months, but has not received as much critical acclaimin subsequent decades. More complex albums such asAbbey Road, on theother hand, which took longer to peak when first released, have received

higher levels of continued sales and critical acclaim since their release. Interms of the inverted-U curve, the less complex albums have peaked earlyand then tailed off in popularity, whereas the more complex ones havepeaked much later and then not tailed off to the same extent.


13/44






19.4.2 Preference for prototypes

The notion of cognitive schemes or schemata were proposed long ago byPiaget (1950), and were more formally proposed in cognitive psychology in

the 1970s and 1980s. Piaget used these terms to refer to internally storedabstract mental operations such as mathematical concepts in children,as well as to visual images of real objects, and cognitive psychologists(e.g. Schank & Abelson,1988) developed the idea of scripts to refer tostored knowledge about typical sequences of actions (e.g. going to arestaurant), and frames to refer to common sets of similar visual stimuli(e.g. an office). The basic idea is that people classify stimuli and plantheir actions by matching them against these abstract schemas, scripts, orframes; and furthermore that there exist idealized versions or prototypes ofthese concepts (e.g. Posner & Keele, 1968). Our everyday experiences are

classified by comparing them with prototypes for those kinds of experience,and repeated exposure to exemplars of particular categories of stimuli oraction gives rise to learning more about the prototypes.

(p. 525 ) Colin Martindale proposed a rival approach to challenge Berlynesarousal-based theories in the 1980s, which was based on the idea thatpeoples aesthetic likes and dislikes are based onpreference for prototypes.This was based on the idea of neural networks. Martindale and Moore (1988)conceived of the mind as comprising interconnected cognitive units, eachof which holds the representation of a different object. Units coding more

prototypical stimuli are activated more frequently, because these stimuliare experienced more frequently than those coding atypical stimuli. Thisleads to the proposal that aesthetic preference is hypothetically a positivefunction of the degree to which the mental representation of a stimulus isactivated. Because more typical stimuli are coded by mental representationscapable of greater activation, preference should be positively related toprototypicality (p. 661). Martindale considered that the prototypicality ofreal-life artistic objects may be a stronger determinant of preference thantheir arousal-evoking qualities, and this contrasts directly with Berlynes(1971) approach.

Most of the research conducted to test this approach has investigatedwhether preference increases with prototypicality: typical instances of anycategory should be preferred because they give rise to a stronger activationof the relevant cognitive representations than atypical instances. Moore andMartindale (1983), for example, found that the colour typicality of randompolygons accounted for 79 per cent of the variance in peoples preferences
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2078http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2078http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2018http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2099http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2078http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2018http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2010http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2093http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2099http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2092http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy


14/44






for them, whereas complexity accounted for only 1 per cent. Martindale,Moore, and Borkum (1990) also carried out a series of studies of peoplespreferences for polygons, line drawings, and paintings, and found thatvariations on the typicality of these stimuli explained more of the variance

in peoples preference for them than did complexity. Investigating peoplesliking for themes in classical music, Martindale and Moore (1989) foundthat 51 per cent of the variance was accounted for by typicality measures,whereas complexity accounted for only 4 per cent of that variance. Similarresults from other studies of preferences for stimuli such as furniture designsand cubist paintings were reported by other investigators including Whitfieldand Slatter (1979) and Hekkert and van Wieringen (1990). Martindale,Moore, and West (1988) concluded that these results suggest that collativevariables are probably a good deal less important in determining preferencethan Berlyne thought them to be. Furthermore, they probably determine

preference via mechanisms different than those proposed by Berlyne (p.94).

However, we have argued elsewhere (North & Hargreaves, 2000a) thatBerlynes arousal-based approach and the preference for prototypes modelmay be compatible in certain respects when closer attention is paid to thenature of the variables under consideration, and we make four main pointsin advancing this proposal. The first is that assessments of the relativecontribution of prototypicality and arousal-mediating variables to likesand dislikes is bound to reflect the extent to which the art works vary interms of those variables. In a set of musical pieces with very varied levels ofcomplexity, for example, complexity is likely to be a significant determinantof preference, whereas if the variation in complexity is low, other factors arelikely to assume greater significance. Secondly, it is possible that the conceptof prototypicality itself may actually incorporate some of Berlynes collativevariables. For example, modern jazz fans (p. 526 ) typically experience musicwith high levels of complexity; new-age music fans typically experiencemusic with low levels of complexity; and rock music or modern-day dancemusic fans typically experience fast-tempo music. In other words, anindividuals prototypes of music as a whole, as a result of their listeninghistory, are dependent on factors that are crucial to Berlynes theory.

Berlynian factors contribute to prototypicality, such that the two are not soindependent as they might appear.

A third point follows from this, namely that the extent to which particularmusical pieces are considered unpredictable or erraticthat is, the extentto which they depart from prototypesare dependent on the cultural


15/44






expectations concerning how that piece might progress. A piece of Japanesetraditional music might seem very strange or unpredictable to Westernears, but appear fairly conventional to a Japanese listener who is familiarwith the genre. In other words, collative variables can only really be defined

in relation to specific musical cultures; that is, to those with which thelisteners are typically familiar, and for which they have existing cognitiverepresentations. Complexity has to be defined relative to prototypes that areindividually and culturally specific.

Fourthly, as a corollary, we might add that Berlynes notion of ecologicalvariables can also account for the meaningfulness of a piece of music toan individual in the same way as prototypicality: although his favouredexplanation of this relationship was psychobiological rather than cognitive,both theories can account for the effects of the meaningfulness of a piece

of music or liking for it. Our conclusion is that Berlynes theory and thepreference for prototypes model may be compatible in certain operationalrespects, and that both can still be useful.

19.5 The situation: social and cultural influences

It should be clear from the early sections of this chapter that the traditionalmethodological approach of studies in experimental aesthetics, such asthose outlined in the previous section, has some obvious limitations. Wehave rehearsed these arguments in detail elsewhere (e.g. Hargreaves& North, 1997), and indeed a good deal of our own research since then

has been designed to overcome these limitations. When (typically)undergraduate students respond to specially composed music underlaboratory conditions, the sounds they hear are unlikely to be typical oftheir real-life listening experiences, and are themselves unlikely to reflectthe tastes and preferences of the population as a whole. Thirdly, and mostsignificantly, people listen to music in a wide variety of listening situations ineveryday life, such that the laboratory is untypical and likely to be artificial.We hear music in cars, restaurants, in the workplace, on answerphones, inthe media, while doing housework, and indeed in most settings in whichit is possible to either be within range of a loudspeaker or wear a pair of

earphones. Our own (p. 527 ) research has been devoted to exploring theways in which these real-life settings influence musical behaviour andexperience (North & Hargreaves, 2008), and although the classic laboratory-based approach in experimental aesthetics is typically unable to resolvethese issues, we and others have nevertheless attempted to broaden theapplication of the experimental approach in various ways. In this section, we


16/44






review some of Vladimir Konenis research that has been carried out in thecontext of experimental aestheticsresearch that has adopted both arousal-and typicality-based approaches to explaining why musical preferencesvary from one place to another; and research investigating how musical

preferences can be influenced by the opinions of others in the immediateenvironment.

19.5.1 Konenis arousal-based approach

Vladimir Koneni and his associates at the University of California at SanDiego carried out an important body of research in the 1980s that was thefirst to deal with music psychologists failure at the time to take adequateaccount of the social context of music listening, and which also adopted anexperimental framework that was grounded in Berlynes (1971) arousal-

based approach. The work and more recent advances upon it is reviewed byKoneni himself (see Chapter 25, this volume), and so we will deliberatelylimit our coverage here. Koneni (1982, pp. 5001) proposed a theoreticalmodel, which draws together the social environment, the listeners emotionalstate, and musical preference:

The model assumes that music, and aesthetic stimuli ingeneralare simply another aspect of a persons acoustic(or visual) environment and that they are chosen largely forthe purpose of mood- and emotion-optimization. The modelregards a person as being engaged in a constant exchange

with the social and nonsocial environment, of which theacoustic stimuli are a part. The social behavior of othersisassumed to have a profound effect on a persons emotionalstates, which, in turn, affect aesthetic choices, including thechoice of music, that a person will make in a given situation.The degree of enjoyment of the chosen piece presumablyvaries as a function of the concurrent social and nonsocialmicro-environmental conditionsListening to music is furtherassumed to produce changes in the listeners emotional stateand thereby affect his or her behavior toward others in thesituation. Since social behavior is by definition interactive, it issafe to assume that the behavior directed toward the listenerby others will also change, leading to a further modificationin the listeners emotional state, and possibly to differentsubsequent musical choices. The model thus contains afeedback-loop feature representing the ongoing nature of apersons interaction with the social and musical environment
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2061http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-25#http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2061http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-25#http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2009http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy


17/44






a series of aesthetic episodes mediated by changes inemotional state and mood.

Koneni and his colleagues operationalized the model by conducting

experimental manipulations of the social situation in a variety of ways,thereby producing different emotional states in their listeners, and thenassessing their liking for different pieces of music under these conditions.At the beginning of Koneni, Crozier, and Doobs (1976) study, for example,some of the participants were repeatedly insulted by an accomplice of theexperimenter, posing as another participant, which had already been foundto (p. 528 ) reliably induce anger, in terms of both physiological measuresand subjective reports. The participants then chose on each of 50 trialsto listen to ten-second episodes ofeither one of two different types ofcomputer-generated melody, by pressing one of two buttons. These melodies

were either of low or high objective complexity. The participants weredivided into three groups: those in the annoy-wait group were insulted, thenwaited alone in a room with nothing to do, and then listened to the melodies.They showed a strong preference for the simple melodies, choosing to listento them on approximately 70 per cent of the trials. Participants in the noannoy-wait group, who were not insulted and who also waited, showed nosuch preference. Participants in the third annoy-shock group were insultedin the same way as the annoy-wait group, but were then given the chanceto retaliate against the accomplice by delivering a fixed number of what theythought were electric shocks. Like the no annoy-wait group, these subjectsshowed no pronounced preference for either type of melody. Koneni et alconcluded from these results that the angry state of the annoy-wait grouprepresented a high level of arousal, which was not present in the no annoy-wait subjects, and that they chose the simple rather than the complexmelodies in order to minimize any further increases in arousal. They alsosuggested that the retaliatory aggression of the annoy-shock group servedto let off steam; that is, to bring the level of arousal back down to normal,such that their preferences once again resembled those of the no annoy-wait group. Overall, The findingsshow that a socially induced changein a listeners emotional state may strongly affect that persons aestheticchoice (Koneni, 1982, p. 503).

Koneni and Sargent-Pollock (1976) reached similar conclusions, findingthat when participants carried out complex mental tasks while listeningto music, they tended to choose to listen to simple rather than complexmelodies. We also found some support for this notion in a study (North &Hargreaves, 1999) in which participants were asked to complete five laps
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2061http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2081http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2062http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2061http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2063http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy


18/44






of a computer motor-racing game whilst listening to either a loud, fast (i.e.high arousal) or slow, quiet (i.e. low arousal) version of the same piece ofmusic. The task was made even more difficult in some conditions by askingparticipants to count backwards in intervals of three. We found that lap

times were slowest when participants heard the high-arousal music and werecounting backwards, and quickest when they heard the low-arousal musicand did not have to count backwards. This supports Konenis arguments, inthat the music and the backwards counting task were presumably competingfor information-processing resources, and that this was influenced by arousallevel.

These findings confirm Konenis idea that we are engaged in a constantexchange with the social and nonsocial environment, of which the acousticstimuli are a part, and can explain several aspects of everyday musical

experiences. For example, we are quite likely to turn down the volumeon the car radio when we come into heavy traffic, presumably to reducethe cognitive/arousal load imposed by the music in order to releasemore attentional capacity for dealing with the difficult traffic conditions.Conversely, we may well turn up the car radio volume on long journeys whenthe roads are quiet, so as to increase our arousal as a means of reducingthe boredom of the drive (and perhaps also the possibility of falling asleep).We should acknowledge that there (p. 529 ) are some obvious criticismsthat can be made of Konenis research. The experimental paradigms arebased on those used in studies of authority and obedience, and apart fromthe well-known problems concerning the ethical aspects of these paradigms,it could also be argued that the laboratory-based conditions were artificialand contrived, even though the intention was to model naturalistic musiclistening.

A second and probably more important issue is that the theoretical modeladopted in these early studies may not provide a fully adequate explanationof how the listening situation itself mediates musical preferences. WhilstKonenis theoretical model is based on the idea of arousal moderationthat people try to choose musical stimuli so as to reduce high arousal levelsor to increase low levelsthis provides an incomplete picture, as there are

some situations in which people choose topolarize their levels of arousalstill further rather than to moderate it. We follow up this idea ofarousalstategoals in the next section. In concluding this one, however, there be no doubtthat Konenis bold, imaginative studies were important, pioneering stepstowards the investigation of the role of social, emotional, and cognitivefactors in music listening.


19/44






19.5.2 Arousal-state goals

One of the ideas contained within our reciprocal feedback model ofresponses to music, discussed in Section 19.4, is that people use music

as a resource in order to achieve certain psychological states in differenteveryday situations; and furthermore, that different arousal states areconsidered appropriate for different environments. This is shown in thereciprocal feedback relationship between situations and contexts and thelistener in Figure 19.1. The notion of arousal-state goals is based on thisthat certain pieces or genres of music are appropriate in particular listeningsituations to varying degrees, and that this can often be linked to levels ofarousal, which in turn influence liking.

In one of our own studies, for example (North & Hargreaves, 1996), we found

that the music seen as appropriate by participants in aerobics classes, whichtypically involve high levels of physical arousal, gave rise to different levelsof ratings of liking and complexity from that appropriate for yoga classes,which involve lower levels of arousal. In other words, people choose whatis normatively seen as situationally appropriate music to moderate theirarousal states, so as to match particular listening situations.

We investigated this in two further studies (North & Hargreaves, 2000b),the first of which was based on Konenis research. Participants were askedeither to ride an exercise bike, in order to produce high arousal, or to liedown on a quilt and relax, to produce low arousal. They were then askedto listen to one of two pieces of music: either a loud, fast piece (i.e. higharousal) or a slow, quiet version of the same piece (i.e. low arousal). Wefound that participants preferred the version that would serve to moderatethe arousal level resulting from their earlier activity: those who rode theexercise bike preferred the slow, quiet version of the music, whereas peoplein the relaxation group preferred the loud, fast version. This confirmsKonenis view that listeners tend to choose music that is likely to moderatetheir arousal level. In the second study, the (p. 530 ) participants wereasked to choose between the two types of music while they either rode theexercise bike or relaxed on the quilt, and this produced the opposite result to

that of the first experiment: participants on the exercise bike preferred theloud, fast version, whereas those who were relaxing preferred the slow, quietversion. Our explanation of both of these results is in terms of arousal-basedgoals. In the second study, the goal of the participants on the exercise bikewas to achieve a high level of arousal, whereas that of those on the quilt wasto achieve a low level, and so they chose the music that they did in order
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2081http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2085http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2081http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-div1-114http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy


20/44






to polarize their arousal levels, so as to achieve these goals. In contrast,participants in the first study had already finished either exercising orrelaxing before listening to the music, so that they wanted to moderate theirlevels of arousal rather than to polarize itthey chose arousal-moderating

music in order to achieve this goal.

The notion that music can be used to achieve arousal-based goals is likelyto be widely applicable to many different everyday life situations, but verylittle research has investigated this (though see Chapter 7, this volume).The notion has the potential to explain a good deal of peoples anecdotalexperiences of the ways in which they use music in everyday life. After astressful, hard-working week, the office worker wants to wind down, andmay do so by playing relaxing, low-arousal music, whereas those hostinga lively party may want to create an exciting, uninhibited atmosphere and

play loud, fast, and arousing music. When driving a car in heavy traffic, wemay well want to reduce our stress levels and play slow, calming music, orindeed to turn it off altogether, whereas long-distance journeys on very quietmotorways may well induce the driver to play loud, fast music to heightenarousal so as to reduce boredom and maybe also to stay awake. Furtherresearch along these lines would have some obvious practical applications.

19.5.3 Conformity: compliance and prestige

In this section, we review research on how aesthetic responses to music canbe influenced by other social influences in the immediate environment. Oneof us (Hargreaves, 1986) reviewed this literature well over 20 years ago,suggesting that a small body of empirical research has accumulated whichhas experimentally investigatedprestige effects upon aesthetic reactionsto works in different art formssome other studies have approached therelated question of the effects ofpropaganda about different artists andart works on reactions to them. The two influences are combined and/or indistinguishable in many of the experiments, and so I shall considerthem both together (p. 194). Hargreaves also reviewed three studies onconformityeffects on musical preferences. The results from all three typesof study led to the clear conclusion that these social influences exert a very

powerful influence on peoples responses to music.

The field of study has not advanced a great deal in the interveningyears, and so we do not propose to revisit it in any detail. A usefulreconceptualization of this field as a whole might be to view all of thesestudies as involving conformityin one form or another. This term represents
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2046http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-7#http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy


21/44






the general effects of various social influences on the (p. 531 ) individuallistener. Conformity can then be seen as taking two distinct forms (Levine& Russo, 1987), namely compliance andprestige. The former arise fromindividuals desire to conform with the opinions of valued social groups, so

as to confer increased status with those groups, whereas the latter is basedon particular information which is available about the music in question. Thelatter is especially important when very little is known, such that conformityeffects are at their most powerful; and these are the conditions under whichpropaganda can be used, to refer back to the earlier term.

We can still only find four studies of compliance in musical judgements inthe research literature. Radocys (1975) study was very clearly modelled onAschs famous study of small group effects on peoples judgements of therelative lengths of lines, in which nave participants made clearly erroneous

judgements of the lengths in order to conform with the apparent judgementsof other members in the group, which were in fact faked. Radocy playeda so-called standard tone to his participants before playing them threecomparison tones, one of which was the same pitch or loudness as thestandard. The task was to say which of the three options was the sameas the standard tone. Before responding, each participant first heard theanswers of four other participants who were actually confederates of Radocy,and who had all been instructed to all give the same incorrect answer oncertain critical trials. The nave participants complied with the incorrectjudgement of the confederates on 30 per cent of the pitch questions, and49 per cent of the volume questions. These results are particularly powerfulin that the participants were all music students who would have been veryskilled and practised at tasks such as these.

The other three studies deal more directly with musical preferences as such.Inglefields (1968) study with ninth graders used a similar methodology toRadocys Asch-type task, but used scores on a music-preference inventoryas the dependent variable. He found that compliance was greatest forpreferences for jazz, and also that it was higher for participants who scoredhighly on measures of other-directedness, need for social approval, anddependency. Crowther (1985) asked each of his participants to listen to one

of four types of music, two of which were expected to be liked by them (discoand rock n roll), and two which were expected to be disliked (heavy metaland reggae). Whilst listening, all participants could see a panel of lights thatsupposedly showed what other participants were listening to, and Crowtherprogrammed this panel to show (falsely) that the majority of participantswere listening to the disliked music. Under these conditions, the participants


22/44






actually did start listening to the disliked music, and demonstrated whatCrowther called minorityinfluences on musical preference: the minorityinfluence of the other participants apparent preferences could apparentlyoverride the majority influence of normative musical tastes for that group.

Furman and Duke (1988), also using a very similar methodology to Radocy(1975), found no evidence of compliance in the preferences of music andnon-music major students concerning pop music, though the preferences ofnon-music majors were subject to compliance effects when orchestral musicwas used.

The second type of conformity that we identified at the start of this sectionis based on particular information that is available about the music inquestion, a good deal of which involves prestige effects. These are likelyto occur when listeners have (p. 532 ) little knowledge of the music, and

so their responses are more likely to be influenced by information fromother sources. Hargreavess (1986) review of 7 studies led to the conclusionthat All but one of the studies summarizedfound social influences tohave a significant effect on aesthetic judgements, and it may be that theseare more powerful in the case ofmusic than in other art forms (p. 198).These included Riggs (1948) study, carried out just before the outbreakof the Second World War, in which participants were played pieces ofmusic including those by Wagner, and told that Wagner was one of Hitlersfavourite composers. Alpert (1982) found that approval of classical musicby a music teacher and a disc jockey increased classical music preferencesand listening among fifth-grade school pupils, and Fiese (1990) found thatfalse attributions of musical pieces to Beethoven and Strauss influencedmusic students judgements of the quality of the pieces. Similar findingsare reported in more detail in the studies reviewed by Hargreaves, one ofwhich (Geiger, 1950) is particularly noteworthy in that it provides evidencefor prestige effects occurring in the real world context of audience listeningfigures for identical radio programmes described as featuring either populargramophone music or classical music.

In spite of the apparent consistency of the results of these studies withmusic, Crozier and Chapmans (1981) review of this literature across all

art forms led them to conclude that prestige effects across the arts as awhole are sometimes small, unstable, and difficult to replicate. Weaknessesin the design of many of the studies may mean that prestige effects areoften artefacts of particular experimental procedures and conditions. Theseinclude the features of particular musical pieces or excerpts (e.g. theirdegree of familiarity to the listeners); the particular ways in which different
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2043http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2037http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2013http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2096http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2028http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2043http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2037http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2013http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2096http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2046http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2094http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230143.001.0001/acprof-9780199230143-chapter-19#acprof-9780199230143-bibItem-2040http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy


23/44






art works are described or labelled; the stability or reliability of any prestigeeffects that are obtained given variations in the procedure of studies; andthe effects of individual differences in susceptibility to prestige effects,such as might result from specific training or experience. Finally, very little

attention has been paid to how prestige effects might be explained. Crozierand Chapman (1981) suggested that providing information about an art workcan not only change the perceivers of that work, but may also affect theway it is perceived. This is an interesting theoretical challenge which remainsunaddressed.

19.6 The listener: individual differences in response

In this final section, we focus on the third of the main boxes in Figure 19.1,which deals with the effect of listener characteristics on the aesthetic

response to music. The research literature in this area is scattered anddiverse, dealing with a wide range of different personal variables, as well aswith a wide range of styles and genres of music. Some of these studies goback many years, and have emerged sporadically over the last few decades.Some of these early studies were based on psychometric tests, and (p.533 ) some have simultaneously considered the effects of several differentdemographic and personal variables.

Date post:	04-Apr-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	elena-kuzmina
View:	212 times
Download:	0 times

Experimental_Aesthetics_and_Liking_for_Music

Documents